Financial doom

As some of you know I work two days a week at the ABC (the broadcaster not childcare) in the Learning Team. Each month we put on a seminar for staff on how to better report on a certain topic. Today was on the financial situation the world finds itself in. One interesting aspect discussed in this seminar was how financial markets are currently being ruled by two main emotions – fear and greed.

Let me explain: investors are scared that countries cannot repay their debt with the USA heading towards 21 trillion dollars in debt and many European countries also in a position of defaulting on their debt repayments. This leads to financial markets getting the jitters eg. the All Ordinaries falling 7% in one day last week. The next day it more than recovered because investors got greedy and see opportunities to make money.

Basically financial markets in part need greed to sustain them in the short term. The question that this raises in my head is, if greed is good in the short term what about the long term consequences of greed? i.e. is it not greed that got the world into this mess in the first place?

Therefore, as Christians, is being less greedy and self-centred not an easy way to be different to the way the world works?

All of this comes back to the passage we have looked at in church the last few weeks: Galatians 5:13-25.