The efforts to try to burnish the image of bankers have gone from being unconvincing to ridiculous. I am certain we will see Jon Stewart comment on the latest twist, of trying to claim that God wants banks (and therefore bankers) to make a lot of money.

Since Calvinism is the de facto religion of America, equating wealth with virtue would normally make perfect sense. But one of my colleagues, who is thinking about writing a book on Christianity and capitalism, points out that God as depicted in the Bible is not a very good steward of the planet. He regularly uses brimstone, floods, earthquakes, plagues, and whatnot. And there aren't offsetting scenes of acts of nature conservancy. So if man was created in God's image, and God seems to have a bit of an appetite for destruction, perhaps the God-invokers are barking up the wrong tree. They might instead consider passing themselves off as mere vessels of Divine will in helping make bad things happen, that the people are who are suffering, in good Calvinist logic, clearly must be sinners somehow, even if it is not obvious what they did wrong.

But the defenses we get instead are more than a bit twisted, at least as reported in Bloomberg:

   Barclays Plc Chief Executive Officer John Varley stood at the wooden lectern in St. Martin-in-the- Fields on London's Trafalgar Square last night and told the packed pews of the church that "profit is not satanic."

    The 53-year-old head of Britain's second-biggest bank said banks are the "backbone" of the economy. Rewarding high- performing bankers with more pay doesn't conflict with Christian values, he said. Varley was paid 1.08 million pounds ($1.77 million) and no bonus in 2008....

    "Is Christianity and banking compatible? Yes," he said in an interview after the speech in the 283-year-old church. "And is Christianity and fair reward compatible? Yes."

Yves here. Whoa! I will agree that banking is probably not Satanic, but not being on a first name basis with him, I could be wrong here. "Satanic" leads to images of ritual sacrifice of babies, and I don't think the banking industry is into that,. However, many readers were put off by the idea of securitizing life settlements. That occurs when the holder of a life insurance policy is bought out by a third party who continues paying the premiums, speculating that they will die on some sort of actuarially-determined timetable. Of course, if the investor is proven wrong, and the people whose lives he is now insuring live longer than expected, he makes less money and has reason to want them to die, and could resort to trying to speed up the inevitable.

....

Of course, you could also turn this argument on its head. If God really did want banks to make money, they have been really really bad at it! How many years of earnings were torched in the crisis? Certainly everything since 2003. And then the banks should properly be charged for all the losses their messes created in the real economy. So the people who ran those banks should not expect to be well treated on Judgement Day, no matter how you look at their divine mission.