"It's the economy, stupid." I ran the motto of Bill Clinton's campaign for US president. In the political milieu it means what really matters is the economy. If politicians get the economy right their passage to another term in government is probably assured. The Iraq War, for example, was dwarfed by the economic crisis. Money makes the world go round, Lisa Minelli sung in Cabaret; or does it?

The wisdom of this reasoning is being challenged. The economic crisis is bringing another dimension of living and being human to the fore.

"The crisis that the world is currently living is not just financial, and therefore the solution cannot be purely financial," said Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, during a recent interview on Vatican Radio. "When an economic-financial system goes into crisis, it is never due to economic of financial motives, but because in its origin, there has been a wound in the global moral system," he added.

Bishop Adrianus Van Luyn of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, who is also president of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences in Europe, spoke in similar terms:

"Whoever considers the cause of the financial crisis to reside solely in a lack of transparency and legal accountability is perhaps overlooking the fact that it is far more our societal model that is being called into question. An economic model that is based on the continued and unlimited consumption of limited resources can only end in tears."

We have realised there is no such thing as a bir bla qiegh! Economics without a soul and treating the market as a god is a recipe for disaster. The wisdom of Church social teaching, unknown by many and abused by others, is now more than manifest.

In more senses than one it is a crisis of a culture that glorifies greed and selfishness. The get-rich-quick attitude, the lack of solidarity, the belief that money should rule the world; the mentality that we are not our brothers' keepers, the dogma that the more you have the more you are valued, were among the myriad faces of greed which brought about the crisis.

Now the financial crisis is morphing into a crisis of trust. Everyone is saying there is need for trust: in government's political will; in bankers; in the whole economic system. But the markets are showing that trust is zilch.

How can poor pensioners whose savings have evaporated, have any trust? How can people whose hard-earned cash has disappeared in a jiffy, have any trust? How can financial dealers be trusted again? Why should we trust regulators or governments who closed an eye and a half?

Greed and trust are ethical attitudes, rather than economic or financial ones. So perhaps we should start saying: 'It's the ethics, stupid, not just the economy!'