TEN years ago I chaired a Christian foundation on business ethics, and got to know a senior advisor to an international investment banking group. He was profoundly worried by the direction that banking was taking, and did not believe that his industry was not paying attention to the warning signs of possible disaster. He wrote a book about it. It was called Debt and Delusion. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

I saw him interviewed on the BBC news channel yesterday.

What alarmed him most was the combination of rising and potentially unsustainable personal debt at the same time as riskier and riskier corporate investment. He wrote a chapter about The Separation of Financial Value from Economic Reality. In conversation he said that our financial system reminded him of the fairy story about the king’s new clothes. No one had the courage to say that ‘the king was in the all together’. The final chapter was called ‘Borrowed Time’, and was about the way the whole thing might unravel, and what households. companies and government might do to prevent disaster.

We now know that ‘the king was in the all together’. Famous names have disappeared from the high street and the term credit crunch has shot into our vocabulary from nowhere. But I am not convinced that we have grasped the heart of the problem.

We have become an instant culture that continually wants more and wants it now. In my lifetime we have moved from a savings culture to a debt culture.

The cycle of people who can’t wait and banks wanting instant profit has indeed created a society of debt and delusion. It is shocking that major banks, taking foolish risks, were being led by people with no qualifications in banking. But the underlying issue is not one of competence it is one of values. The values of our society and our personal values within it.

It is no surprise that poor countries live with huge debt. It is a scandal that wealthy countries do the same. It should not surprise when we get the kind of financial leaders which match our values.

Wanting more is not wrong, but wanting it now with no thought of tomorrow, or of others, is both wrong and stupid.

We live in the most affluent era there has ever been. We need to learn to be content, and to care more for the needs of others than for ourselves. It is time for a values change.