The Bard for MBAs

By Mark Leiren-Young

Whether t’is nobler to study the Bard or to learn to balance your chequebook, that is the question posed by the Financial Post business section.

Although the article by Fabio Campanella, CA, CFP, CIM is a partner at Campanella McDonald LLP never actually suggests ditching English Lit in favour of watching your wallet, the headline is plain enough: “Why you should study personal finance, not Shakespeare.”

Of course, this makes perfect sense, because when conservatives talk about the arts and economics, they always present it as an either/or thing — the arts, or “stuff that really matters.”

Which is also sensible. As we all know from years of arts finance debates, all cultural funding comes directly from money that would otherwise be allocated to caring for sick babies and dying grandmothers. Similarly, any time spent studying Shakespeare is obviously taken directly from class-time that would otherwise be spent studying practical things.

Military spending is military spending. Subsidies for big corporations are their own separate line item. But arts funding always comes directly from the Health Care budget.

Which is why no politician has ever said, “Would you rather spend a million dollars on the Canada Council or 25 million dollars on helicopters that don’t work.” No, the debate is always posed as . . . “Would you rather fund the dumbest sounding project the Canada Council didn’t really give money to in the last decade . . like money to keep the lights on at a gallery that once bought five bucks worth of Girl Scout cookies from an artist who went on to sculpt The Baby Jesus out of calcified cow dung or . . . pay for respirators for premature babies.”

So now the Financial Post has decided that if students spend a dozen class hours a year learning Hamlet they have no time at all for reading more meaningful words, like those published in the Financial Post.

Of course, students could just study personal finance in, um, math class, but that would mean less time for the kids to enrich their souls with the poetry that is trigonometry, which always comes in so handy in the lives of, um . . . architects?

Meanwhile, perhaps the trick to making the Post headline writers happy is to combine finances and the Bard in the same class.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be unless you’re a credit card company charging nineteen percent interest.

A pound of flesh isn’t worth as much as it used to be.

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless MBA.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow is a good time to invest.

Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant invest in real estate.

All the world’s a stage, but don’t expect government funding to perform on it unless you’re in the oil industry.

The fault dear Brutus lies not within the stars, but in government interference.

He doth bestride the world like a Trump.

If you prick us do we not sue?

I am one who invested wisely, but not too well.

If music be the food of the love, buy the publishing rights to the music. Seriously, do you know how much the Beatles catalogue is worth?