No, it’s not, in the economically unsophisticated judgment of the Daily Blog.

In fact, it’s probably not even accurate to say that capitalism as a whole is on life support, despite last fall’s international financial crisis and the resulting aftershocks that continue to batter global markets. On the other hand, the prognosis is a lot bleaker for the kind of speculative capitalism that triggered the market meltdown. 

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster, the primate of the Church in England and Wales, has triggered a bit of controversy by his recent declaration that “capitalism had died” in 2008.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reported Jan. 5 that Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor made the comment to a well-heeled audience at a recent dinner at London’s famed Claridges Hotel.

The dinner was organized by the owner of Claridges, multimillionaire property developer Derek Quinlan, to raise money for a new “Faith in the Future” fundraising initiative that has been launched in support of the work of the bishops in England and Wales.

Reading between the lines of the Telegraph article, it appears unlikely that the cardinal was intending to pronounce the death knell of the entire free-market economy.

Instead, we suspect he was engaging in some deliberate hyperbole intended to remind his audience of deep-pocketed Catholics of the reality that the wild speculation and unrestrained greed that characterized financial markets in recent years has been proven to be unsustainable.

Register contributor Angelo Matera makes this same, more nuanced point in the Jan. 11-17 issue of the Register in his thoughtful commentary, “The Failure of Speculative Capitalism.”

Angelo’s article examines the complexities of the market meltdown from the perspective of the rich deposit of Catholic teachings regarding economic matters.

“Catholic moral and social teaching tell us that a financial system that purposely channels greed into speculation and usury, rather than into productive investment, is inherently irrational and unstable,” Matera notes in his commentary. “A collapse was inevitable.”

And, Matera argues, renewed economic stability and prosperity can be assured only if the principles articulated by the Church are respected:

“Like sex outside the generative context of marriage, making money through speculation — gambling on price increases caused by luck, mass psychology, or some other arbitrary reason — is a form of mutual exploitation, a zero-sum game where winners gain at the expense of losers. In real business, profit is the result of something else; it comes from ‘creating a customer,’ in the words of the late, great management guru Peter Drucker.”

— Tom McFeely