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Good morning They're calling it the New Washington Consensus. Leaders of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have started to say that the major economic challenge all over the world is now inequality - that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. And they also see this as a moral problem rather than just a technical one. For instance Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, recently quoted Pope Francis as saying that increasing inequality was "the root of social evil". She went on to praise the values of solidarity and reciprocity that you find in Catholic Social Teaching, agreeing with the Pope that these principles that bind societies together are more likely to be worn away in excessively unequal societies. In other words they become divided, quarrelsome and unstable. The IMF believes they are also economically inefficient, which means low growth rates or none at all. Christine Lagarde took part yesterday in a panel discussion at the IMF's annual meeting in Washington, together with Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. They all agree that Catholic Social Teaching is asking the right questions, though it may not have all the answers. The Archbishop of Canterbury has called it “one of the greatest treasures that the churches globally have to offer.” The old Washington consensus, so-called because it was the standard orthodoxy at the US Treasury Department as well as the IMF and World Bank based in that city, was that the answer to the world's economic problems lay in freer markets, more privatisation and more deregulation. Hence bigger profits for the private sector while the public sector shrunk. A new report has just been published by the think tank Theos, called Just Money and subtitled, somewhat brazenly, How Catholic Social Teaching can Redeem Capitalism. It argues that as well as justifiably seeking a profit, a reformed capitalist system must also serve the common good. It says it was precisely the old free market consensus and the resulting deregulation of the financial sector that lead to the crash of 2008, wiping out up to $30 trillion dollars’ worth of wealth globally. That consensus in favour of free market economics was otherwise known as economic neoliberalism or what the Governor of the Bank of England calls "market fundamentalism". The Theos report quotes Mark Carney as saying "just as any revolution eats its children, unchecked market fundamentalism can devour the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself.” So as one Washington consensus is replaced by another almost its opposite, moral philosophy is firmly back on the economics agenda again, which of course is where it began - and Pope Francis has been invited to attend the world economic forum in Davos next year.