America’s top banks are in mortal combat with the Catholic Church over their souls.
Five years after the financial crisis brought widespread global misery, these big moneylenders are still in league with the devil, a coalition of outspoken church-led activist institutional investors charge.
And this Roman Catholic flock is going much further into the nuts and bolts of what Wall Street does than Pope Francis’ sharp rebuke of today’s global financial system.
Francis condemned the current economic system as “unjust at its roots” and went on to say it’s based on the “tyranny” of a speculative marketplace run amok.
“We found that while banks report some enhancements in their enterprise risk management, to date we have little or no evidence of the effectiveness of these reforms,” said Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) member Sister Barbara Aires, coordinator, Corporate Responsibility, of the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth, in Convent Station, NJ.
“We were further concerned by the banks’ lack of transparency around high-risk trading such as dark pool operations, which are conducted anonymously, and high-frequency trading, which can disrupt market stability through the speed and volume of orders executed within seconds,” Ailes professed.
The banks’ “sins” include controversial and risky, high-frequency trading, as well as a panoply of dark practices in executive compensation, risk management, responsible lending and political contributions.
The seven US banks on the list are household names. And Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo still need to repent, the activists say.
Those banks scored an unremarkable 60 or fewer out of 100 possible points in a new benchmark study released by the ICCR.
ICCR’s 300 institutional investors account for more than $100 billion in assets under management from a huge swath of Catholic Church groups, as well as other denominations and institutional investors.
“When you think how close they came to bringing down the global financial system in 2008, there’s got to be a way for government, investors and for the management of major institutions not to take us to that level of crisis again,” the Rev. Séamus Finn, director, Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation for the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and ICCR board vice chair, told The Post.