As we enter a new decade, our mood, guided by our conscience will greatly influence our collective contributions in the UK to enterprise survival and success. Refer to blog here.)
It is appropriate to seek guidance from key figureheads with a long term view:
- Her Majesty, The Queen and
- His Grace, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams
Accordingly, the following are extracts from addresses by the above at the turn of the decade (2009/2010) with passages that are notable for me highlighted.
The Queen's Speech.....
"It is sixty years since the Commonwealth was created and today, with more than a billion of its members under the age of 25, the organisation remains a strong and practical force for good. Recently I attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago and heard how important the Commonwealth is to young people.
New communication technologies allow them to reach out to the wider world and share their experiences and viewpoints. For many, the practical assistance and networks of the Commonwealth can give skills, lend advice and encourage enterprise.
It is inspiring to learn of some of the work being done by these young people, who bring creativity and innovation to the challenges they face.
It is important to keep discussing issues that concern us all – there can be no more valuable role for our family of nations.
I have been closely associated with the Commonwealth through most of its existence. The personal and living bond I have enjoyed with leaders, and with people the world over, has always been more important in promoting our unity than symbolism alone. The Commonwealth is not an organisation with a mission. It is rather an opportunity for its people to work together to achieve practical solutions to problems.
In many aspects of our lives, whether in sport, the environment, business or culture, the Commonwealth connection remains vivid and enriching. It is, in lots of ways, the face of the future. And with continuing support and dedication, I am confident that this diverse Commonwealth of nations can strengthen the common bond that transcends politics, religion, race and economic circumstances....
....Christians are taught to love their neighbours, having compassion and concern, and being ready to undertake charity and voluntary work to ease the burden of deprivation and disadvantage. We may ourselves be confronted by a bewildering array of difficulties and challenges, but we must never cease to work for a better future for ourselves and for others
The full text is here ... http://tinyurl.com/ycyv2ha
The Archbishop's New Year message for 2010.....
Remember New Year's Eve ten years ago? All our family piled out of doors to watch the fireworks all around the horizon.
And the start of the new millennium was a moment for fireworks, a moment of real excitement. At one level it may just have been a flipping over of the calendar, just a date in the book. But for so many people it represented something we all dream about – a change in the sort of world we live in, a change that could bring us that bit closer to a world where cruelty, suffering and unfairness get dealt with properly..........
...And it's true that it has been a terrible and gruelling ten years in all kinds of ways, with terrorism and war and natural disaster and the financial collapse of the last fifteen months. Plenty there to distract us, you might well think.
But before we do shrug our shoulders and lower our expectations, let's not lose sight of one enormous lesson we can learn from the last decade. The truth is that there are fewer and fewer problems in our world that are just local. Suffering and risk spread across boundaries, even that biggest of all boundaries between the rich and the poor. Crises don't stop at national frontiers. It's one thing that terrorism and environmental challenge and epidemic disease have taught us.
We share the risks. The big question is, can we share the hopes and create the possibilities? Because it's when we do share the hopes that we really see what it is to belong together as human beings, discovering our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others.
If we look back, quite a bit has been achieved. There is hope but so much remains to be done: each year, nine million children still die before reaching their fifth birthday – from avoidable disease, from violence and undernourishment.
....................
... it's about not losing our hope for change and our love and respect for the dignity of everyone. In a world where risk and suffering are everybody's problem, the needs of our neighbours are the needs of the whole human family. Let's respond just as we do when our immediate family is in need or trouble. We may be amazed by the difference we can make.
God help you make a difference; and God bless you all and those you love in this coming year.
You are at http://tinyurl.com/yz6ndtx
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"...It is the human nature that suffers from both greed and chronic insomnia. With the Islamic finance system, those two symptoms are greatly dampened down. Greed is reasonably managed and rationed and insomnia is partially cured..."
The speech......
Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions
(AAOIFI)
Euromoney Summit
London, February 23, 2010
Chairman’s Speech
By
Dr. Mohamad Nedal Alchaar
Secretary General
Acounting and Auditing Oganization for Islamic Finacial Institutons (AAOIFI)
Ladies & Gentlemen
In the midst of this current global financial chaos and the presence of a dangerous adverse loop between the real economy and the financial sector, and with the spread of what might be fittingly termed “The Financial Swine Flu” which was genetically engineered by the very people to whom we trusted our life savings and hard earned money with, a new financial system is emerging; it is the Islamic banking and finance system.
What we live in today is an innate consequence of the compounded greed of individuals, institutions, and nation states. Individuals who sought more house than the house they can afford, institutions who bet on the demise of each other through the creation of “credit default swaps”, nation states who excessively accumulated foreign reserves which impaired the international economic adjustment process.
These macroeconomic imbalances prevailed in the last decade or so resulted in a downward impairment of the term structure of interest rates. This in turn stimulated demand for credit based instruments that achieved the desired yield uplift. Consequently, a revolution in packaging and distributing credit based instruments was underway. It was called “financial innovations”. We all believed in the fallacy that these sophisticated tools and instruments would create value. Apparently and in hindsight, the value they created was mostly illusory and in turn was a prelude to the boom in shadow banking which was mainly based on excessive leverage. It was a textbook-style manifestation of regulatory sabotage.
This regulatory sabotage along with the illusory value creation gave rise to a new mosaic of the world financial landscape. It was a new mosaic that was puzzling for not only regulators but also the investment community as well. It was a perfect case for “irrational exuberance”. The premise on which banking was based was changing. Credit intermediation and maturity transformation were taking on new shapes and slowly but surely distancing us from real economic activities and thus causing a detachment between what is real and what is financial. This decoupling notion which is different from the one prevailed at the advent of the crises was the catalyst for what had to come ... a full-blown economic, financial and social imbalance for us to deal with for the next generation.
As this chapter is still unfolding, one would wonder if any lessons are learned and whether this kind of calamity will be repeated. The answers to these questions rest in the wrinkles of human history; they are no. It is a no to both questions. Few lessons will be learned but soon forgotten and the whole story will be repeated perhaps with different techniques and reasons. It is the human nature that suffers from both greed and chronic insomnia. With the Islamic finance system, those two symptoms are greatly dampened down. Greed is reasonably managed and rationed and insomnia is partially cured. All is done through the imperative existence of the everlasting Shari’a rules and principles that must guide structures, and execution of all financial instruments.
Ladies & Gentlemen
The Islamic Banking & Finance system is here. It is growing and it is here to stay. Our system focuses on allocative efficiency. While macro-prudential function is left to sovereign authorities, our system engages in all aspects of micro-prudential functions and responsibilities. What is permissible and what is not is based on highly ethical and prudent Sharia rules that preserve and create wealth and enhance allocative efficiencies.
While we possess the needed checks and balances to build a sound system, we should be cognizant to the fact that those checks and balances can be easily circumvented and compromised similar to what took place in the conventional finance system. The only way we can prevent this from happening is through the enforcement of well designed standards backed by close regulatory supervision. Our efforts should center on how we better serve the real economy. We believe we can do without those synthetic instruments that contributed to bring the whole financial system down to its knees. However, we will always be part of the economic cycle. We don’t possess a complete immunity from adverse economic conditions, but we are and for sure prudentially well vaccinated.
As this economic crisis generates an opportunity for us to present our case, we emphasize that we would not accept to rise over ailing bodies. We strongly believe that our system possesses as much merit as the conventional finance system. We both thrive to serve our constituents in the best way we can within our equally important and revered value systems. Therefore, our coexistence is a profound and noble mandate for us to work on. Enhancing the economic well being of our constituents will definitely pave the road for better harmony among nations, religions and practices. It is Economics. It is what drives us all.
With this I end my speech. I thank you for listening. God Bless you all.