9 Listen! The Lord is calling to the city—
and to fear your name is wisdom—
“Heed the rod and the One who appointed it.
10 Am I still to forget, O wicked house,
your ill-gotten treasures
and the short ephah, which is accursed?
11 Shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales,
with a bag of false weights?
12 Her rich men are violent;
her people are liars
and their tongues speak deceitfully.
13 Therefore, I have begun to destroy you,
to ruin you because of your sins.
This passage always seems to have a modern scoundrel or two that fits it, and the current Barclay's LIBOR scandal seems to fit all too well, especially if we capitalized city in verse one, since "the City" is shorthand for Britain's Wall Street. They were shorting not ephahs but interest rates, by citing a fudged-down number on the the international equivalent of the Fed Funds rate to their lenders.
As it turns out, Barclay's is at least catching the wrath of the British authorities; other banks might follow shortly, since other banks were seemingly fudging downward as well. Whether they're getting God's wrath yet remains to be seen, but God does generally work through temporal means rather than flat-out miracles.
However, before we take too much comfort in seeing the 1% get theirs, let's check our own weights. If you're sneaking in an Internet break at work on Monday morning to read this, you might be shorting your boss if this isn't an agreed-up break and the company Internet policy is cool with a limited amount of chipmunk-friendly personal surfing. Proving 7.36 hours of honest work for 8 hours pay is shorting just like offering 0.46% on short-term CDs when it should have been 0.49%.
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