Sasan Fayazmanesh: The Monk’s Cure
Posted by The Interest on January 31, 2009
Over at the Counter Punch, Sasan Fayazmanesh discusses The Monk’s Cure, Our Current Economic Crisis. In her post she talks about an economy blame game being waged where arguments on who is at fault for any economic malaise seems to miss the real problem of a crisis. She goes on to show examples of market manipulation and trade manipulation for ones’ gain.
Fayazmanesh continues by saying the cycle of regulation and deregulation has been with us for hundreds and hundreds of years. The early monks told people not to worry about ever increasing wealth or the use of usury, but that advice went unheeded over and over. She goes on to say this:
…we should not expect to see “toxic” mortgages, “troubled” assets, “exotic” financial instruments, and Ponzi schemes to disappear from the market for good. Instead, we should expect every regulation to be followed by deregulation and, then, the cries for reregulation. We should also expect the creation of even more “exotic” financial instruments. That has been, since the age of “commercial revolution,” the pattern of development of the market system and there is no reason to believe that such a pattern will change.
I think she’s correct that we will continue on this cycle as long as we are all taught that usury is bad since you should feel guilty for not helping your fellow man for free. Perhaps if we educated people on how our monetary system works in regard to debt, people would understand what usury really means and they’d begin to ask, “Where’s the Interest?”
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