Wall Street and the Urban Crisis

A faith-based partnership between global entrepreneurs and indigenous leaders offers a promising model for Haiti's long-term economic development.

In a plenary session titled "The Values Behind Market Capitalism" last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, I started with this observation:

Every morning when I wake up in Davos, I turn on my television to CNN in my hotel room. And every morning, there is the same reporter interviewing a bundled-up CEO with the snowy "magic mountain" of Davos in the background. The question is always the same: "When will this crisis be over?" They actually have a "white board" where they make the CEO mark his answer: 2009 ... 2010 ... 2011 ... later. But they're asking the wrong question.

As our country sinks further into uncertainty about its economic future, I find hope in the fact that some of us have been down this road before and lived to tell about it. In 1999 I was laid off from the company I'd poured my life into, my wife and I had just welcomed our second child, and I was struggling to figure out exactly how God was ordering my steps. To be honest, I didn't see it. For six years, I had been teaching youth how to start and operate businesses, and now I had to put those lessons into reality for the sake of my family -- and to see if I could live out what I had been teaching for years.

With our economy in a shambles, the nation is looking to President-elect Barack Obama and his team of financial advisers to reverse the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Obama has proposed an $800-billion stimulus package that is unprecedented in scope. And while many experts agree that the solution to our economic woes will require something that radical, others worry that the "big government" nature of Obama's plan might land us too close to a socialist system. It brings to mind some of the heated rhetoric of last year's long presidential campaign.

Now that the sky has fallen on the U.S. economy, and terms like bailout, foreclosure, and recession have become a normal part of our everyday reality, it's important for the United States to do some serious self-reflection. Based on the economic disparities in this country and around the globe, should our current crisis really come as such a surprise?