Swanning Around

“While people are saying, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”

The day of the Lord will catch the world by surprise. I used to find this strange. I don’t anymore.

The vast majority of human beings are instinctively uniformitarian in their outlook. They don’t read history, and even if they do, they don’t imagine the sort of catastrophes that occurred in other times and places could possibly happen during their lifetimes, let alone a once-in-human-history event like the day of the Lord. In one of the earliest books of the New Testament, Paul writes that the day of the Lord will come like a thief. In one of the last books, Peter says exactly the same thing. Few on earth will see it coming.

Pensions, Portfolios and Black Swans

For years, I didn’t think much about pensions, portfolios and my eventual retirement. The company I worked for gave us limited investment options, and managed the money accumulating in its employees’ accounts at so many removes that most of us just looked at our bottom line number once a year or so and carried on plugging away at whatever we were doing in blissful ignorance. Retirement seemed awfully far away. As long as the 2006 number was bigger than 2005, everything was copacetic. That changed when I was packaged off not so long ago. Suddenly, I had to start making those decisions for myself.

For me, a pension is a matter of stewardship rather than security. It’s the Lord who takes care of me; I’m just trying to be optimally responsible with what I’ve currently got to manage. Just for a thought experiment, I sat down last July and calculated how often some catastrophic event sends the North American markets into a downward spiral sufficient to wipe out large numbers of inattentive investors. It turns out that over the last century, on average, this happens every 5.9 years or so. That’s something you don’t work into your calculations when you’re twenty-five, because even a really bad year won’t break you. You’ll make it all back in the next couple. On the other hand, when you’re looking at less than a decade before you may need to draw on those funds, one really catastrophic economic year could potentially leave you dependent on your relatives in your dotage. For a Christian with other options, not a good look.

N.N. Taleb refers to such events as Black Swans. Unless you’ve traveled to Australia, you’ve probably never seen a black swan. I assure you they exist. So do rare financial catastrophes, but few people build the latter into their plans for the future.

Gnats and Camels

My new pension investment manager is a believer. Periodically, he’ll call me up, make sure I’m happy with how things are going, and check whether I want to adjust my investment strategy in any way. Like me, he’s dispensational, and he’s looking for the day of the Lord. He’s a catastrophist. Unfortunately, he also works for a major bank, so the advice he gives me is about as uniformitarian as you might expect. He’s saying what he’s told to say. “All the experts”, he says, agree that the biggest thing on the horizon is November’s election. A Trump win would be good for the economy, a Harris win probably not so good.

I was a bit boggled. Where finances are concerned, the election is probably the last thing on my mind. Anything it’s likely to produce will be a comparative economic blip, a gnat in a herd of camels. For one thing, the whole financial system is rigged and at some point in the very near future is destined to collapse no matter how frantically governments print money to cover their obscene excesses. For another, even if Trump can overcome the odds of a stacked election deck, I wouldn’t put it past the Deep State to try to deliberately tank the economy on his watch. It’s been so mismanaged during the Biden regime that one little push ought to do it. For yet another, there’s the war in Ukraine, not to mention Gaza, Iran and possibly Taiwan. These may be physically distant, but their economic repercussions are potentially massive, and not in a good way.

What do the bank’s advisors have to say about these factors? Not a word. What do they have to say about the BRICS countries banding together to form an economic bloc that encompasses 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of the world’s economy? Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. What do they have to say about the imminent demise of the Petrodollar and the corresponding decrease in interest in US Treasury bonds? Not a sausage.

All Things Are Continuing as They Were

You see the problem. The vast majority of our friends and neighbors are uniformitarians, including the so-called experts we trust to tell us what’s coming. Even most of our Christian friends, while acknowledging that we are living in perilous times, are ordering their lives as if “all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation”. And perhaps that’s all we can do. As my investment advisor opined when I finally pushed past the “expert opinions” he was citing and asked him what he thought personally as a Christian, if the entire economy goes down, it won’t matter whether you’re in GICs, treasury bonds, real estate, gold or anything else. Everybody will be in the same boat. True that. The few financial insiders who can read the writing on the wall offer two pieces of sage advice: diversify, and don’t carry debt. Both are always prudent.

But my thought is this: if nobody is even bracing themselves for the next, absolutely inevitable, almost-predictable economic Black Swan, how likely are they to get ready for the day of the Lord?