Finally, we must introduce rules to ensure financial markets work for people. Regulating flows of money will help move us away from an economy based on speculation and \”making money from money\”. It will help control the lenders and will remove the control that financial markets have over every aspect of our lives. Returning money to its original purpose: a means of exchanging goods.
The original purpose of money was not, if David Graeber is to be believed, to facilitate the exchange of goods. It was, rather, to record the debts among those who had exchanged.
What do you think of Graeber’s book? I assume you’re talking about Debt The First 5000 Years?
What’s wrong with speculation or interest anyway?
“help move us away from an economy based on speculation and “making money from money”. It will help control the lenders and will remove the control that financial markets have over every aspect of our lives.”
Be fair to him, at least he’s consistent. The church has been saying this since at least the 12th century. It’s just that they used to blame the Jews.
Presumably he’s going to fire the Church Commissioners then, and liquidate all the Church’s investments and instead start running businesses themselves to make profits from making and selling stuff, rather than all this ‘speculation’?
And what, precicely is he doing to earn his crust? Extorting money from the credulous and gullible. Very ethical.
I think its one of those irregular verbs – I invest, you speculate, he is the unacceptable face of capitalism.
@ Jim
FYI the Church Commissioners are managing a pension fund (that’s well over 90% of it) and are legally constrained as a result. Last time I looked closely they were overwhelmingly into long-term investment rather than short-term speculation.
@ sam
Practising Jews do not charge interest to other Jews. Mediaeval governments that banned Jews from engaging in trades other than banking, while the Catholic Church denounced usury, are to blame.
Personally I think that any religious leader that agrees to write an article for the Guardian is sadly naive. Archbishop Sentamu’s perfectly reasonable appeal for lenders to relieve citizens or impoverished countries of debt taken on and embezzled or wasted by corrupt rulers has been distorted into a suggestion that investors in general should lose their investments, which in some cases would mean pensioners going hungry while their debtors lived the life of Riley.