I suppose it's hard for a market driven culture hyper-sentistive to the health and long term prospects of wealth creation, wealth retention and thus wealth possession, to come to terms with the reality that no one is immune to the transience of wealth, the permutations of market forces and the capricious fears and greeds of investors.So earlier this week, when financial landmarks were flattened, centuries old institutions liquidated overnight, and vast electronic share monitors were glowing red across the board in all the major global share indices, the cause was identified and named by the US spokesman, responsible for announcing the remedy.
The cause, we are told, was toxic debt.
Now I know what he means, I think. Debt that has become a poison in the system, liabilities that have no matching assets, commitments so overstretched they could never be met, and this not with the odd maverick money-grabbing risktaker, but as a pervasive practice that has become systemic. Toxic debt is a phrase that sounds like an unfortunate set of circumstantial events no one could have predicted, something that has happened to otherwise repsonsible people. But that isn't the truth,is it? Does unregulated greed, irresponsible decision-making, blind faith in money's power to create wealth regardless of human caprice - are these irrelevant?
Here's an odd, scary, perplexing and morally outrageous story. Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world, has seen his personal wealth tumble from $50 billion to $12 billion in the past six months. A personal loss of $38 billion - or around £20 billion.How can someone lose $38 billion and still have more money than it cost to buy HBOS? So is there something called toxic wealth?
You could be forgiven, in the context of the frantic, fevered, frenetic money markets of our globalised greed, for thinking that the Sermon on the Mount has little to say. "Consider the lilies" seems a tad inadequate as advice to a culture busy manufacturing and breathing its own life-diminishing, and life-threatening toxins. But I still want to place alongside the nonsense, (I mean "non-sense" as irrational foolishness), of making money into a golden calf, the words of the clearest thinking and most forward looking wealth analyst ever to comment on the human lust for accumulation -
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven......"
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these..."
"You cannot serve God and wealth".
Unless of course you make wealth into your God - which brings its own judgement, of toxic debt and toxic wealth.
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