Economics

Headline: "Catholic church invests in tobacco, arms and birth control pills".

Sounds too unbelievable to be true? Well, not entirely. According to this article on spiegel.de, the German Pax bank, one of the four catholic church banks in North Rhine-Westphalia did exactly that.

According to the article, the following investments were made:

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Since I had to explain it anyway, I can put just as well write it down here in my blog. The question, I was asked was, how the stock market can magically generate money out of thin air and the short answer is: It cannot, but psychology can be used as a means to redistribute existing wealth.
There is no such thing as an intrinsic value. The value of any object depends on it's scarcity and our desire to own it. By manipulating desire for and the availability of an object, it's value can either be increased or decreased.

I find it annoying, if not fraudulent. Whenever the economy slows down or even crashes, some people start suggesting to buy gold as crisis-proof investments and of course, there are other people, following this ill advice, loosing money even more.

I seriously suspect, that there is a method behind this. A game, played by financial jugglers, that revolves around scaring people, looking for security, into buying their reserves at inflated prices, by trumpeting around, that the global market will collapse soon.