Market Meltdown - Check The Bible?

Lying fallow during the Shmittah year — the way to avoid financial meltdown

The global economic crash of 2008 might have been avoided if bankers had followed the ancient biblical principle of shmittah.

That is the view of Rabbi Julian Sinclair, an Israel-based economist and environmental activist.
Shmittah is the ancient religious injunction under which farmers allow agricultural land to lie fallow every seventh year.

Speaking at a four-day conference on how traditional Jewish values could be applied in the modern world, Rabbi Sinclair said the practice could be vital to our physical and economic well-being.

“Shmittah is about building in a rhythm of six years of intense activity and a seventh year of stepping back and taking stock,” he said. 

“It’s a natural human impulse to have goals and to devote all your energies towards them. If we keep going faster and faster without a rest — we crash.

“Shmittah recognises we have to build in a rhythm of work and rest before the crash happens. Economic bubbles like the 2007/08 crisis took place because there was too much energy and hyped-up expectations.”

Thirty leading Jewish thinkers and activists from Israel, the US and Europe attended the “Shmittah Summit”, organised by Siach, a Jewish social justice and environmental umbrella group in London.

Nigel Savage, the founder of Hazon, an American-Jewish organisation promoting sustainability, and a former fund manager in the City of London, said that re-engagement with shmittah would benefit businesses as well as individuals. 

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Former US Senator Says 2008 Crisis Possible

Setting ourselves up for another financial crisis

By Ted Kaufman

How much do you think we should invest as a nation in order to greatly reduce or even eliminate the possibility of another financial meltdown?

I think most of us would agree we ought to spend whatever it takes. After all, the Great Recession of 2008-09 resulted in the loss of 8 million jobs and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

Who wants to risk that happening again?

If you look at the federal budget it passed, you might think Congress does. Because the two agencies most responsible for averting another meltdown have not been given the funding they need to do the job.

Effective regulation of our financial markets can't be dismissed, as it once was by some, as a big-government liberal agenda. Too many conservatives who once believed that to be true changed their minds after 2008. Even Alan Greenspan, who for years was acknowledged as "Wall Street De-Regulator in Chief," admitted after the crash that his belief that financial markets could regulate themselves was ill-conceived. In a February 2009 speech before the Economic Club of New York, the former Federal Reserve Chairman conceded the "enlightened self-interest" he had once assumed would ensure Wall Street firms maintain a "buffer against insolvency" had failed.

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