Your treasure will be safe

 "Sell what you have and give to those in need. This will store up treasure for you in heaven! And the purses of heaven have no holes in them. Your treasure will be safe--no thief can steal it and no moth can destroy it."-Luke 12:33

My parents considered debt a fearful state- always to be avoided. Their families had been administrators, military adventurers, farmers and merchants in England, Africa, and America. They were part of that remarkable historical anomaly, the "middle class". In Ontario, in the 1950s, we learned that the rise of the middle class had provided an unusual and valuable stability to society. As a child, I thought that class distinctions were a matter of history. It wasn't until I went to McGill University in 1960 that I discovered the continued existence of an actual "upper class" whose fathers went on golfing holidays to Scotland, and whose siblings all attended a certain few schools.They seemed  irrelevant to me.

My parent's families both had another stream, though: a stream of priests, nuns, and monastics, who followed Luke's advice, and whose attitude to the accumulation of wealth lay like a shadow across our acquisitive natures. When I entered medical school it was a kind of compromise with the call to the convent. I just wasn't willing to have a life without men, although it never occurred to me that medicine was an avenue for creating wealth. It was the opportunity to be of service without the requirement to relinquish all the pleasures of life!

Now that Bernard Lietaer's own website makes his remarkable contribution directly available to my friends, this blog is going to shift away from whatever constraint I felt about translating "The Future of Money". I am still following the book, because I want to really understand it. Some version of it ought to be an elementary school textbook about money. However, I am knitting up my own version as I go along. For the moment, the question is what to do about the accumulation of wealth. By sticking to my family's ideas of avoiding debt, I have accumulated some wealth: now I confront that perennial problem of the wealthy-what to do with it?

It is time we taught everyone  money basics. There is a middle class mindset, and a lower class mindset, and both are steeped in  ignorance of our money system. My college friends, the children of the wealthy, had some knowledge about real estate, bonds, trust funds, investing, and so forth. The girls had  studied such things as interior decorating, and required husbands who could finance periodic skiing trips to Switzerland. They were generous and unworried. They lived with plenty, and imagined a life of plenty. In spite of my own accumulation of wealth, I do not think that way.

A review of the means available for storing up one's earthly treasures creates an excellent background for understanding what is going on  while our financial system does its endless alarming contortions.
In my lifetime cash has been a very poor way to store value. Between 1971 and 1996  the US dollar fell to 25 cents in value. This was not a particularly bad performance by the US.... it came17th out of 108  currencies- during that period the winner was Germany (100-42) and the loser Brazil (100-0)  There have been some periods when money held value, but it's basically not a good plan to put cash under your mattress. Land was the traditional store of value ever since the hunter gatherers settled down to farming. With the arrival of the Industrial Era major wealth came to be associated with shareholding in enterprise-stocks and bonds. In recent times, both property ownership and stock-holding have led people to enormous losses.

Who seems left to be winning? Those would be the winners in the global casino created by deregulation and computerization in the past 30 years. Huge winners, huge losers, there is no safety here. If we desire some safety, we may need to rediscover our care for one another. This will likely be very interesting (there is an old saying "May you not live in interesting times") We live in interesting times.