Of course it isn’t just professional interest.  The financial crisis hits us all, whether it be the cost of our mortgage, the value of our pensions, the opportunity for work and for some their very livelihoods.  Why have we got ourselves in to this situation, and who is to blame.

The immediate reaction would be to blame the bankers (always a brokers first reaction!).  Figures from the Bank of England don’t make good reading.  At the end of last year British banks had lent 625 billion pounds of money they didn’t have.  As recently as 2001, the banks only lent what they had, so this is a very new way of doing business.  I’m no economist, but it seems obvious that if you lend what you don’t have, and can only manage by borrowing from others, that a time will come when you get caught out.  This is now happening, big time.

Is it fair to blame the banks?  I think not.  Wherever you go, you see “buy now, pay later” as an incentive to purchase.  We are being encouraged to dream, and have that dream now.  You can have whatever you can’t afford, and you can have it now.  Chris de Burgh sang “I want it, and I want it now.”  Never has that song been truer than today.

The banks then are merely responding to the demands of society.  The responsibility is as much ours for wanting and asking as it is theirs for responding to the demands of our consumer society. 

The Bible contrasts the need to have whatever we wish with the ability to be content, not just with what we have but with who we are as people, so that our worth and esteem is determined by the things we can buy.  The government is trying to sort out the finances of our banks and getting them on to their feet again.  Yet it is our responsibility as individuals to not fall in with a society that encourages us to continually want what we cannot afford, and instead to learn the art of contentment.