Professor Paul Dembinski outlined four possible parallel strategies for ‘moralizing and domesticating finance’: working on individual behaviour; creating the right corporate mechanisms; the right regulatory framework; and finally, the utopian option of ‘Jubilee’ the forgiveness of debts, springing from the Jewish tradition.

Professor Paul Dembinski outlined four possible parallel strategies for ‘moralizing and domesticating finance’: working on individual behaviour; creating the right corporate mechanisms; the right regulatory framework; and finally, the utopian option of ‘Jubilee’ the forgiveness of debts, springing from the Jewish tradition. The future was at threat, he continued, with an ageing population in the North, concerned with the return on their capital, and a demographically young and expanding South primarily absorbed with questions of survival. ‘So we live in interdependence, but also in tension,’ he said. ‘We are all concerned and are all co-responsible; the world of finance is not just someone else’s business.’ Together it should be possible to create a ‘win-win’ situation. In reply to questions, the professor stressed the task of teachers and professors in training the new generations to open their minds, and to prepare business leaders and not just MBAs.
The ‘financiarization’ of the contemporary world results from two complementary forces, Dembinski said, ‘the multiplication of financial assets and transaction possibilities on one side, on the other, our aspirations for an ever-greater material society without security risks – that financial techniques pretend to offer.’
The Swiss professor was followed by Emmanuel Ndjeloue, a department manager with the Bank of France, originally from the Central African Republic. The African economist underlined that immigrants living in the rich countries sent back to their home countries capital flows more than double the rich world’s aid budgets – in 2005 a total of $232 billion. This money also went further and did more good, less of it getting ‘lost’ along the way. This was a vital year for Africa, he continued, with elections in the Democratic Republic of Conge and Côte d’Ivoire. He warned about the danger of creating a world with two categories of people: those who can travel freely, and make their lives anywhere on earth, and those who are condemned to live and die in the same place.
The conference has three components running in parallel: The Farmers’ Dialogue, the International Communications Forum and a forum on ‘Ethical Leadership in Business’. www.obsfin.ch/index.htm

Andrew Stallybrass

Conference Report