Tomorrow evening, I will sign copies of my new novel, Peace at Battle Mountain, at a local bookstore in San Antonio.[1] All my novels involve a financial crime, murder, and a spiritual struggle. In the case of Peace at Battle Mountain, the central theme is love—our human propensity to love things as secondary that are primary and love things that are primary that are secondary. Instead of God and other people, we love secondary things. Of course, sex, pleasure, power, and money rank high among the things that we human beings tend to overvalue.
From a financial perspective, Peace at Battle Mountain involves misusing generally accepted accounting principles to create illusory profits. In my legal practice, more than once, I saw the susceptibility of people to invent reality, distorting their business’s financial reporting. One of the saddest things is when management begins to believe their distorted reality. This fatal misstep always ends in disaster. I’ve seen this happen more than once.
Unfortunately, with the advent of postmodernism and the loss of confidence in the reality of truth in Western civilization, the problem has become even more serious. In my judgment, some of the most recent financial disasters reflect the most profound danger of a Nietzschean way of thinking – a group of so-called “supermen and superwomen” develop a highly complex financial strategy divorce from reality in which they can make a lot of money on the front end. Of course, these people have little or no concern for those damaged by their behavior.
This is part of the decline of Judeo-Christian Christianity in the West. In Peace at Battle Mountain, one of the characters describes the problem this way:
“Unfortunately, no one was paying much attention to where this was all leading. In this enthusiasm, accountants turned a blind eye to lousy accounting that did not reflect reality. Analysts on Wall Street ignored difficulties in financial reports. Money center banks loaned money for marginal transactions. Lawyers created vehicles for transactions that lacked financial reality. This was especially true at E-Titan. Lance used his contacts on Wall Street to grow E-Titan at astronomical rates—growth rates that no serious investor should have believed. But they did. Everyone forgot the old maxim, ‘If it is too good to be true, it isn’t.’
“Years later, one of the architects of the final growth of E-Titan (its lead trader) put it this way, “Postmodernism is popular on college campuses these days. One principle of postmodernism is that human beings can and do create reality through language. That is what we did at E-Titan. Accounting rules and financial statements involve the language of mathematics. We made the mistake of believing that we could just create our own reality and that whatever that reality was would one day be real. We didn’t stop to think that it would come crashing down on us all since it wasn’t true. The question was never ‘if.’ The question was always ‘when.’ We were just too arrogant to see it coming.
“I remember Brad Gilliland telling me one day, as we created another Cheetah and took more assets and debt off our balance sheet, ‘I think we might be forgetting that when Judgment Day arrives, everyone will have to go to cash accounting. That includes E-Titan.’ I didn’t remember Brad saying that until Judgment Day arrived—at least as it pertained to E-Titan.
“We thought we were supermen. We were making all these trades, and we were making big money. Our bonuses were huge. Who cared about the accounting? Who cared about the financial statements? Who cared about the pension plans investing in our stock or the fate of those leaving E-Titan stock to their aging spouses? Somewhere along the line, we lost our moral bearings. “After a time, we began believing our Lance DuFort-created false reality. We came to believe that the illusions created by mark-to-market accounting were true. (Or, maybe we just wanted to believe it was true, or we would not have been able to live with ourselves.) Here is the bitter truth: after E-Titan failed, and the bankruptcy lawyers and managers reconstructed and restated all the transactions, they became convinced that E-Titan never made much money on a continuing basis. It was all smoke and mirrors.” [2]
Here, we have depicted a sad truth in the form of a novel. In most of the financial crises of my lifetime, driven by greed, someone or some group created an alternative reality that was divorced from economic accuracy. Accounting only works if those preparing the financial statements and later auditing them use accounting principles to reflect reality. It is not just a matter of “following the rules.” It’s a matter of morality and judgment. No series of regulations or laws can protect people from financial misdeeds.
One of the points made in Marshland and Peace at Battle Mountain is the consequences of the dubious use of mark-to-market accounting. In the case of the savings and loan crisis, market accounting allowed savings and loans to ignore losses for long periods. In the case of E-Titan and similar situations, mark-to-market accounting was used to show profits that did not exist. In both cases, management and accounting firms were “following the rules” but also manipulating those rules in ways that were simply inappropriate. In some cases, they were breaking the law. In all cases, reality came crashing down on the perpetrators sooner or later.
The Arthur Stone novels are not designed to keep me busy and retirement. I’m trying to say something that I think is important to our society and its stability. It’s vital for our children and our grandchildren and their happiness. It is essential for the stability of our political system. It is crucial for the stability of our economic system. It is critical to the strength of our families and neighborhoods: The excessive, narcissistic individualism that America breeds is unhealthy. It leads to all kinds of dysfunctions, both personal and social. Our educational system, the media, the government, and, most recently, economic businesses reinforce this. This means we can’t have a stable society without the ultimate values that are wisely and carefully applied to every area of life.
Copyright 2024, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved
[1] Alystair West, Peace at Battle Mountain (Hunt, Texas: Quansus, 2024). The book can be purchased at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other outlets. The electronic version is not yet available due to the author’s lack of competence.
[2] Id, 150-151.