Abstract
The purpose of the research is to develop an integrated conceptual framework of stock market behaviour seen from a biblical perspective. The stock market is part of the financial markets, which are part of the created social reality. From a biblical perspective, man is accountable to God for the decisions which create the social reality of the financial markets.
Developing a biblical perspective of the created social reality requires a biblical worldview as a presupposition before analysing the facts. The Bible was presupposed as the infallible Word of God in developing a biblical worldview. The essence of the biblical worldview is that there is a cosmic antithesis between God and Satan which affects every aspect of life.
The social reality of the financial markets is the collective result of individual buying and selling decisions. These individual decisions create the social reality of the financial markets. To understand the financial markets, human behaviour must be understood. A system to understand human behaviour from a biblical perspective is developed in this study. The key to understanding human behaviour was the cosmic antithesis between God and Satan, which is at the heart of every decision made.
A model of the global money system was developed from a biblical perspective. The essence of the model is that the cosmic antithesis manifests in the money system in an antithesis between a true and a false weight. The model has systems thinking as its foundation and consists of different subsystems and various horizontal and vertical relationships between the subsystems. The biblical principle is that the money system should be based on a true weight. The non-biblical model is the use of a system based on a false weight. The mechanism to introduce a false weight into the system is to issue debt which is not backed by savings.
The biblical worldview, history, history of prices and biblical time line was used to reconstruct equity prices for the last 2 700 years. In analysing the price pattern of the reconstructed equity prices over the last 2 700 years, in conjunction with the characteristics of systems thinking and the building blocks of the global money system, four observations were made. Recessions occur when the equity building block collapses, depressions when the debt building block collapses and revolutions when the currency building block collapses. If the whole system collapses, it represents a fall of a civilisation or empire. Over this period one civilisation, namely the Roman Empire, has fallen. In the last century the last major collapse (excluding recessions) was the collapse of the debt building block in 1929 to 1933, causing a depression.
The global money system was analysed in terms of the characteristics of systems thinking and the cosmic antithesis between a true weight and a false weight. The social reality of the financial markets is based on a false weight, which is artificially sustained by adding debt not represented by savings to the system. According to the research, the process of adding debt without savings has run its course and the global money system is set to collapse. According to the analysis, the collapse is of the magnitude of that of a civilisation or empire and could be the fall of Babylon as described in Revelation.
Based on biblical systems thinking the concepts developed in this study were structured into an integrated conceptual framework of stock market behaviour.
Prof. N. Lessing