Financial Horror Story

Stephen King has a horror story to tell. No, not that Stephen King of It, Doctor Sleep, Bag of Bones, Cujo, Firestarter, Misery, The Tommyknockers etc. I’m referring to Stephen D. King who is chief economist of HSBC Bank. The latter has just written a book that is as scary as anything the Maine-based horror writer ever thought of. King D.’s book is entitled, When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence.  His premise is simple and sobering: The Western world, especially America, has experienced extraordinary economic progress throughout the last six decades, a prosperous period so continuous that ever-expanding economic growth has come to seem normal – and expected.  But such an era of continuously rising living standards is a historical anomaly Stephen D. warns, and the current stagnation of Western economies threatens to reach crisis proportions in the not-so-distant future. He isn’t recommending buying gold bullion and heading for the hills with dehydrated food, but King does warn that government benefits as we know them, and Obama wants to give in greater measure, won’t be affordable in the future. By allowing budget deficits to soar and interest rates to go to zero, American citizens have become, in King’s words, “stimulus junkies.”

All this should be sobering to Christians, who more than any other people, see the trajectory of civilization headed toward an end point of centralized control and the loss of all significant human liberties. The forecast looks like this: governments promise ever more benefits of health care, pensions, and social safety nets until the resources to underwrite such largess is gone. That is followed by major social upheaval and the promise of someone, anyone, to fix it – at the price of creeping totalitarianism. We’re not the first country to encounter such a scenario, but we are the nation with the best-financed Christian population. Strangle that, and the ability to evangelize is severely hindered. Missions will suffer, Christian charities will be stymied, and all outreaches will have to pull back drastically. Finally the whole thing will be near collapse, the perfect time for a “savior” to arrive on the scene. It seems to me that the conclusion to be drawn from this projection is that “when the money runs out” the trumpet is about to sound! (1 Thess. 4:16)