Stocks investments, etc. and Orthodoxy

[A.M.]

I'm trying to find out what Orthodoxy teaches vis-a-vis investments. I know that Saint John Chrysostom (and perhaps Saint Basil as well?) has some quite harsh things to say about earning money without actually working for it. I believe he also says that any money that is saved has been stolen from the poor. These are obviously "hard sayings" and very different from contemporary wisdom.

Does the Church teach these principles generally, or are these simply the convictions of certain Fathers? (Either way, they need to be taken seriously, but perhaps there is a certain intentional lack of clarity on the matter?)

[Vasilis Kirikos]

It seems to me that The Church makes money all of the time with investments. Our financial reports at our parish council meetings always has a statement of what we made from this or that investment (CD, property or whatever). Each one of us who owns a home has an investment that increases in value with time; my understanding is that it's something like 5 to 7 % per year. That is a pretty good return on your money without working for it. Also, St John knew nothing about modern economics or the modern machinery we now have and that makes a world of difference. We have machines that do work slaves had to do in his day. All that considered is nothing if think about what our lives would be like without the stock market. Can you imagine what would happen to us all if all investors took their money out of the stock market! That is how the USA produced a civil war in Yugoslavia. Public Law passed by the US Congress during the Bush Sr. administration required that they have a democratic gov within a 6 month period or the IMF, World Bank and other financial institutions would withdraw all monetary support...The result was civil war in Yugoslavia. By the way.....that particular bill was written and pushed through the Congress of the USA was by none other than a totally corrupt scurrilous privately endowed organization called the "Council of Foreign Relations or CFR.... It's a "think-tank", so called, paid for by various big businesses. The CFR's function is to push forth laws and lobby governments in the interests of these conglomerates....Nasty people to say the least...and they work for a living!!

[Jill]

"The USA produced a civil war in Yugoslavia"? Surely the start of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s had more to do with Milosevic's inflammatory (to put it mildly) speeches at the 600th anniversary commemmorating the defeat of Prince Lazar by the Ottomans, which rekindled all the old ethnic and religious hatreds which were kept dormant under Marshall Tito's regime. These cycles of violence are nothing new in the Balkans, they've been happening for centuries. It doesn't need an American think-tank to get it going, just one or a few nationalist fanatics.