to you, as an Impact Investor

We are talking about changing the way finance gets done.

Not just changing the values the enterprise and investment are designed to value.  Changing the way investment actually designs enterprise to value values.

Right now, most every enterprise of any real size is designed the same way to value the same values.  They are all designed the Wall Street way, to value the values that Wall Street is designed to value.

The importance of design cannot be overstated here. This isn’t about choice. It’s about architecture. And vocabulary. And the thoughts about what is possible and what is right and good that get made visible through the words and images that make up our shared vocabulary for how enterprise is and should be designed.

Chances are, the impact you want to be having is a 

NOT

as in, you want not to be harming people and planet through the investments you choose to make

Problem is, you are pretty much required to invest within the Wall Street dominated system of speculating on future movements in the market-clearing prices for securities trading in the markets for maintaining a market-clearing price.

Even when you are investing in so-called Social Enterprises,

This system is designed to be non-prescriptive on values. Every buyer and every seller is 100% free to value whatever values they want to be valuing when they decide what securities to buy or sell, and what price to buy or sell them for.  The markets, however, only value one thing: growth in the market-clearing price.  Growth in price is what let’s sellers sell at a profit. Sellers selling at a profit is what brings new buyers in to buy at higher prices, in expectation that they will, in their turn, be able to become sellers selling for a profit to the next new buyer who buys at an even higher price.

The markets will punish any corporation that does not drive it share price up.
Almost instantly.
And ruthlessly.

What happens when the only way to continue driving share price up is to agglomerate, externalize costs onto society and the environment, monopolize commercial markets and capture government policy making, so that government makes policy to support corporate gigantism, rather than to protect the welfare of people and planet?

As an Impact Investor, you want to avoid such companies.

But what if you could completely disempower them?

You can’t do that alone, but you can help us wake the sleeping giants of stewardship investing who are unwittingly complicit in this Wall Street gigantism, but who, largely unknowns to us and to them, have the fiduciary duty and the investing power to escape the tyranny of trading on Wall Street, and to invest directly in enterprise doing well by doing good on Main Street, instead.

The tyranny of the trading tape over our superfiduciaries – and society – began in August 1972, in the United States, when the National Commission on Uniform State Laws promulgated the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act (the “Uniform Act”) during its annual convention.  This Uniform Act changed over 400 years of common sense and common law that held that fiduciary prudence is a question of fact under the circumstances that is best decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis. Instead, the Uniform Act makes the legislature the arbiter of prudence for fiduciaries through general – application rules of what is called in the law Black Letter Law.

In its defense, the Uniform Act does not change the time-honored rule that has continued for over 500 years, that speculation with other people’s money (or other property) entrusted to the good judgement of a  fiduciary is a violation of fiduciary duty.

The law does, however, in the special case of so-called institutional fiduciaries – what we think are more accurately named as superfiduciriaries – acknowledge that fiduciary prudence is a question of fact determined under the law by reference to the Hypothetical Reasonable Person.  From there, it goes on to observe that individuals of reasonable prudence in the management of their own financial affairs routinely invest in shares traded in the public markets for maintaining a market clearing price for shares traded in those markets in reliance on portfolio diversification strategies established in implementation of the so-called Modern Portfolio Theory (“MPT”).  Although the Uniform Act does not specifically reference MPT, it does approve investment in securities traded on price in the public markets as properly prudent for fiduciaries if the properly diversify their portfolios as a way of managing speculative risk.