| Iff’s New Year Newsletter for 2008 – ECRC member iff sends the institute’s wishes and comments on “Hypocrisy” in the money-economy and 40 years on. |
Dear colleagues and friends,
To celebrate iff’s 20th anniversary, last year we published the New Year Newsletters from the previous 14 years in a collection entitled "Using Money: 20 years institute of financial services”. Printing this book in English as well as in German should have really sufficed. Even reflection is not immune from the infirmities of old-age, smugness and pig-headedness. But, things have once again turned out differently than planned.
This time however, there will be no theme highlighting promising features of competition, security and solidarity. Instead, I will offer a reflection on “hypocrisy” which, at the very time it seems to suffocate everything, inspires a reaction, which it then in turn suffocates again. In a sense, iff was a response to just such a process of suffocation in contributing the insight, in the face of the practical impossibility of defending ideas, that only concrete research founded in practice and based on empirically verifiable facts is capable of permanently removing the basis for and acceptance of hypocrisy. Forty years after my summer of 68 in Berlin, Paris and Prague, this amounts to a response to the question, which is put periodically, "Exactly what was it you wanted in those days?" and an overview of the diversions and wrong turnings, blind alleys and false prophets that are always capable of making the future resemble the past.
Below are the introductory words of the different paragraphs. The full letter is available below as a pdf file.
1. The summer of 68 gave rise to individual perspectives and experiences. What many people fail to appreciate is that there was no “we” of "68", just many liberated "I"s….
2. Many of the German student generation at that time had been brought up in an environment of hypocrisy…..
3. Hypocrisy is also connected to money….
4. Is it to do with the money itself and is the hypocrisy involved in this deception, in the language of 1968, "inherent in the system"?….
5. It is the volume and lack of culture of transactions which transforms medicines into drugs, food into obesity, wine into alcoholism and ownership of money into greed for profit….
6. So it is not money which is hypocritical, it is….
7. The keepers of the Holy Grail of hypocrisy harp on their religious right to interpret issues exclusively and conclusively from the point of view of investment and profitability, in which it is quite enough for money to generate more money, even where it satisfies no-one….
8. The battle about the EU Consumer Credit Directive came to an end at the beginning of January. It was possible to prevent its worst excesses….
9. Iff’s fortunes in 2007 were better than those of many borrowers….
10. We have returned to research, but with open eyes….
11. 2007 was also a year of international activities; we held the central ECRC conference in Brussels....
12. Following our last strategy day….
13. Once the process of professionalisation well underway, we began the process of clearing away the egg-shell in order to allow the chick space to develop, allow for the ageing process....
14. That model will of course only work if there are the people to give effect to it….
Left is only to wish you all the best for 2008, to thank you for the time taken to read the letter, and to welcome you to either our Responsible Credit conference on 6th and 7th of June in Hamburg (for the German speakers) or any of the other conferences taking place this year, especially the international conference in Den Hague, the Netherlands on 27th -28th November 2008 (see the website or email us at ecrc@iff-hamburg.de).
Best Regards,
Udo Reifner |
| ID: |
40978 |
| Author(s): |
UR |
| Publication date: |
19/02/08 |
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Created: 28/02/08. Last changed: 28/02/08.
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