Yes...but!

September 21 2008

Home > Columns >Yes...But! Year 8-46

Being a columnist is a lonely job. Sitting behind a computer, thinking, typing a few lines, deleting them again, trying to fathom what’s happening in our world, making a guess what’s up next, is a solitary undertaking.

I do get reaction. Last week I received this e-mail from a medical doctor: “Credit where it's due. You predicted in February that the US economy would collapse in September and at the time I thought "give me a break, that's impossible". But it has. That was one hell of a prediction.”

Often good things come in pairs: on that same day I went to pay my real estate taxes and a lady there showed me a photocopy of three columns among which that same February column which ended with these words,” Three reports from three different sources, all well regarded, and all pointing to a disastrous fall-out from our monetary moves.”

The happenings in the last few weeks have confirmed my suspicion that we live in an Age of Endings. We already are seeing the diminishing of the Middle Class; the fading of family life; the erosion of education; the melting away of manufacture; and now the eclipse of the Age of Money.

The Age of Money itself has plunged the world into the most perilous instability. There are more than six billion people in our world, the majority of them huddled into cities that survive only by virtue of money. For them money is like the potato to the Irish in the 1840’s: when money fails or its use curtailed, then cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, Beijing, Tokyo, will starve. Today every city has a potential Ireland in them.

Famines are generally caused by shortages of food, but during the Great Depression in the USA in the 1930’s people went hungry because there was no money.

Lately the world’s most rewarding jobs have been in the monetary sector. Professions that in earlier ages seemed hardly legitimate let alone honorable – stock-broking, consumer credit, futures trading, risk arbitrage, devising all types of money vehicles – have become full circle: they are vanishing by the millions, a clear sign that we are at the end of an era, the money era.

For many, money is life’s main goal. During the Middle Ages money did immense harm to the Christian church, where it was used to buy ecclesiastical offices and even salvation in the next world.

Max Weber, a German economist who died in 1920, has claimed that

Protestant Christianity was responsible for the development of modern capitalism. He asserted that it bred greed and made the emergence of materialism manifest.

What is certain is that we are entering a period in which the Western world is under siege thanks to money. Money’s circulation is being curtailed because nobody knows what its value is, because Money is built on faith, and suddenly this indefinable trust is missing.

It’s all because Money has replaced ‘the old time religion’, and is, for many, the centre of life. Succumbing to this human weakness is ultimately destructive. No matter which faith we adhere to – and we all have some sort of faith – we know that somehow we have to serve something greater than ourselves, something that goes beyond the material. The Eastern religions – Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism – call the failure to live for ‘a cause’ ‘illusion’; we in the West call it ‘sin’.

Sin often causes its own punishment, and we see that now in the collapse of the banks and the stock market, the money churches, with as high priests Federal Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson.

We don’t have to be scientists to observe that Climate Change, the melting of the Arctic, the increasing frequency of ever fiercer hurricanes, floods, droughts, the extinction of song-birds and reptiles can all be traced to our obsession with money. Money kills, including itself.

The current banking crisis is another phase in our Age of Endings. It was grounded in the Bush administration’s erroneous faith that the market, with its invisible hand, works best when it is left alone to self regulate and self correct. That belief system has collapsed. With the USA now assuming control of its money-market, an economic Katrina is approaching. Just as the USSR disintegrated, thanks to its state-owned base, so will the USA.

Unless we change direction, the ultimate end of economics is a world reduced to a scorching slum, its women to whores, its men to murderers.