For most of
human history, the moral opprobrium associated with credit was attached to the
lender, not the borrower. Aristotle and Plato poured scorn on usurers. Dante
placed them in the seventh ring of hell. Following the teaching of Aquinas, the
Catholic church prohibited lending at interest.
Jakob Fugger, a German merchant and
industrialist and possibly then the world’s richest man, sponsored a mission to
persuade the pope - cash-strapped in the early 16th century by the construction
of St Peter’s - to relax the ban.
In Genoa, if not in Venice, religious
teaching was widely ignored. While Martin Luther decried this sort of
liberalism, other leaders of the Reformation saw the advantages of a more
pragmatic approach. Max Weber’s 1905 masterpiece celebrated the connection
between the rise of capitalism and the doctrines of Protestantism. Islamic
teaching, of course, remains hostile to interest even today.
The same ingenuity and sophistry Christians
applied in the Middle Ages are used to reconcile religious doctrine with
economic reality. So in the modern era, it is the lender who occupies the high
moral ground and the borrower who must adopt a penitent stance.
The tone of Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch
finance minister, and Wolfgang Schauble, his German counterpart, as they
harangue their debtors is above all self-righteous. As was the rant of Rick
Santelli, an early mover in the US Tea Party, for whom any suggestion of
support for subprime mortgage holders was subsidising "losers". In
this view, debt repayment is simply a matter of contract. As US president
Calvin Coolidge apocryphally said of proposals to cancel Allied First World War
debts: "They hired the money, didn’t they?" But mostly they didn’t
return it.
As French economist Thomas Piketty has
pointed out, Germany has derived more relative benefit from debt forgiveness
than any other country in history. There were compelling reasons for the 1953
settlement that dealt, once and for all, with the financial consequences of
Germany’s decades of irresponsible economic policies, wanton aggression and
costly reconstruction.
It is fair to question how much
responsibility the current taxpayers of a country can be expected to take for
debts incurred by venal governments of the past. This is especially so if you
devoutly wish the citizens of that country to put the era of those venal
governments behind them.
Perhaps it is reassuring that Germany should
adopt a legalistic approach to the issues that are confronting the eurozone.
The ordoliberalism that has been the driving force of German economic policies
since the Second World War is in part a reaction to the lawlessness of the Nazi
era. For every foolish borrower, there is usually a foolish lender.
The Greek crisis is not simply the result of
Athens’s inept public administration but also of an extensive carry trade on
eurozone convergence by northern European banks, notably in France and Germany,
that obtained short-term profits by matching northern eurozone liabilities with
southern eurozone assets.
The lesson is not that lenders should become
philanthropists. Rather, it is that solutions to issues of indebtedness should
be pragmatic. The results of drawing a line under the troubled politics and
economics of Germany’s past were beneficial not just to Germany but to the
wider causes of global peace, world economic growth and financial stability.
The starting point for any solution to the
Greek crisis, or the continuing problem of US mortgage default, should not be
to ask who is to blame but what is likely to work. Morality does not come into
it.
Far better is the nonjudgmentalism of the
gospel of St Luke: "And if you lend to them of whom ye hope to receive,
what thank have ye? For sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much
again."
Πηγή:
bdlive.co.za
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