Financial Stability, + Website

CHAPTER 13 Saying versus Doing

Needless to say, doing what is required to maintain financial stability is much, much, much more difficult than saying it.

Fraud, defined in simple terms as the use of two measures, was banned by the Jews about 4,000 years ago. Two millennia later, high priests of the Temple in Jerusalem helped fund their work by the fraud of manipulating two currencies (Roman and Temple money) for gain, at the expense of religious pilgrims. A rabbi that founded a new religion sought to expose that fraud by forcing open competition that would relieve pilgrims from that burden of financial manipulation. The priests and Roman authorities, with consent of some of the very people Jesus sought to help (and silence from His closest friends), ordered His execution.

None of them understood how to change course. Few had any idea why Christ sought to push money changers into an open market. Most pilgrims did not see that fraudulent profits on lambs sold for their Passover sacrifices were hidden in the duplicity of controlled exchange rates.

The money changers could not do business in Temple currency on the streets of a Roman city. The Temple priests had families to raise and a Temple to run using their share of the money changers’ profits. Moving the exchange process outside the Temple would have at least brought competition and, at worst, arrest for undermining Rome’s taxation to support an occupying army.

Nobody understood how the transparency of an open market would ...