Peace Cafes: 2020 Series – Session 1

exploring

the FUTURE we face

the FINANCE we need

Can, should and will we petition
The Rhode Island Foundation
to commission of New Study of Fiduciary Duty, upgrading from ordinary to extraordinary after assessing the experience
40 years after the Carey & Bright
report to Ford Foundation?

The Provocation

this is the future we need, want and can have…

this is the future we are currently co-creating

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/12/20/middle-class-incomes-have-fallen-behind-and-not-set-to-catch-up-says-cbo/

How did we get here?

What are we doing wrong?

How can we fix it?

We current live inside a narrative of GROWTH as the pathway to prosperity. This driving concentration of more and more of society’s surpluses into the hands of fewer and fewer, larger and larger corporations, and the smaller and smaller number of human beings who manipulate the law to exercise dominion over those corporations and they surpluses they share, creating a new aristocrat of corporate bureaucracy.

Our problem is not so much that Modern Finance is broken, as that it has become obsolete. Our times have changed. Finance has not.

The last innovation in Finance of any real consequence – the innovation that gave us Modern Finance as we know it today – was the development of Modern Portfolio Theory in the middle of the 20th Century, and its application to the laws of fiduciary duty as the standard of fiduciary prudence for Pensions & Endowments beginning in 1972.

Over the last 40+ years, we have lived through a gradual take-over of the Capital Markets – more correctly, the Exchanges & Funds channel, mechanism, moral code and places for directing financial flows into enterprises through speculation on NPV Growth – by Professional Asset Managers managing assets professionally for Pensions & Endowments as Asset Owners.

This has caused the Capital Markets – Exchanges & Funds – to fall into dysfunction, disempowering the Individual Investor and replacing the Invisible Hand of popular choice with the very visible hand of Professional Management, giving us an almost megalomaniacal obsession with Growth in enterprise, finance and government.

This is not correct.