“The first revolution is when you change your mind about how you look at things, and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown.”
Gilbert Scott-Heron
American Jazz Poet
1970
We look at things today through the lens of Corporate Finance. Through that lens our possibilities for personal agency are limited to the choices that they experts choose to offer us.
We are not being shown the full picture of finance as a social structure for social decision making in which we can have agency, IF we take it back from the so-called experts that we have given it over to.
Once we take back our personal agency in finance, we can add new channels and mechanisms for directing financial flows into enterprises that foster and promote peace through social and environmental justice in the conduct of commerce that is reasonably inclusive and fundamentally fair, locally, globally and intergenerationally.
Let me show you another way to look at finance spatially, as Money City.
In Money City there are six different places where financial decisions get made. Each place does the same work of aggregating surpluses from us, as citizen-savers, and deploying those aggregations as investment in enterprise. Each has its own unique value that it offers us, in return for our savings. Each has its own unique mechanism that it uses to construct investment in enterprise. Each has its own unique moral code that guides it in selecting enterprises to invest in.
The first space is Family & Friends. In this space families and their friends pool their savings to provide for their own. They invest in enterprise through patronage for IMPACT, where impact is defined by the family and their friends to be whatever that family and their friends decide is good for the family, and their friends.
The second space is Church & Philanthropy that aggregates savings from citizen-savers to care for others, and deploys those aggregations as grants for MISSION.
The third space is Taxing & Spending that aggregates savings time provide for public health, public safety and public welfare and deploys those aggregations as subsidies for POLICY.
The fourth space is Banking & Lending that aggregates savings for safekeeping and deploys those aggregations as credit lent at interest against PROFITS
The fifth space is Exchanges & Funds that aggregates savings for idiosyncratically and opportunistically putting money to work making more money through speculation on what was in the 19th Century PROGRESS but what has degenerated during the 20th Century into GROWTH in the scale of corporate bureaucracy.
The last and sixth space is also the newest. It is Pensions & Endowments that aggregate surpluses saved to programmatically provide certainty against certain of life’s uncertainties through agreements on prioritizing cash flows through enterprise that align with a fiduciary duty of inter generational loyalty and prudence.
Now we, as citizen-savers, do not want to put our programmatic savings into an opportunistic speculation . That is not prudent. Opportunistic is the very opposite of programmatic.
But, when we look inside the Pensions & Endowments space, we see that what we are requiring our Pensions & Endowments to do today is take our programmatic savings and invest them in opportunistic speculation.
Why are we doing that?
Why aren’t we requiring our Pensions & Endowments to invest in stewardship?
Of a new prosperity, of peace, through the financing of social and environmental justice in the conduct of commerce.
