For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good.

• Author: Dwyer, Gerald P.
• Position: Book review

For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good

By Samuel Gregg

New York: Crossroad, 2016.

Pp. xii, 223. $29.95 cloth.

Finance as an occupation--never a praiseworthy occupation, like being a firefighter--has suffered because of the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Being a banker may not be that disreputable in and of itself, but being an investment banker or a currency speculator is seen as bad by many people today. Almost everyone loves to hate speculators and payday lenders. Speculators have been the subject of opprobrium from time immemorial for taking food out of the mouths of starving people simply to sell it for a profit. The U.S. federal government has gone after payday lenders by cutting off their access to banks, and there has been little complaint (other than from payday lenders, of course).

Not a typical economist addressing these questions, Samuel Gregg comes at the subject with a Ph.D. in moral philosophy and political economy from Oxford. He is the research director at the Acton Institute. Gregg doesn't simply argue that finance is not all bad. He argues that financial activity is useful and that financial occupations can even he a vocation for some in the same way that being a priest is a vocation for others.

Parts of this argument are unlikely to be a hard sell to typical readers of The Independent Review. The benefits of speculation are based on a simple price- theory argument I first saw in a "Principles of Economics" course. I know economists who have defended payday lenders in print, and the economics of the argument are straightforward. If there is no fraud or dishonest behavior, it is hard to argue that payday lenders are making the borrowers worse off, as the borrowers see it, a point that Gregg makes.

The most unusual aspect of Gregg's book is the combination of topics advertised in its very title: For God and Profit. We all know about defenses of free markets. God seldom appears in those arguments. What has God got to do with it?

Catholic social teaching is the framework Gregg uses in his discussion of banking and finance's role in the economy. That's where God and religion enter into it. Not just socialist nonsense, Catholic social teaching is a framework for thinking about the purpose of markets based on a view of life's purpose, a purpose that can be summarized as "human flourishing."

Catholic social teaching about finance is historically related to usury--the receipt of interest when there is...