ABSTRACT
Global financial regulation as onemajor response to the financial crisis has inspired scores of proposals by the usual suspects, such as governments, international institutions, think-tanks, noted economists, NGOs, and the financial press. Regardless of the merits of these proposals, the magnitude and intractability of this crisis seems to call for divine inspiration. And in fact, Pope Benedict XVI and the Dalai Lama have weighed into the debate. In his encyclical Caritas in Veritate from July 2009, the Pope, under the heading of “The Cooperation of the Human Family,” called for a true global political authority to manage the world economy as response to the crisis (Benedict XVI: 2009). The Dalai Lama struck a much more skeptical note in a June 2009 interview. He doubted whether the lack of rules was at the origins of the current crisis and thought that even the best regulation would not have made a difference. Instead, instilling a moral sense of personal responsibility into market actors was to be the appropriate response (Dalai Lama 2009).
