Mid Week Meditation: Trying to Make a Dollar Out of 15 Cents...

If you get all of your understanding about salient issues from Fox News, you know that the American economy, the housing and financial markets, and the global economy for that matter, have been in something of a recession.  However, you may not know that the American economy is making a steady recovery. 

If you get all of your understanding of salient issues from Fox News, you may also be reading this by mistake.  In which case, I apologize.  I will, however, make you feel welcome here as everyone is welcome here.  I promise to try to call people raging communists and socialists and if I mention the president's wife, I will use the term your news station uses to describe her:  Obama's Baby Mama.  I want everyone to feel welcome here.

Now, while we may not all agree on whether our economy is recovering from a recession, we all agree that we had one.  And most of us agree on the cause of the recession.

In the middle of the last decade, several banks, mortgage and loan companies, offered loans to first-time home buyers at a special, introductory interest rate, or sub-prime rate, so called because it was below regular interest rates.

After a period of time, the interest rates on these special loans were to move to the regular interest rates, naturally, meaning higher or "balloon" payments to be made by the people who got the loans. 

The people responsible for giving these introductory loans knew that many of the people they were loaning money to would be unable to pay the higher interest rates, but granted the loans anyway.  So, you know the rest of the story.  Mass foreclosures.  Bad loans the federal government had to absorb.  Recession.

So as a result of an ethical and moral lapse on the part of many lenders, who gave loans to people who they knew could not afford to pay the interest rates, we are dealing with the effects of a recession.

I have checked and most business schools either do not require business students to take any ethics courses at all or take one course in business ethics in order to graduate.  Now, I know it would be quite the socialist of me (see, I did it) to call on the federal government to require business schools to do more moral and ethical training of their students before they send them out into the world, so I won't call for that.

But, perhaps this is something the "church" is suited to consider.  Raising responsible business leaders in the pews and in the world.