“Protection of savings! ‘’ seems to be the guiding slogan of new financial regulations lately introduced in Belgium; according to the new C.S.G. Year-book. In the United States, also, the New Deal legislation in regard of banking and Stock Exchange professes to aim at “protecting the investor,” which sounds much the same thing. This is well enough as far as it goes, but a truly Catholic sociology must needs point out that there are other objectives, even more urgent, to which Governments should direct their monetary policy. If we need protection of savings, we also need protection from savings. It is right that people who save money should be protected from their own over-eager avarice and from the financial sharks who take advantage of it; and it is equally necessary that the community in general should be protected from accumulations of money, large or small, which are used in ways injurious to the common good.

Nineteenth century philosophy took for granted that thrift and saving was always a good and meritorious habit. Nowadays we are not so sure. We can see that this business of saving is at the bottom of the whole money muddle. If there had been no savings there would have been no banks to look after them, no lending of them at interest, no invention of credit-creation, no national debts. The old Christian and Catholic teaching, of course, condemned saving (in effect) as sinful. Everybody was supposed to give away his surplus income to those who hadn’t enough; money saved was money that ought to have been spent on the poor.