May 16, 2012
Hallucinatory Grandeur
The primary victim amid this week’s cascading bad economic
news is not the economy but people’s faith in it. The latest plunge by large banking houses into
high risk ventures that turn calamitous seems to signal that much more is amiss
than we realize. Faith in the “market”
has been badly undermined by the debacle at J. P. Morgan, where the extent of
loss may rise to $4 billion according to the Financial Times. Last Fall it was MS Global, this Spring
featured Goodman Sachs misadventures, and this week it’s the best of the best
(President Obama said so), J. P. Morgan, financier to the world.
The worldwide news about money is generally bad. Growth Indicators
in China have turned strongly south. Eastern Europe is now officially in recession.
Moody’s lowered twenty-six Italian banks’ credit ratings this week. Unemployment
in the U. S. is now not expected to decline significantly for the rest of 2012.
Put in another language, that’s 13 million of our friends and
neighbors. This coming Saturday 400,000 of
them will be dropped from unemployment benefits. They’ve been out too long.
A sinking feeling has spread from coast to coast and while it
is clear that the people get it—they see what’s happening—but many national
leaders remain true to the phantom of American exceptionalism.
Last week columnist
Tom Friedman told a California audience: “I don’t want the U. S. to be where the first moon shot took place,
I want California and the U. S. to be where the greatest tech minds come from
all over the world to do their own moon shoot.
When that happens, there will be plenty of jobs for the butcher, the
baker and the candlestick maker.”
That same day California’s budget deficit reported a new
high of $15.5 billion—threatening entire education, health and environmental systems.
Friedman’s visions of grandeur express the popular American cultural faith that
drives the nation. One wonders, however, if it’s not made of the same stuff as
J. P. Morgan’s faith in “complex synthetic positions using credit default swaps.”
If it is, and it probably is, pastors and other faith
community leaders need all the more to avoid passing out weekly nostrums similar
to Mr. Friedman’s grandiose visions, and switch to the hard lessons told and
re-told in biblical literature. The teaching there is not about American
exceptionalism, but about creating just relations among the whole human family.
There is plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what people seek as the pain
they endure grows.
No comments:
Post a Comment