First Things RSS Feed - Elizabeth R. Schiltz https://www.firstthings.com/author/elizabeth-r-schiltz en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:53:50 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/elizabeth-r-schiltz 60 Subsidiarity and the Financial Crisis https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/04/subsidiarity-and-the-financial https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2009/04/subsidiarity-and-the-financial Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400 When the brewing financial crisis erupted into full boil last fall, I was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy for the first time. Being a banking law professor, I couldn’t help but speculate about which circle of hell Dante would have found most appropriate for the various actors in the meltdown. Some clearly belonged with greedy “hoarders and spendthrifts” in the fourth circle: banks lending to borrowers with incomes insufficient to support repayment; investment bankers reaping profits on derivatives they did not understand; politicians burying their heads in the sand for the sake of substantial political contributions from the financial services sector; and homeowners buying homes they could not afford. Others clearly belonged in the eighth circle with the “perpetrators of fraud”: predatory lenders engaging in outright deception or exploiting vulnerabilities generated by need or lack of access to legitimate banking sources. But in this era of unrestricted interest rates, would anyone be condemned to the seventh circle where Dante placed the “usurers,” as perpetrators of violence against God and nature?

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