April 1 2017
THE FUTURE OF MONEY; THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE. (1)
I am not a fan of contemporary music. Most days I listen to the local (Belleville) radio station at noon for the regional news, which briefly exposes me to its repetitive and a-musical tunes, offensive to listen to.
In my younger days there really were songs to remember, such as Bridge over Troubled Waters and American Pie and, of course, the Beatles. Thinking about MONEY caused me to recall another oldie: MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL, TAKE IT AWAY. It parodies the Bible where in the letter to his protégé Timothy, Paul writes that THE LOVE OF MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL. Nevertheless there’s a lot of truth in the song suggesting that money itself has an evil root.
We live in a CAPITAL dominated society. The word CAPITAL refers to several things: it could be the governing city of nation; it could refer to capital punishment, but it usually refers to money: having capital, being rich. Living under a CAPITALISTIC system means that its main goal is the acquisition of money.
Today capital gain and retention is the main industry in such Western cities as London, New York, and Toronto. They exist for the purpose of managing, preserving, enhancing CAPITAL. Some 40 percent of its total workforce is engaged in that ‘industry’, doing nothing but sit behind a computer and try to gain or retain a monetary advantage.
The money industry, the banking, the stock market, the leasing and lending, the real estate buying and selling, the granting of mortgages and other securities is a very profitable business as long as times are good, as long as government is stable, trustworthy and forward-looking, and people are confident that good times are ahead. Granting CREDIT is based on trust. The word itself is derived from the Latin word CREDO, which means “I believe”. As long as we believe that the system is sound and trust-worthy, as long as we believe that TRUMP is good for the economy, as long as we believe, the stock market goes up. Once that FAITH is gone, once prospects for the future are no longer rosy, credit dries up, banks are loath to lend, and the CAPITALISTIC system sputters. Then all of a sudden DEBT becomes an issue.
DEBT
All money is debt. Debt is the only growth industry today, and it is created out of nothing. You need a mortgage? The bank will magically produce the money and so finance your house.
Take a look at USDEBTCLOCK. ORG. The figures are mind boggling, showing that US total debt is close to One Million Dollar per US taxpayer. The debt per person, thus all US people from baby to pensioners is $60,000. Median per-capita income is $15,480, which means that, in order to pay all debt, people have to devote all income from fulltime work for almost 4 years to pay this off.
As long as the future is an extension of the past, thus stable work, stable climate, stable economy, all is well. When this is not the case, trouble is in store.
Yes, all money is debt. Money is created through debt. Our immense debt is the reason why money is so cheap: car loans at zero percent; mortgages at 2-3 percent, driving up the price of housing.
My first and last mortgage in 1963 carried an interest rate at 6.25 percent, and that was normal. At that rate people earned sufficient interest to make retirement possible. Today retirement funds are in the red because people live longer and interest rates are low. All pensions are in peril, but when the interest rate goes up (it has to because inflation is increasing) debt becomes too expensive and cannot be repaid. So brace yourself. Anything is possible.
The power of money
In the church we say: Blessed are they who come in the name of the Lord. But both in and outside the church we confess: blessed are they who come in the name of silver and gold. By and large people are not measured by what they do or say, but by the amounts of possessions they have. Money is the most important rule in today’s society and the acquisition of it is seen as its highest goal.
Money, in short, is seen as the meaning of life: our actions are geared towards that goal, and if we can’t make it by working, perhaps playing the lotteries will do it, or a bit of cheating here and there might help as well. It seems that no institution or person has become immune to the power of a bribe. Nothing seems sacred anymore.
In spite of all its drawbacks, money, as a tool to facilitate the commerce between human beings, was and is, nevertheless, an inspired invention, with tremendous potential for both good and evil. That is why, when first invented, it was administered by the priestly class. Today, more than ever, money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to more than One Trillion Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular.
Jesus and Money.
Christians are supposed to fashion their lives on Jesus, taking him as an example.
When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a person of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.
No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in Brazil, the Crentes, as the believers are known, preaches the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation, a puritan ideology imported from the United States. There the Prosperity Gospel has become a leading component of Christianity: being rich means that God is with you. Yet Jesus, in The Sermon of the Mount tells us that “Blessed are the meek, those who claim little or nothing for themselves.” So perhaps due to the contrast between what Jesus portrayed and advocated in his life, and what we see as the goal might be sufficient ground to investigate a bit closer the relationship between Jesus and money.
I think Jesus deeply disliked money.
I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just like we do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. No wonder “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy. Jesus gave money a name: Mammon. He identified it with an idol, certainly a sign that Jesus did not like money.
If I understand Jesus correctly I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff.
Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had complete insight, hindsight and foresight. We may recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel – how would I feel – if I knew that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.
I better back this up with concrete examples. Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighboring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it.
So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.
Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. And how else to get the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the saints, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus.
In the end Judas ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the super-rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “so what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” (Matthew 17:24)
But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this too. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.
And then, in an ironic twist, with almost a touch of black humor, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and says: “OK, not important. Let me not major in minors. Go to the lake, catch a fish and there you’ll find a silver coin enough for the both of us.”
I like that. Jesus is never skimpy. And, of course, with this gesture, he shows that all the fish in the sea and- by implication- the cattle upon a thousand hills, are his. Here we see Jesus’ royalty coming through. Queen Elizabeth never carries a wallet. Wherever she goes on an official visit, she goes free. Jesus is the same and much more so. Here he shows that he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, but people do not recognize him that way.
Yes, Jesus had a deep distrust of money.
Today we see what money is doing. In 1492 Columbus landed in the Americas. In two or three years he sucked a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean and then extinguished all its human life. That destructive force now rages all over the globe, including the Polar region where money is melting their eternal ice cover, sealing doom for all of us.
Money has paved the woods, has mined the mountains, has eaten the seas, has annihilated many species, all the large land and sea animals of the earth, and many of its birds.
The future of money is directly tied in with the future of the earth. Money has become the great destroyer.
That’s why Jesus hated it.
More about that in the next two weeks.