This is not an article about religious faith. Those who have such faith are fortunate. It can be a powerful guide to values and qualities of life that we all need. I do not have such faith in the conventional sense and regret that. I think that professing to have it while not actually believing it would be an act of disrespectful blasphemy – if the faith is true.
This article is about money.
When a highly respected, international economist was kind enough to steer me through the complexities of uncontrollable world debt he made the point that some debt is eternal, like the institutions creating it. The concept of eternity involves faith. Not, perhaps, in the same way as a conventional religious faith, and yet the idea of ‘everlasting’ seems to me to be somewhat the same form of power or control as a divinity.
Belief in eternity about money is not irresponsible but it sets a template that contradicts our temporal practices. To be effective everyone would have to believe and practice it in the same way. The world is not inherently a good or bad place. It is what we responsibly make it. For those whose temporal, material practices, rather than a belief in eternity, create the living arena, ‘infinite’ anything can seem like a shelving or abdication of that responsibility.
All of us, force majeure, are driven by, and must operate within the rules of, existing daily life if we are to survive on earth. The present dilemma of NATO demonstrates this perfectly.
The application of belief to the concept of eternal debt may seem frivolous but it is not. If some debt can be eternal, why not all debt? And this is what I fear is happening. People being asked for loans quickly become aware of the borrowers’ probable attitude to repayment. A non-repayable loan is not a loan, it is a gift. To cloak it as repayable when no repayment is in fact intended is theft.
For some debt to be considered eternal is to open the gates to a tsunami of borrowing.
Or are the gates already open?
Good morning
John Bittleston
Please teach us the answer at [email protected].
8 September 2026
