Simon and Bex introduce their new ‘Financial Crises’ season, explaining what they hope listeners will find interesting and helpful in it. They start by discussing what financial crises are, why they happen and how we can respond to them.

Some key points of interest covered in this episode include the following:

• Simon introduces the season by commenting that financial crises are significant because they can affect any or all of us at any time and can have a really significant impact on people’s lives. [01:38] Bex then outlines the content of the season, which will include Ponzi Schemes, Rogue Traders and Financial Bubbles before concluding with an episode on Boom, Bust and Belief. [02:44]
• Simon explains that this first episode will pose a number of questions around financial crises [03:45], the first one (asked by Bex) being, ‘Are financial crises happening more regularly?’ [04:39]
• When asked to define the distinctive nature of financial crises, Simon suggests that it is their scale – geographically and financially – that makes them stand out. [06:37]
• Financial crises are also sufficiently frequent and widespread to mean that they are likely to affect each one of us at one or more points in our lives. [09:25] Moreover, they can affect us very significantly even if the core element of the crisis is happening many miles away and has nothing to do with us in terms of its nature and causes. [10:51]
• Each financial crisis that we encounter raises the question of how, as Christians, we should respond to such an unsettling and difficult situation. [12:28] What does a godly and trusting response look like, and how can we support our community and individuals rocked by adverse events when we are affected by them as well? [13:57]
• Bex cites Job as a biblical example of an individual who has to grapple with how best to maintain his faith and trust in God under the most trying of circumstances. [16:25] Ultimately, in chapter 42 verses 1-3 of the book of the Bible bearing his name, Job acknowledges God’s sovereignty and accepts that not every ‘Why?’ question can be answered in this life: ‘Then Job replied to the Lord: “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely, I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”.’ [19:13]
• Simon concludes by encouraging listeners to tune in to subsequent episodes of this season if they are interested in exploring how best to respond to financial crises. The next episode will focus on financial crises in the Bible, which were often triggered by war and/or famine. [20:31]

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Simon

Welcome to ‘Where Your Treasure Is…’, the podcast where faith meets finance.

Bex

I'm Bex McGregor.

Simon

And I'm Simon Glazier. Each episode, we're going to explore how biblical wisdom can guide our everyday money decisions.

Bex

We'll be looking at how we can give generously, save wisely, and navigate the complex financial realities we face.

Simon

But remember, investments can go down as well as up.

Bex

This is, ‘Where Your Treasure Is…’

Simon

Let's get started!

And so, here we are back again with Season 13 of the ‘Where Your Treasure Is…’ podcast, well over a hundred episodes now, and it's me, Simon Glazier, chartered financial planner, with my co-host, Bex McGregor. Bex, introduce yourself.

Bex

That was weird. I am Bex McGregor, formerly Bex Elder. I am a business owner. I run a copywriting and translation business, and I get to have fun conversations like this about faith and finance with you, Simon.

Simon

And if you are listening to us live, as it were, as we publish these episodes, then hopefully you're coming back after a lovely summer holiday. Prior to that, you will have been back-to-back listening to five guest episodes, our longest ever series of guest episodes, Bex. And weren't they just superb?

Bex

Honestly, they are some of my favourite conversations. And don't take this the wrong way, I'm a little bit sad it's just the two of us now, but maybe we should actually plan and deliver some content. So, Simon, what do you have in store for us this season? Where are we going?

Simon

Well, the topic that is going to be covered in season 13 is all about financial crises.

And I think we've decided, Bex, that it would be a good idea to try and bring to the podcast a faith and finance perspective on this topic, which seems to be perennial. There's always a financial crisis that has recently happened or one that's about to arrive.

They come from all sorts of different causes and sources with all sorts of different impacts. And so, we have decided to grasp the nettle and tackle this tricky subject over the entire season - eight episodes.

And we'll cover various different aspects, but also various different types of financial crisis. Bex, do you have a list of the kind of topics we are going to be covering over the next eight episodes?

Bex

I sure do. And full disclosure, I feel a little bit nervous about this season because I'm a person who quite likes being in control. And the nature of financial crisis means that you don't always know they're coming. You don't always have control over all the factors. So, I'm looking forward to unpacking this in more detail.

So, today is a bit of an introduction episode. We're going to look at the right questions to be asking about financial crises.

Then we're going to move on to episode two, where we focus on famine and war in the Bible and how they were a trigger for financial crises. Then we've got some Ponzi schemes; we've got some bubbles that may or may not burst – spoiler: they often burst!

We've got an episode that's looking at panic, then rogue traders, whether an institution is ever too big to fail. And then, finally, we're going to wrap it up with an episode on ‘Boom, Bust or Belief’.

Simon

Now, when Bex says, we're going to have some Ponzi schemes, we're not offering them to you! We're definitely not recommending you invest in anything. During the ‘Where Your Treasure Is…’ podcast, we will discuss some Ponzi schemes.

And then, when it comes to bubbles, the question would always be, is it a bubble… unless it bursts?

Bex

Ooh, ponder that for a couple of weeks!

Simon

Maybe you could get in with a quick email to us in time for us to answer that question.

But we're starting off with the questions around financial crises. Everyone's going to have different questions. We're not going to answer all of them.

This is not supposed to be an academic insight into historical causes of financial crises and the financial implications, but an acknowledgement, really, that as Christians who are trying to be good stewards of the resources that God has given us, who operate in a complicated, sophisticated, financially integrated world - that was a good phrase, wasn't it? - where somebody's actions hundreds or thousands of miles away can end up having a practical impact on our own financial situation over which we have no control… so, how do we respond to that with a faith perspective and then a stewardship perspective, being our faith interacting with our finances.

So, Bex, where should we start today?

Bex

I think the first question that comes to mind is, ‘Are financial crises happening more frequently or is that just a bit of a recency bias?’ We're more aware of them now. We have more reporting on it. What's your take on that, Simon?

Simon

It's a similar question that I occasionally get asked by clients, prospective clients, around volatility when investing. Volatility being the idea of typically stock markets going up and down in value.

And a quite regular comment is, ‘But the world is more volatile than it ever used to be.’ I'm not entirely sure that it is. What I certainly recognise is that the speed at which news is reported means we find out about volatility, financial crises, events around the world far more quickly than we used to. Therefore, the news can actually exacerbate some of these financial crises because the news exists not to give us good godly financial advice. The news exists to, in reality, sell - to sell advertising, to make a profit for the owners of the news companies. And what sells is generally fear and greed or celebrity - something that's going to grab your attention.

And so, I do wonder if some of these financial crises that come and go, because they do come and they do go, wouldn't be half as bad if we didn't hear about them.

Bex

And I suppose there can be really practical consequences of hearing about them. I'm thinking of runs on banks. When you hear that a bank is failing, someone takes money out. ‘Oh, someone else is taking money out, I'll take it out!’

And suddenly, it perhaps speeds up. Perhaps that bank was always going to collapse, but it perpetuates the problem.

Before we get into the nuance of runs on banks, which I'm sure would be fascinating, why don't you define for us, Simon, what do we mean by a financial crisis and what are some of the effects that we're talking about?

Simon

I think for most people, the idea, the concept of a financial crisis is to do with scale - scale, both in terms of the geographical scale and in terms of the financial scale itself.

So, it isn't going to be a financial crisis if you happen to drop a fiver down the drain and you can't get it out. It could be a real nightmare in the moment for you if you had plans and purposes for that money and it's gone and it's never coming back! But a financial crisis typically affects a large group of people - typically a country or countries - and is of such a scale that it's impacting lots and lots of people at the same time, to quite a large degree.

So, as you said, Bex, you might think of a run on a bank, and when you talk about a run on the bank, there are two thoughts that come to my mind.

Number one is ‘Mary Poppins’, the original film: Michael Banks want his two pence back out of the bank and they won't give it to him. And it causes a run on the bank. And only the people who happen to be walking past the bank in that moment are affected. No one else knew about it - didn't do much.

Or in the film, ‘It's a Wonderful Life,’ when the failure of the Building and Loan, if I remember what it's called, has a real impact on the community. But it never got any wider than that. They would have been financial crises of their time because they affected possibly the majority of the community within which you lived.

But now we live in a global community, so somebody across the world could say something on the news and suddenly the value of your pension fund has fallen, or the money that you were saving up for a deposit on your house has reduced and you can no longer buy the house you want.

And so, we have this society which is creating interconnectedness generally in a positive way but, at the same point, the negatives impact us much more quickly, much more forcefully.

We can lose jobs, we can feel emotional stress, physical anxiety, jobs under pressure, relationships suffer all because of things that we had no direct control over when they started.

But we do have control, and we'll get into this later in the season about how we respond – or, in advance, about how we prepare.

Bex

And one of the things that I was thinking about there is that one of the reasons this subject matters is because we can't really extricate ourselves from that network of interconnectedness. For most of us, if we want to buy a house, that requires a mortgage, which kind of buys you into that whole global system that's affected by many, many factors. If you're renting, you are paying someone else's mortgage, normally.

And so, it strikes me as, whatever we do, we are in some way going to be influenced and impacted by these various factors.

Why else does this season matter? Simon? Why should we spend time thinking and discussing financial crises?

Simon

I think one of the reasons is because we can say with reasonable degree of certainty that, during our lifetimes, most of us are going to be affected by one or more financial crises.

And there are parables in the Bible that talk about planning for the future, about making almost contingency plans whilst also living generously so that we are good stewards of what the Lord has given us - stewarding for ourselves, but also for those around us and for the ministry.

Now, the Bible didn't really have the language of financial crisis that we have now. I'm always intrigued when it says that so and so earned a day's wage, which was one denarius. It was always ‘denarius’! You did a day's work, you got a denarius… whereas, today, inflation has a massive impact on our lives, and interest rates have big impact on anybody who is a borrower - you know, your mortgage, your credit card, your car loan - or a saver: your bank balance, your investments, your pensions. And almost everybody is either a borrower or a saver, so it impacts us all.

And then, like you say, in terms of if you want to buy a house, you're probably going to get a mortgage. Well, to get a mortgage, you need an interest rate. But the interest rate might be fixed for a few years and then it falls out at a variable rate. And it could be a lot higher or a lot lower than it was. And it could be that there's been a war hundreds of miles away that's impacted the price of oil, and the price of oil impacts the price of food and goods, and suddenly interest rates are higher because inflation is high and the Bank of England is trying to control it, which means they're going to take money out of the system to cool the system down, to reduce inflation, which means paying more on your mortgage or getting less on your investments. And suddenly, this thing that's happened, which has no direct physical effect on us - we're not being sent into battle; we're not the ones who are disagreeing about something over international borders - but we are the ones whose financial affairs are being impacted.

And we know that for so many people, they don't have a huge amount of financial resilience. When your finances are impacted, when you're not getting pay rises above inflation, when you can't afford to retire as early or you can't afford to share with your family or with your community, we have to make decisions around what do I do when this shock hits my system, and I have to respond while thinking about the godly way to respond, the faithful and the generous way to respond.

Bex

And that kind of response feels very countercultural. When I think of financial crisis, I think of people panicking. I think of people losing their jobs or ending up in more debt because they're trying to navigate that initial shock that maybe lasts longer than they expect. I think of the fact that there's always really someone profiting off of it, whether that's because they've bet against the markets, or whatever it is - there's always someone winning out of it.

So, when that feels like there's not many great responses to financial crisis, how do we respond well, as Christians?

Simon

And it's a real challenge that I find professionally, when planning your finances is ultimately what I'm trying to do for people. I'm trying to help them have a plan, to plan the future as best they can with a massive degree of uncertainty built in. And when we hear about those that do well even in moments of financial crisis, or, to be honest, just do well generally financially, we aspire to be like them.

We assume that, well, if I had more resources, if I had more money, I would be more resilient, I could look after myself even despite the financial crisis.

And yet, from where we sit in the world, Bex – Aberdeenshire - there have been seasons where the financial crisis that affects our community is quite often related to the price of oil, the price of gas. Aberdeen itself is quite an oil and energy centric city.

And there are times in the past when people have been making good money in good jobs, buying big houses, going on holidays, driving big cars… and, then, the financial crisis hits, quite specifically, maybe quite narrowly to a community and people have walked away - they've handed the keys to their house back to the mortgage lender: ‘I haven't got a job, I am maxed out on debt, I can't afford my mortgage,’ because they were living in the moment - they weren't planning for the future.

It's not a very wise and godly approach.

And when you read through the Bible, a lot of the general principles of faith work really well when it comes to moments of financial crisis, the personal impact on you or your community. How much do we trust in the Lord and His plans for us, not trusting in money and our bank balance, the size of our pensions?

Are we dependent on him and not dependent on ourselves, our own health, our own education, our jobs, or dependent on those around us who are providing for us?

Do we respond with panic or with prayer?

And do we go to prayer first rather than as a last resort, which is something I struggle with, certainly… eventually getting to, ‘And I've run out of things that I can do myself. You know what - maybe it's time to pray!’

Can we make prayer our first response instead so that we live in that peace which transcends understanding?

How can you stand in a moment of crisis around people living through crisis and exhibit a peace that hasn't come from your own self-determination and strength of will, but is given to you by the Holy Spirit who says, ‘I give you my peace’, and your peace can be an impact on those around you. What a witness to your faith and God's faithfulness when you can operate out of peace rather than out of panic!

And, then, we find ourselves in community. Yes, there are global and national financial crises, but there are also individual financial crises. And it's great when you hear stories or you get involved in stories of a need being met through the community of the church, because God did not call us to live independently and isolated lives, but called us to live in community as a church, as his body, where we get to meet the needs.

It's going to be great to talk about these interactions over the next few episodes, taking the macro financial crisis down to the micro personal impact, and then the faith response… and the faith preparation as well.

Bex

And that tension you touched on there is so hard to live in! And, particularly, I'm thinking about the tension of stewardship and managing what the Lord has given us well - whether that's through savings, through investing in our pensions, et cetera - and also not being so reliant on ourselves that actually we don't need God anymore and we don't trust in God's provision.

And that tension just feels like a constant push and pull. And so. one particular aspect of the Bible I was thinking about as we are planning for this season is Job in the Old Testament. And he's a really good guy: he loves the Lord, he has a wife, he has a family, he has a pretty successful farm.

And throughout the course of the book, every single thing gets taken away from him! And it is a fascinating study on, I guess in this level, the micro - because it's him specifically - of how we respond… because there's points where he is understandably fuming at the Lord. There's points where he's really sad and depressed, and there's points where some of his friends just, instead of comforting him or helping him, just ask the most unhelpful questions or almost try and blame it on him.

So, I guess my question is, how do we respond well, and not like Job's friends?

Simon

And the story of Job gives us a very interesting case study on the understanding of crisis, of when things go wrong. Because we can point and we can label causes of crises in the Bible - we'll see it's often to do with things like war and famine. For us today, it can be political pressures, it can be natural disasters, and there can be financial crises that are caused by the financial system, that don't seem to have any real reason. In the book of Job, we get this spiritual perspective that says it was almost as though Job was being tested. He was picked out as an individual - now let's see what happens when you suffer!

And out of that, we get an incredible testimony of Job's faithfulness through dire circumstance, his ability to remain trusting in the Lord when those around him are saying, ‘Look, just give up and curse God and die!’

‘No, I'm not going to do that.’ And that can lead to our own spiritual response. I think sometimes we can over spiritualise and assume this is a very personal attack on us.

When we know we are living in a spiritual battle globally, nationally, in our own lives, to not be under attack for an entire lifetime is probably a bad position for a Christian to be in. If you're being so ineffectual as a Christian that the devil hasn't got to worry about you at all, then you're not doing very much.

But the moment you put yourself in the position of being effective for Christ, we should anticipate we could be under attack. And one of the ways that we are attacked is through our finances. We've spoken in the past about how important Jesus thought our finances were to us and how important finances are in terms of relationships and how relationships break down when finances are under pressure.

And yet Bex, doesn't Job end so well! You get to the end of Job, and what does he do?

Bex

It is one of my favourite bits of the Bible - Job 42; ‘The Lord has said, “Who are you to question me?” And it says, ‘Then Job replied to the Lord, “I know that you can do all things. No purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge? Surely, I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”.’

And as somebody who is obsessed, or certainly was obsessed, with asking the question of, ‘Why God? Why would you allow this? Why would you allow that?’, I find Job's response so helpful of actually: ‘There are so many things that are too wonderful for me to know, things that I just don't have the capacity to understand. But thankfully I do know and trust in a God who does understand these things, who knows far more than I do!’

And I think the more we can remember who's in charge, instead of all the temporary things flying around us - all of which feels super urgent and super important (and many are in that moment) - but remembering that eternal perspective and that God is still sovereign and on the throne, which, let's be honest, is easier said than done.

Simon

Far easier said than done!

So, dear listeners, if you are interested in honing your spiritual response in times of financial crisis, whether you're in one right now or you've been in one in the past and didn't cope terribly well, or looking to the future, then join us for the next seven episodes of season 13 of ‘Where Your Treasure Is…’, and we will talk as best we can about these things that we don't understand… but the Lord does, and our prayer is that he would guide us to help you to be better prepared, to respond wisely, to be a great witness around the world, around your community, of how we can live with God's peace, faithfulness, trust in him, his provision, dependent on him, while the world around us can go completely crazy, as it will from time to time!

So, we look forward to speaking with you again. For now, goodbye from me.

Bex

And it's bye from me.

That's it for this episode of ‘Where Your Treasure Is…’

Simon

Thanks for listening. Let's keep learning to be good stewards of all we've been given.

Bex

See you next time.