Colorado Foundation’s Faith in Hedge Funds Unshaken After Rout
Bloomberg, March 6, 2009.
Faith = risking money despite evidence of losses.
Christopher Bittman, head of the $1 billion University of Colorado Foundation, is committing more money to hedge funds even after the industry handed investors record losses last year.
March 4, 2009. LA Times.
Lack of faith = not risking money due to fear because evidence is not available.
This terse article reads like inside baseball, but this quote is clear: "At the current price the stock’s annualized dividend yield is 14%. That’s the market’s way of saying it’s sure the dividend is a goner."
March 6, 2009. SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle)
Faith = ideology instead of facts, evidence.
Making tough decisions with facts, not faith, is so emblematic of Mr. Obama's new pragmatism. But as the Congress begins debate over his huge education initiative, we will discover whether Obama's commitment to science is real, or simply rhetoric.
March 5, 2009. NY Times.
Faith = belief in something that is contradicted by what's going on in Japan.
For those seeking solace in the conventional wisdom that stocks rise in the long run, consider this: 20 years after Japan’s stock market peaked, share prices are still less than 25 percent of their top values.
March 5, 2009. US News Money & Business blog.
Faith = lip service without risking anything.
It’s easy to pay lip service to stocks being a good long-term investment, but few investors plan to actually buy them during a month when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged below 7,000. About half of Americans (53 percent) and 67 percent of stock owners agree that stocks remain a sound long-term investment, according to a Gallup Poll conducted March 4.For most of these sources, faith is wishful thinking which is opposed to evidence and facts. Perhaps someone at the University of Colorado Foundation has had a private revelation about an unexpected turnaround in hedge funds. So it would seem that journalists agree with the theologians that faith is something remote from evidence and facts...
3 comments:
Okay, I feel like my comment caused this post. Truly there is common usage of the term. Thanks for the post Fred.
These articles are focused on the economy and definitely focus on faith as trust. But, we do speak about faith in persons, such as our parents...
heh. It's a bit of work but it is interesting to see how journalists are using words on a given day.
But some of us just read Giussani's book on faith (Is it Possible vol 1). This is the approach of Alexis de Tocqueville (quoted by Julian Carron in January 2008), Walker Percy especially in his essays, Message in the Bottle, and Jonathan Edwards emphasizes it also. That is to say faith as a way of knowing that depends upon the testimony of another. This is what I mean by 'natural faith.'
Now, faith as a theological virtue is surely more than this, but it can't be less than this if we want to use the word faith in a way that makes sense. Unfortunately, it looks like the journalists don't even have this basic idea of faith: for them faith is stupidity or lip service.
It's hard to beat Mark Twain's cynical definition: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." I wouldn't call that "faith," however--or if I dead, I'd emphasize that it is "dead faith," not the saving faith that unites our hearts with Christ.
I may be a Protestant, but I have come to view "dead faith" to be just as deadly as the "dead works" the Reformers so opposed.
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