A Financial 9/11: How Likely Is It?

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A Financial 9/11

How Likely Is It?

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Many of the necessary factors are either already in place or seem about to fall in place. South China Morning Post columnist Jake van der Kamp, creator of Morgan Stanley's research department in Hong Kong says, "Beware Shanghai." He sees the stock market insanity on the Shanghai exchange as like what happened in Taiwan 20 years ago. At that time the top banks in Taiwan appeared for a while to have a market value greater than the entire U.S. banking system. Overnight it went bust, caused by investor mania. People were caught up in the crazy waves of greed that can so easily grip the common person wanting to make a fast buck. Appropriately, our time could be dubbed the Age of Mammon. The newly popular Shanghai market has doubled its price per share values in the last six months. Every day, some 300,000 people are opening brokerage accounts in China. That's almost 2 million new—often inexperienced—investors a week. Prices of shares are shooting up far worse than in the mania that led to the U.S. stock market bubble and crash in 1929. Yet the trend is just beginning. It is estimated that the present market bubble could reach four times current prices for shares in a relatively short time. Will untamed, irrational greed again plunge us into a worldwide depression even greater than the one that beset us just before World War II? That is a possibility we should not ignore. Just before I began writing this commentary I received an email from a highly respected financial commentator in the United States who says that perhaps the greatest threat to the global economy in the near future is the financial mania in the new Chinese stock markets. It has the potential to become the greatest market bubble in history, created out of sheer fiction. It's setting up a precarious financial deck of cards in our nanosecond connected market-reactions around the world. When the Shanghai market dropped 9% in one day this past February, the U.S. and other Western markets dropped $1 trillion in market values. Global stock markets have since recovered, all now at their highest asset valuations in history. But …! There is the very real potential, already in-the-making, for the greatest stock market bubble in China. Experts say that this could lead to the greatest financial debacle in history. Could what we see developing be leading to the emergence of what the Bible calls "Babylon the Great?" This will be an economic, political and religious system in which the world's heads-of-state cultivate inappropriate liaisons with international merchants. It will produce enormous wealth for its insiders but great inequity and abuse toward those not included. Its end will come suddenly, at Christ's return (Revelation 18). Before that alliance develops it's probable that our present free-market economic system will reach such a crisis that direct and drastic governmental intervention will be exercised to revamp it. Another global stock market crash could spark such a crisis. That is one reason why the present market bubble in China poses such danger and concern. Since most market crashes are driven by unchecked greed, a comment by the apostle Paul about the self-centered attitudes that will dominate the world just before Jesus Christ returns seems appropriate. "But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!" (2 Timothy 3:1-5). Can you think of a more compelling description of the motivations that drive such a large percentage of world's people today? We are indeed living in the Age of Mammon. Far too many people are placing their values in materialism and the present structure of the global economic system where everything is reduced to the value of money. In reality, the value of money is no greater than the faith people have in the system. Overnight, that faith could become as thin as the paper it's printed on. That leads us to these questions. How can you know what is real in the Age of Mammon? What should be your priorities?