Check it out!!!

And I have only one thing to say about the immigration.  Every white person in America is a descendant of an illegal immigrant! Just by landing on Plymouth Rock and calling the land yours before the Department of Homeland Security came into existence doesn't mean you're all of a sudden natively American!  Not only are your ancestors still an immigrant, but they're an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT!!

So unless you're Native American, think about that the next time you're debating the immigration issue.  If white people can trounce onto Native American land for opportunity, I suggest we let others' do so.  And worse comes to worst, what's the best solution for stopping illegal immigrants coming in from Mexico?  HELP MEXICO BE GREAT! (is it really that hard?)

I've always wondered what the largest theological library in the world is, simply because I kinda just want to be there.  Of course, the statistics vary, but two rankings are available. If it's based on number of individual things (books, manuscripts, etc.), the statistics are:

1. The Vatican: 1,320,000
2. Princeton Theological Seminary: 1,068,000
3. Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley: 743,500
4. Union Theological Seminary (Burke): 700,000
5. Andover-Newton Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School: 485,000

#3 is a consortium of 7 theological schools in the Berkeley, CA area. #5 consists of two schools. If based on number of purely theological holdings, then...

1. The Vatican: 1,320,000
2. Union Theological Seminary (Burke): 700,000
3. Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley: 743,500
4. Princeton Theological Seminary: (595,000)
5. Andover-Newton Theological Seminary and Harvard Divinity School: 440,000

The key here is that these are exclusively theological holdings.  So ethics and economics are not included in the bottom list, but are in the top one. 

Libraries are important especially in a theological institution for traditional and practical reasons.  No serious theologian in Christian history ever left his/her books alone, especially since Christians are supposed to be "people of the Book".  Books are the cheapest and easiest way to communicate over long distances AND over vast tranches of time.  Nowadays, you can certainly post video lectures or stuff online, but I don't see Jesus posting his Sermon on the Mount on YouTube.  Books are here to stay because it's the only way people from the year 2009 can communicate and preserve their thought and culture to the people from the year 2109.

But practically a large theological library is so convenient! If any of you Wheaton College/Trinity/Moody people have done theological research, you know how annoying it is when the book you want is... (duh duh DUH) not available, and you have to do interlibrary loan or worse.  The problem is made worse when a major paper is due in, say, 7 hours, and that one book that everyone is fighting for is not available.  Interlibrary loan is too slow, so you will need to drive somewhere to get it.  There was a paper that I worked on for a class where the only place that had a book was Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston.  Driving from Wheaton to Evanston?  I didn't bother, even if the book would've made by paper amazing.  Got a B in it, if I recalled correctly. 

- My Thoughts -

Robert Shiller is the Arthur Okun Professor of Economics at Yale University and is the author of his hugely influential Irrational Exuberance. Basically, Shiller's theory launched the field of behavioral finance, and is based upon the fact that many people invest emotionally, rather than rationally.  If investors behave rationally, then the following is true:

A stock is worth $10 and pays $1 dividend every year unfailingly.  So, you would buy the stock, and hold it for at least 10 years, even if the stock falls to $0, because after 10 years, you make the $10 that you've lost if the stock went down to $0. 

But 99% of investors would've sold that kind of shares!  That's why stock crashes happen, because people don't believe that $10 stocks are worth $10 anymore.  So a massive sellout happens.  Now, if you're investing in a totally unrelated stock, you might be safe, but when everyone around you is selling, you suddenly don't feel too good about yourself, and you only join the crowd to precipitate a stock market crash.

But let us look at it differently.  Right now, Intel is worth $19.46 per share.  Do you believe it?  If you do, then you'd buy the share once it hits $19.45 or below.  But even if you believe it's worth $19.46, you won't buy it at $19.45.  You'd wait until, maybe $19.30, or maybe even $19 before you buy Intel shares.  You wouldn't wait for it to go any lower, because by faith alone Intel is worth $19.46, is it not? 

So faith is involved in investing.  But the question is what kind of faith, and when that's established, how that faith changes as the underlying environment changes.  Our God, for example, is a mighty fortress, the great unchangeable I AM.  Thus, our faith shouldn't change too much, if at all.  God, our underlying Fundamental, is unchangeable.  But if the underlying fundamentals change, what happens?  Suppose I am friends with person X, and trust him/her so much that I share secrets with him/her.  But person X turns out to be a crook, cheat, and professional gossip.  Does your faith in that person change? The faith is shattered, unfortunately. Our behavior changes as a result in reaction to that shattered faith.

How to tie it to investing?  When people invest, they look at the "fundamentals".  If I wanted to invest in, say, Microsoft, I'd study it well because I don't work there.  Do I believe in the values the company operates around (important because of cases like Enron and Worldcom)?  Do I believe in the services and/or products the company provides?  Do I believe in the trajectory or vision of the company's future direction?  How well does the company respond to changing demand? The questions go on and on, but if they are solid, the easy part is to determine what the fair price of the company's stocks are.  The research into the fundamentals builds the faith so that the investor can invest in the firm.

But faith is either shattered or reinforced.  The reinforcement comes when the firm survives a time of trial and tribulation.  If you had faith that Intel was worth $19.46 in 2007 (around this time last year it was trading at around $25), then even in the midst of the crisis when Intel was trading at around $13, you would not sell because you know that the fundamentals (ceteris paribus) have not changed and that it is still worth $19.46.  If anything, this faith in Intel should prompt you to invest in even more Intel stocks when it was at $13, and short Intel stocks when it was at $25. 

Thus, we enter in to an ethic of short-selling.  The mechanism of going long on a stock (buying low first then sell high later) drives prices up.  Ideally, you drive the stock towards its fair value.  Utilitarianism would say, "No, drive the stock towards the maximum value," which in a sense is deception, because you create an illusion that the stock is worth more than it really is.  In other words, it is injustice towards the investors.  The mechanism of short-selling (sell high first, then buy back later at a low price) drives prices down, ideally towards its fair value.  Of course, driving a stock lower than it is worth does no justice to the firm because the firm is being perceived and treated unfairly (assuming, of course, the fundamentals have not changed).  To be like Kathyrn Tanner and say that short-selling is bad means that you have to ban going long on stocks.  Well, you might as well burn the NYSE while you're at it, 'cause there goes the stock market.

Now picture this.  We return back to person X.  Suppose not just me, but everyone at church loves person X.  But in the end, person X is a crook, cheat, and gossip legend.  What do you do, assuming X is unrepentant?  The biblical thing to do is not just to run away from him/her, but go so far as to excommunicate X!  But now, let's twist the scenario into something more complicated, but realistic as well.  Suppose we introduce person A, who just happens to be Mother Teresa resurrected.  Okay, from now on, person A = Mother Teresa.  We all love Mother Teresa because she is a champion of the poor.  We see MT's work and we see the holiness and love that is present in her life.  In financial terms, MT's fundamentals are solid. BUT suppose person X, who is a crook, cheat, and distinguished member of the PGA (professional gossip association), was able to convince all of us that (alas!) Mother Teresa (MT) is really a devil in disguise!!  What happens?

Well, we would all flee from MT, right?  We would condemn her and excommunicate her, even if she were a great witness to society. If we were really irrationally exuberant, we might even do the Salem Witch Trial thing and confine her into a janitor's closet for life!  This was what happened, in fact, to Mary T. Eastey, a very holy woman and a great witness for Christ who was, unfortunately, accused of witchcraft by some 10-year old jerks during the Salem Witch Trials.  Unfortunately, irrational exuberance took hold and she was executed. 

The Salemites experienced irrational exuberance because they were on a quest for their version of purity and holiness.  These were Puritans, see?  The purity and holiness is an equilibrium that was deviated slightly with minor infractions such as theft or stuff.  But when a shock comes (i.e. witches conspiring with Satan against the community), people counterreact to it.  When Satan is using people to wreak havoc on the community, the Salemites were not interested in using reason and due process of the law to judge appropriateness, especially since they believed their children were the ones experiencing fits.  Their faith, in other words, was not in God, but in purity and holiness.  My conjecture is if God were more important, they would be more cognizant of the fact that Jesus did not execute the few people he met who were accursed by the devil.  When not just purity/holiness, but their idea of purity/holiness was the center of their faith, the results were devastating.

And so it is with investing.  Our faith needs to be placed in the fundamentals of the stocks we plan to invest in. Without the fundamentals, and faith in it, all I need to do to spark a sellout is to buy huge positions in the DOW components, and then sell them all when Joel Osteen pisses me off (not hard to do...).  You will go, "hey, Henry sold $1 billion of Microsoft... maybe I should sell my Singapore Airlines stock."  Singapore Airlines has nothing to do with Microsoft, but that doesn't matter, because you're holding Singapore Airlines merely to make money, and the moment that faith disappears (with money, it's not hard for that to happen), you want to liquidate your positions ASAP. 

Of course, fundamentals change over time.  Intel might make a bad management decision, which will definitely cause you to revise your fair price down below $19.46 unless they change for the better.  But unless that happens, when investors invest based on the profit-maximizing motive, then there's no reason to have a true and concrete faith in the fundamentals of the company they invest in.  When things go south, then irrational exuberance can screw things up in a royal sort of way.

My favorite Christian artist, as some of you well know, is Dr. Michael Card.  He first came to fame with his praise song El-Shaddai, but his magnum opus, if you will, is Scribbling in the Sand, which was his contribution to a biblical theology of art, and the topic of the book of the same title.  I invite you to listen to it while reading the lyrics.  I don't think there's much to the music video, so just play it and read the lyrics.




Amidst a mob of madmen she stood, frightened and alone,
as hate-filled voices hissed at Him, that she should now be stoned.
But in the air around Him hung a vast and wordless love.
Who knows what luminous lesson He was in the middle of?

At first He faced the fury of their self-righteous scorn,
but then He stooped and it once became the calm eye of the storm.
It was His wordless answer to their dark and cruel demands.
A lifetime in a moment as He scribbled in the sand.


Within the space of space and time, He scribbled in the sand.
They came to hear and see as much as they could understand.
Now bound by cords of kindness, they couldn't cast a single stone.
And Jesus and the woman found they were all alone.