Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Audio: Jayabalan on the G20 Meeting
Audio: Jayabalan on the G20 Meeting
Jan 30, 2026 10:46 PM

Acton’s Kishore Jayabalan on Vatican Radio today. Summary:

The spectre of a hard Greek default and euro exit hung over a meeting of G20 leaders beginning in Cannes on Thursday. U.S. President Barack Obama said after talks with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy that Europe had made some important steps towards prehensive solution to its sovereign debt crisis but needed to put more flesh on the bones and implement the plan. The world is counting on the G20 to find a way out of the crisis, before it begins spreading to other parts of the globe.

“A lot of what is happening…at the G20 summit in France over the next couple days is really the inevitable consequences of a three or four year unwillingness of European politicians, and I would say American politicians as well, to deal with what’s obvious to most people is paying attention to this debt crisis,” said Kishore Jayabalan, the Director of the Rome office of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.

“At some point government leaders are going to have to be frank and tell people they can’t rely on government benefits indefinitely,” he told Vatican Radio. “The entire scheme was based promises that can’t be kept.”

Jayabalan said in the future, people are going to be forced to be more self-reliant, and create their own opportunities.

Click on the player below to listen in:

[audio:

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Krugman: Aliens Worth More to Economy than Men and Women (VIDEO)
Paul Krugman made the mistake of over-sharing this past weekend when he told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria he thinks that the United States economy would benefit from a military build-up to fight made-up space aliens. He’s been defended as being fed up with Republican obstructionism, being desperate to make a point, or even being wholly pletely correct. He’s entirely wrong though, and his thinking (what there is of it) is an example of the kind of depersonalized economics that has cost...
AP: International Aid Actually Worsens Somali Food Crisis
It’s terribly sad, but you just can’t make this stuff up: Thousands of sacks of food aid meant for Somalia’s famine victims have been stolen and are being sold at markets in the same neighborhoods where skeletal children in filthy refugee camps can’t find enough to eat, an Associated Press investigation has found. As much as half of the food aid going into Somalia is stolen and sold in markets. Militants that control of large parts of the country and...
British Leaders Talk Moral Collapse
British Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour Party leader Ed Miliband both weighed in on a moral decline that was exposed during the recent riots in Britain. An AP article titled “Cameron: Riot hit-UK must reverse ‘moral collapse'” covers their contrasting diagnosis and solutions: Britain must confront a culture of laziness, irresponsibility and selfishness that fueled four days of riots which left five people dead, thousands facing criminal charges and hundreds of millions in damages, Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged...
Elise Amyx: Farming subsidies often do more harm than good
In today’s Detroit News, munications intern Elise Amyx offers a piece on farm subsidies. She looks at how Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow described this government support as “risk management protection” for farmers. Stabenow, chairwoman of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, conceded to the soybean farmers that “it’s wonderful that farming is prosperous now.” But she pointed to droughts in the South and the floods in the Midwest as proof that “you still face the same risk that farmers...
Wringing Hands Over Dominionism
Michelle Goldberg has a column up at the aptly named Daily Beast letting us all know that we really need to worry about something called “Dominionism” which supposedly prevails among Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, and folks who support their campaigns. Reinhold Niebuhr once warned of the dangers of religious illiteracy. Here we have exhibit A. Goldberg claims Bachmann and Perry are “deeply associated” with this “theocratic strain” of Christian fundamentalism. Yes, they are probably so deeply associated with it that...
Evelyn Waugh on Corporate Jets (sort of)
The recent English riots, soaked as they are in unrestrained Marxism, bring to mind one of the 20th century’s great anti-Marxists, the British novelist Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was a staunch—even curmudgeonly—defender of social order, and a derisive critic of Marxism, calling it in The Tablet “the opiate of the people.” Waugh would no doubt have been a booster of the Acton Institute (his best man was Lord Acton’s grand nephew), and a passage in his 1945 classic Brideshead Revisited artfully...
World Youth Day: Pope talks profits and people
On his flight to World Youth Day in Madrid this morning, Pope Benedict XVI responded to a question about the current economic crisis. Not sure what the question was, but the well-respected Italian Vatican analyst Andrea Tornielli captured the reply. Here’s my quick translation of the Pope’s answer: The current crisis confirms what happened in the previous grave crisis: the ethical dimension is not something external to economic problems but an internal and fundamental dimension. The economy does not function...
Humanitarian Aid Is Encouraging Famine, Not Ending It
Coverage of the drought in the Horn of Africa has fixated on the amount of aid going into the region and humanitarians’ estimates of how much more will be needed. According to the U.N. Coordination of Human Affairs office, the $1 billion mitted to assistance is less than half of what will be needed—but who knows whether the final figure will be anywhere near the stated $2.3 billion. Hundreds of thousands of Somalis are flooding out of their country into...
TV Bias Book Not Ready for Primetime
My contribution to this week’s Acton News & Commentary: TV Bias Book Not Ready for Primetime By Bruce Edward Walker Reading Ben Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV is similar to time traveling through the pages of a TV Guide. Dozens of television series from the past 50 years are dissected through Shapiro’s conservative lens – or, at least, what passes for Shapiro’s brand of conservatism – to reveal his perception...
Samuel Gregg: Taxing Warren Buffett
In “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich” investor Warren Buffett, one of the world’s wealthiest men, makes a case for upping the tax rate on the “mega-rich” in America. In a response published on National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg observes that “this is a broken record that Mr. Buffett has taken to re-playing over the past five years.” He points out that the U.S. tax system is already heavily progressive (no pun intended) and that the label “mega-rich” may...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved