They have also healed the hurt of My people slightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ when there is no peace.
– Jeremiah 6:14
A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself, but the simple pass on and are punished.
– Proverbs 22:3
In his recent piece “11 Reasons Why So Many Experts Believe That A US Economic Crisis Is Imminent,” Michael Snyder makes the case that there are numerous and important economic indicators that are flashing red, warning us that a the next recession is imminent. I strongly suggest that you read it.
Predictions about the future are always difficult. Michael Snyder does not claim to be a prophet. Neither does this author. But God has given us his Word and the ability to reason from it. In the Scriptures we can learn the mind of God on what sound government is, what sound money is, and what pleases him as well as what incurs his wrath.
Gordon Clark and John Robbins both noted in their writings that the once Christian West is in a state of collapse and has been for some time. This collapse, which can be traced at least to the second half of the 19th century has advanced to the point where the nations that once rejoiced in the blessings of God brought about by the Christian Reformation of the 16th century are now falling apart before our very eyes.
It is beyond the scope of this series to look at all the ways in which the West is in collapse. Rather my focus has been on the failure of the Western financial system. That is quite enough for one series.
Getting back to Michael Snyder’s article after listing out the 11 economic danger signs, Snyder comments, “On the surface, the Trump administration is trying to assure us that everything is going to be just fine, but behind the scenes they appear to be preparing for the worst.”
Worth noting is that Michael Snyder is not some snowflake Trump hater. He’s a conservative Republican, but one who is honest enough to admit that the rhetoric out of the Trump administration does not match with the policies the President wants to pursue. Lowing interest rates and demanding Quantitative Easing – Quantitative Easing (QE) is a new term that came into common use during the 2008 financial crisis; QE is a roundabout way of saying “money printing,” which has the effect of destroying the value of the dollar – are measures designed to pull an economy out of a recession. These are not measures one uses when the economy is doing well, but when it is struggling.
It appears that Trump is concerned that the economy may tip over into recession before the 2020 presidential election. Were this to happen, it would weaken his chance of reelection.
Trump is right to be concerned. When the next recession hits, it likely will be much worse than the one we saw in 2008. In fact, many economic observers don’t speak of a coming recession. Rather, they speak of a coming Greater, or even Greatest, Depression.
Those who speak of a Greater Depression rest their case on the fact that the 2008 crisis was never dealt with honestly. The 2008 crisis was debt driven. There was too much debt in the financial system and not enough capital to service it. So what did governments and central banks do to “solve” the 2008 crisis? Unbelievably, they added more debt to the system!
While adding more debt to the system had the effect of reflating the collapsing bond market, stock market and housing bubbles and kicking the can down the road, not only did it not solve the debt problem, it actually made it much worse. As did the false prophets Jeremiah’s day, so too have done elected officials and central bankers in our time: They have healed the wounds of their people slightly.
I would like to be optimistic and say that the nations of the West will come to their senses and reject the policies, chief among them central banking, that have driven them to the point of bankruptcy, but it appears that this will not the case. There are simply too many powerful, vested interests to expect a change of course at this point. In the view of this author, it will take a major economic collapse before there is any opportunity for change.
But even an economic collapse of historic proportions will not be enough. As John Robbins has noted, events do not explain themselves, but must themselves be explained. Were an economic collapse to happen tomorrow, not a few people would take to the microphones of the MSM to declare that it is all the fault of too much liberty, that those who favor capitalism are to blame, and that what we need is more centralized government authority to pull us out of this mess and ensure that such a disaster won’t happen again.
Of course, such an explanation is nonsense. It is not too much economic and political liberty that has led the nations of the West to the brink of economic collapse, but too little. It is the central planners, the central bankers, the authoritarians and the socialists who have created this mess, and it is imperative that Christians point this out once the collapse occurs.
There is a sense in which Christians can be faulted for the collapse of the West, but not in the way that our enemies think. Our fault lies in the fact that we have not fought the good fight of faith as we ought to have. Too often we have been seduced, either by the pleasures of this world, by the so-called wisdom of this world, by our own laziness, by our own self-imposed ignorance, or by the fear of men, from teaching, rebuking, and correcting the enormous fallacies that have poured forth from both religious and secular thinkers over the past 150 years.
The ideas of Thomas Aquinas, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Karl Barth, John Maynard Keynes and many others have replaced the systematic truth of the Scriptures in the West to the point that even many Christians have absorbed at least some of what these men taught under the mistaken notion that their ideas are Christian.
Christians in the late 19th and 20th centuries first lost the intellectual battle, and now their descendents are losing their countries.
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