Newsflash!

Followers of Homeless Man Hit Hard by Market Meltdown!

everal weeks ago I sat in the office of an acquaintance of mine. He works for a high profile wealth management firm here in Toronto. He manages money for rich people. He is a humble, godly, generous man who personally supports a wide range of Christian endeavours all over the globe. He ambled into the boardroom where I was waiting for him on the 39th floor of a building on Bay Street (Toronto’s Wall Street). It was a Friday afternoon and his top shirt button was undone, tie askew, jacket off and sleeves rolled up.

Plunking himself down opposite me, he let out a sigh before smiling wearily. He said something about the markets and how he would be working through the weekend at his office. The working weekend I understood, the thing about the markets - not so much. I understand money matters even less than I understand 17th century Mayan cosmology.

I asked him to explain, in one or two sentences at the most, what the problem was. He summed it up like this. What he does is manage the money of a select cliental of very wealthy people, most of whom live in the USA. He invests their money, makes sure they make money on their money, nurtures it, protects it, helps them reinvest it… that sort of thing. Normally these clients might check in with him once or twice a year. But because of all the recent turmoil in the American economy (of which, at the time, I was oblivious) his clients are agitated and all of them - say 200 or so - were phoning him every day! “And of course, I have to be there for them”, he concluded.

Interesting, I thought. But as I’m not rich (financially I’m actually not even middle-class) this appeared to have little to do with me. So we moved on with our conversation. About half an hour later, it dawned on me that all this stuff actually might affect me. You see, I was making a pitch for some funds for a project I’m involved with. He told me that it would be a hard sell, not only for him personally and for people he is connected with, but pretty much for anyone these days. “My company’s profits are down this year 70-80%. There’s not much spare money around”.

Then last week things apparently really went belly up. Companies with names I had vaguely heard of Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch… all these institutions are in trouble. People are jumping off ledges, financially speaking, all over the place. The US government announced that they will bail these companies out - and this is the Republican party, the right-wing-less-government-is-best. This morning (as I write this column), the paper tells me that Barack Obama has publicly announced that he is in support of President Bush’s decision to throw money at these people. Strange days produce strange bed-fellows, I guess.

I reflected on all this drama as a practitioner of urban ministry who understands that the calling of his particular denomination is to walk among and alongside the poor and excluded and who often quotes Shane Claiborne’s sound-bite that as Christians we profess to follow a homeless man and as someone who took an institutional vow of poverty when I became a Salvation Army officer… I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship to money.

I don’t own any stocks. I don’t have any savings. I don’t personally own a credit card. I live from pay cheque to pay cheque and most fortnights (I get paid every two weeks) even that takes a fair bit of creativity to pull off. I always throw out the financial section of the newspaper I subscribe to (and incidentally, the sports section). I run a ghetto church that, metaphorically speaking, panhandles on the street of Christian donordom in order to survive. I don’t have any real debts, but I also don’t really own much of value, apart from a lot of books. What meager financial assets I do possess I tend to fritter away in places like Starbucks while writing columns like this. There are likely few people in the Western hemisphere who can boast less comprehension about money than me. Ask my wife. And usually, those things we don’t understand, we tend to mock.

But here is the paradox. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about money. Part of this is worrying that I won’t quite manage to make it to the next pay day, or be able to take my family on a proper holiday this year or go to a movies with my kids this weekend. Most of it, however, is hard thinking on how I can find more money to do what I do in my community and fund the various projects I am involved with. Most of them have to do with people who have about as much money as me. In truth, I’m co-dependent on the wealthy and by extension - the market. I can’t survive without them.

So, the woes of my wealth manager friend need to concern me and the troubles of his clients will impact me. Maybe not directly, but it trickles down. Following 9/11 numerous Christian organizations were hit very hard, The Salvation Army being one of these. I wrote about it in a magazine article: In their attacks, Al Qaeda targeted political (military) and financial symbols. The White House, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The effects of what happened on that day continue to reverberate in The Salvation Army. A financial crisis was precipitated in all the American territories and in my home territory of Canada and Bermuda. In the years since 9/11, we have been plunged into a financial crises that has so far seen the amalgamation of six divisions, the closing of one of our Training Colleges, the selling of three divisional camps, budget cuts across all divisional and territorial headquarters departments by up to 30%, the closing of numerous corps and it is not finished yet.

At the time I even quoted Walter Brueggemann to lend gravitas to my case about the travesty of the church’s acquiescence in the face of an all-consuming consumer culture, voracious materialism and the seductive power of wealth and on our shameless dependence on Mammon and the markets.

But the war against poverty and its ills is costly. And “…the sinews of war are infinite money”, said Cicero. So I hope the market bounces back soon. Because I really need the money.

Writer: Major Geoff Ryan is co-founder and publisher of theRubicon, co-ordinator of the 614 Network and organizes the bi-annual Urban Forum. His interests include writing, politics, coffee and his children. Geoff and his wife Sandra minister in Regent Park, a social housing project in downtown Toronto, Canada.