Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.
Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.
Trust is almost always conditional, focused, qualified, and therefore limited.
All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal.
There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar.
Whether one sees the world as God’s creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.
There has been talk in Europe about American hegemony being somehow based upon the use of the dollar in the world. I just don’t see that connection at all.
The United States as usual has a sizable deficit in the current account of its balance of payments, trade account and other current accounts, current account items.
Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment’s deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.
Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.
So if the euro, if Euroland is to become a reserve center, if the euro is to become a reserve currency, Euroland will have to have a deficit in its overall balance of payments.
On private transactions, I’ll just go very quickly now, a major difference between the United States and Euroland is that in Europe banks are much more important in financial transactions than in the United States.
In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.
The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.
If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.
The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.
Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the tradition.
Trust is built step by step, commitment by commitment, on every level.