Toward a Right Relationship with Finance: Debt, Interest, Growth, and Security

Toward a Right Relationship with Finance arose from a great dilemma. These Quaker authors and earlier QIF Focus Books have been advocating major changes to the growth economy that is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However, Quaker institutional endowments and individuals' retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book offers background on our current economic system, frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs, suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement, and invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality. With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy