Religious authorities do not necessarily spend a lot of time pondering the nature of global financial systems, but Pope Francis' recent comment that 'money has to serve, not to rule' suggests it can be useful when they do. For at least a decade, the failure to make money something that serves is exactly what has gone wrong in world finance — and to an extraordinary degree.
The tension is hardly new, indeed it is as old as the vice of usury. Allowing bankers to gain too much power has been a recurrent problem for centuries. In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt used the term 'banksters' to describe a rapacious finance sector that was exploiting the misery of others for profit.
In 1861 Abraham Lincoln created the 'greenback', dollars that were printed in green by Congress which had no interest rate and had not been borrowed from banks. That way Lincoln was able to get around paying money lenders interest rates of between 24 per cent and 36 per cent to finance his war effort.
'The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government,' announced Lincoln. 'Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.' Needless to say, these interest free greenbacks did not last long — and neither did Lincoln.
This time, however, the problem is different. Money is rules, rules about value and obligation.
Normally, financiers depend heavily on the enforcement of those rules by governments, even as they exploit them for their own use. Thus Shakespeare's character Shylock praises Portia when she gives judgement in his favour as 'noble' and 'worthy' when she says the law must be carried out and he can have his pound of flesh (he is only defeated by a legal technicality, not by the law being flouted).
Governments change the rules of money from time to time, often in order to stop financiers enjoying mastery over everyone else. But over the last three decades, a period euphemistically described as financial deregulation, something very different has been happening.
If money is rules, then how is it possible to deregulate them? It isn't. So what was financial deregulation? It was governments allowing financiers to make up their own rules, in effect ceding their responsibility to govern. This is not the usual cycle of boom and bust, nor is it a customary battle over who is