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by Adrian Sobers
“Fear of your recession and depression can’t tarry ya.” – (Damian Marley, Dispear) Robert Sirico’s The Economics of the Parables is short on page-count but long on shelf life.
Readers will be richly rewarded on the first read, and exponentially so with each revisit. Sirico’s clear thinking on the economic implications of Jesus’s parables is timely given the state of the global economy.
In his general thoughts on economics and the New Testament he says “a just legal system”, “will militate against the unjust acquisition and accumulation of wealth, whether on the part of governments—as when they plunder property in wars or through unjust taxation or inflationary monetary policy—or by thieves in back alleys.” There is no difference between back alley thieves and inflationary monetary policy. (Read that again.)
Backlogs notwithstanding, the judiciary needs to catch up with those who plunder citizens’ pockets through such policies. Governments who gorge on debt are enabled by “independent” central banks (wink, nod) who monetize said debt.
Their back alley counterparts could only dream of pulling off a job like this. But, nothing new under the sun.
The corrupt Judean and Roman temple-state of Jesus’s day, was the precursor to the inherently inflationary state of ours. Little wonder Jesus, Prophet par excellence, died as a criminal reject of the state. In Leadership: Six Strategies in World Leadership, Henry Kissinger speaks about the “virtue of prophets” in the section “Epitomes of Leadership: The Statesman and the Prophet”.
Kissinger says the prophet redefines “what appears possible; they are the ‘unreasonable men’ to whom George Bernard Shaw credited ‘all progress’. Believing in ultimate solutions, prophetic leaders tend to distrust gradualism as an unnecessary concession to time and circumstance;
their goal is to transcend, rather than manage, the status quo.”
If ever there was a time the status quo needed transcending, it is now. The church, as an age-to-come people, must play a part in this transcending. It must keep before itself the question posed by Emerson B. Powery (The Good Samaritan): are we engaged in good trouble?
(Bad trouble persists, in part, because the church isn’t engaged in enough good trouble.) On this note, we should keep in mind the point made by Oral A. W. Thomas (Reimagining Caribbean Methodism For Contemporary Missions). In Howzat!
Cricket as a Model for Resistance and the Church as Umpire, he makes a good point on the church and the status quo.
He says, “[…] the foregoing raises the issue of whether the church of, and in, the modern-day Caribbean is a collaborator with the social system, complicit with and guardian of the status quo; or whether the church is acting in the interest of the public to bring about transformation of oppressive systems and structures.”
With all that is going on, it is hard to think of a more oppressive structure, than fiat currency as currently constituted and how monetary policy is practised, or rather perverted, in the twenty–first century.
The US Dollar Index is riding a 20 year high. This index is a measure of US dollar to a basket of six currencies: Euro, Japanese yen, Pound sterling, Canadian dollar, Swedish krona, and Swiss franc. For practical purposes we only need to pay attention to the Euro and Yen which account for just over
71 percent of the index.
This is important now because of the different monetary policy positions of the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Bank of Japan (BOJ).
Here is also a good place to remind readers that we are still in the throes of the biggest failed monetary policy experiment in human history for which no one is being held accountable. (Back alley thieves blush.)
The minutia of the policy differences need not detain us but, briefly, the Fed is tightening more aggressively than the ECB and BOJ. Let me hasten to add that this is a comparative aggression, not an absolute one.
The Fed painted themselves, and the Dollar-pegged world, in a corner and were kicking the can down the road until reality called their bluff. So inflation was “transitory” until it became permanent and reached multi-decade highs, and the money supply didn’t matter, until it did. The Fed has embarked on Quantitative Tightening (QT), namely, destroying the Dollars created through Quantitative Easing (QE). You remember QE right?
Marketed under the auspices of helping the global economy, QE was code for a collective squeezing of consumers’ throats and pockets. QT is a change in the name of the beast not its nature so we will experience more of the same, especially in emerging markets and Dollar-pegged small island developing states.
With a US recession looming we are seeing a repeat of what happened with inflation, namely, playing fast and loose with the definition. In addition to hurting the poor the most this allows central banks and governments the time and room to keep printing away the public’s purchasing power.
Spoiler alert: As the US stares at a recession, the Fed will blink first in its QT program; QE will resume (and the inflation it creates, will continue).
World leaders, proving quite the stubborn lot, are vigorously defending the status quo. They are neither acknowledging nor dealing with the governance deficit, therefore the economic deficits will continue to increase and the inevitable/related fall-out will worsen.
It was well said that if you can’t find the words find the lyrics. It is left as an exercise for the reader to find the lyrics to Damian Marley’s Caution and Dispear. Both double as anthems (and running commentary) for the fallout from what is happening in the monetary policy space.
Economics and eschatology are not strange bed fellows, and the streets and scholarship should follow suit. We no longer have statesmen/women but prophets (even if more forth-telling than fore-telling) will always be with us.
Adrian Sobers is a prolific letter writer and commentator on matters of social interest.
