Every month. Forever.
On the use of poster art, architectural renderings, digital virtual immersive experiences and the theater arts to change our thinking about Money and Finance
"We are interested in financial decision making. Financial markets and economics are two things that many people think are hard to understand. There are lots of seemingly impressive terms, jargon and slogans that we don't always fully understand," says Gustav Tinghög, one of the researchers behind the study, and associate professor in economics at Linköping University.
Researchers' tools show who is most easily duped by 'financial bullshit'
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-tools-easily-duped-financial-bullshit.html
Another thing that people used to think was hard to understand is the movements of the heavenly bodies in the night sky before the Copernican Revolution and the invention of Modern Science.
Nicholas Copernicus is a 15th Century Polish church cleric who first posited that the sun was actually at the center of planetary motion. Not the earth. He based this heretical declaration on mathematical models of planetary motion as concentric circular (later refined to ellipses by Johannes Keplar) orbits around the sun to more accurately explain observed movements of the planets without the bewildering concoction of cycles and epicycles that the conventional wisdom of the day used to “save the appearances”, that is, to make observed movements fit into the preconceived notion of the earth as the center of the universe (and, in consequence, humans on earth as the center of everything - we are nothing if not a vain and self-aggrandizing species).
People were aghast.
It took almost 100 years for another churchman, an Italian named Galileo Galilei, a favorite of the high ranking Cardinal Bellarmine, working in the 16th Century, to invent a telescope to observe craters on the moon, that broke the stranglehold of conventional thinking and gave birth to Modern Science as the way of knowing about the physical world of Nature into which we all are born.
Today, schoolchildren can tell us about the planets and their orbits around the sun. It is not that hard to understand.
The time is now for a similar revolution, this time in thinking about ourselves, living together in society, on earth, circling the sun, spiraling through the galaxy, floating in a universe that, as far as Modern Science has thus far been able to determine, does not seem to have any center at all.
What are the social structures through which we make social decisions that hold us together, in society, or drive us to fall apart?
This is the New Frontier for New Learning in our times. The place for our own Copernican Revolution.
And within that new learning about social structures for social decision making, the mysteries of Money and Finance, shrouded as they are in “seemingly impressive terms, jargon and slogans that we don't always fully understand” are perhaps the most critically important point of Copernican inquiry and questioning.
Our hypothesis is that if we cannot articulate a common sense understanding of Money & Finance that can be taught to school children the way we teach Civics and Constitutional representative self-government through electoral politics and the rule of law, then our understanding of Money & Finance is, well, wrong. Which explains why it is so incomprehensible. In a pre-Copernican kind of way.
How to evolve this new understanding?
Words as text assembled into sentences according to the rules of grammar, grouped into paragraphs, divided into chapters and bound together to form books, are a difficult medium for exploring the mysteries of Money & Finance, because we are exploring realities that the Ancients would describe as incorporeal. They have no physical form, beyond the traces they leave as words in legal documents and numbers entered into books of account. We cannot actually see the impact of financial decision making - by which I mean decisions made by financiers, about where the money can, should and will be made to go - on the shape of enterprise, the economy, society, our future, our past and our present prosperity. Because we cannot see it, it is easy to believe that it is not there; that Finance does not actually matter. So why worry about it? Which is exactly what conventional wisdom wants us to believe. And exactly why we find Modern Finance “hard to understand”. Contemporary experts in Modern Finance want us to believe that they are the masters of mysteries. That way, no one can hold them accountable for the choices that they make, and the harms that they are causing. To us, and our posterity.
A better way to find our way out of the miasma of jargon and slogans that is the language of Modern Finance might be to use text as a visual element in poster art, as annotations to architectural renderings - viewing all of the economy and the whole of society as what architects call “the built environment”, as elements in digital virtual immersive experiences and as dialogue in dramatic performances, to give people something to look at in order to talk about it, as we evolve a new common sense of the social structures for social decision making through Finance, and agree the new words we want to use to talk to each other about those decisions, and to hold the deciders who we empower to decide for us accountable for the decisions that they make with the authority that we give to them.
Let’s begin by using a visual metaphor of an imaginary Bank of Nature to see that much of Finance is actually made up of institutions that make institutional decisions according to an institutional logic that is hard-wired into the design of those institutions, and to discover the new institution of Fiduciary Finance as an incomplete innovation of the 20th Century that we need to complete in the 21st.
This is a direct challenge to conventional wisdom. A challenge of Copernican dimensions.
Conventional wisdom wants us to believe that social decisions are made by all of us as individuals, acting as equals. Our individual choices get aggregated up to form the social conscience of society overall.
This may be true in the design of political systems of constitutional self-government through electoral politics (although even there, only to a point). Our own personal experience teaches us that it is decidedly NOT TRUE in business and finance.
When it comes to business, and the business of money, especially, the rule is not “one person, one vote”. It is “one [insert your favorite unit of currency here], one vote.” People talk. Money matters. And different people can control vastly different amounts of money.
The people who control the most money are our Financiers, those individuals who are invested, professionally, with personal agency to act for the various institutions through which society aggregates surpluses saved by us, as individuals, and deploys those aggregations as investment in the various enterprises and exchanges that make up the economy in which we all live, and upon which we all depend for our own personal prosperity, and standing in society.
When it comes to shaping our future, and our present, Financiers matter most.
Not politicians.
Not corporations.
Financiers.
Finance is the most powerful force in society today. And the most powerful force in Finance today is the tens of trillions aggregated, collectively, worldwide into Pensions & Endowments as Institutional Fiduciary Owners of Intergenerational Fiduciary Money.
The Fiduciary Money owned by Pensions & Endowments is not all the money that there is in the world of Finance today, but it is the most money aggregated for a shared PURPOSE. AND it is a lot of money. Enough to dramatically affect the shape of our future, and our present.
As Financiers, Pensions & Endowments matter most.
Let’s imagine all of this Fiduciary Money entrusted to Pensions & Endowments as Fiduciary Financiers being aggregated into a new kind of fiduciary financing institution designed and constructed especially to meet the fiduciary responsibilities of Fiduciary Money.
Now, let’s imagine this imaginary Bank of Nature being physically housed inside a single, physical building complex that is designed and built by architects. It doesn’t actually exist yet, so we can’t go visit this Bank of Nature building, and take a tour. But we can look at the architect’s drawings, to see the different spaces they are designing to house the different functions that will be performed - the different work that will get done, and the different workers who will do that different work - inside this imaginary Bank of Nature.
The first thing we want you to see is that Bank of Nature is not a Palace of Privilege open only to qualifying experts, and closed to everyone else. Rather, Bank of Nature is a center of social interaction, of civic engagement and of public discourse, mostly about the possibilities for choosing new beginnings, and the future as we want it to be made to be, and where we want the money to be made to go.
Who is “we”? We is you. And me. And all of us. Our common sense as reasonable people, thoughtfully engaging and deliberating.
The second thing we want you to see is that the primary business of Bank of Nature is the Business of Money, and that within this business of money there are three separate specialities:
Deposit Accounts and Credit - what is popularly known as banking, with it various sub-specialities of: government/municipal finance; international currency exchange; business banking/treasury functions; consumer banking and lending; etc.;
Securitization for Speculation - what is popularly known as Wall Street, investment banking, the capital markets or sometimes just the Markets, with its various sub-specialties of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, corporate mergers, acquisitions and restructurings and so on; and
Fiduciary Finance, which is new, innovative and socially transformative, in a Copernican kind of way!
This new business of Fiduciary Finance is the core business of Bank of Nature. It is the business of directing Fiduciary Money aggregated from Pensions & Endowments into enterprise and the economy directly, through evergreen equity payback agreements on prioritizing cash flows for prudent loyalty to the fiduciary purposes of Fiduciary Money.
Evergreen equity payback financings are purpose-built to fit the fiduciary purpose of pension money to programmatically provide financial certainty in a dignified future to evergreen, ever-changing populations of qualifying retirees - sending out retirement checks every month. Forever.
You can see how this works by imagining a pension plan that is a proper income-in-retirement assurance program as an actuarial risk pool designed to average the costs of providing actual benefits to a statistically significant population of statistically similar plan participants that is constantly:
flowing money out through two “drains” of administrative costs and current payouts to current retirees; and
taking money in through two “faucets” to “top up” the pool from new contributions for future retirees and earnings realized on investment of money aggregated into the pool.
Looked at this way, it is easy to see that the fiduciary duty of pension fiduciaries when investing pension money is to realize at least the minimum level of cash flows required to meet the design assumptions of the actuaries who designed the plan. It takes a small amount of imagination to also see how this duty to realize fiduciary minimums is also endlessly ongoing - what we call evergreen. There is a limit on how much money must be earned each month - enough to support the payouts for the month - but there is no limit on how many months that minimum amount must be realized. It is every month. Essentially, forever.
It takes a bit more imagination to see how this duty to realize fiduciary minimums every month, forever, includes a duty to realize fiduciary minimums this month by making investments that are conducive to the ability to realize fiduciary minimums again next month, and every month, from month to month, thereafter. Forever.
Which is to say that pension funds have a fiduciary duty to forever. We call this a duty to finance a dignified future, because it is only by investing in a dignified future today that we can be sure of living in a prosperous present tomorrow. And it is only by investing in a dignified future tomorrow that we can be sure of living in a prosperous present the day after tomorrow. And so on, and so on. Forever.
The fiduciary purpose of endowment money is less formulaic in its determination of qualifications and entitlements, but the principle is still the same: financial certainty in a dignified future. Every month. Forever.
So we get to this realization that makes perfect common sense, that the primary business of Bank of Nature is investing in a dignified future today, to ensure a prosperous present tomorrow. Forever. For qualifying individuals, directly. And for all of society, consequently.
A third thing we want you to see is that Bank of Nature is supported by two wings of engagement with Art and Science.
The Science Wing helps Bank of Nature see the economy as a Human-Nature partnership that is interactive, and not extractive, which vision informs decision making about where the money can, should and will be made to go to finance the right economy for keeping a good society ongoing into a dignified future.
The Arts Wing helps Bank of Nature engage with the common sense of reasonable people in ongoing explorations of the evolving answers to the mission-defining questions of:
What is a dignified future?
What is a good society?
Do we have the right economy?
There is a lot of learning that we believe can be ongoing by poking around the imagined structure of this imaginary Bank of Nature, and drilling down on the many different details of the many different activities that are expected to be ongoing in this imaginary built environment.
The most important learning in this moment, however, comes from stepping back from the details, to see a new common sense that:
Money shapes Enterprise.
Enterprise shapes the Economy.
The Economy shapes Society.
Finance shapes Money, Enterprise, the Economy and Society.
Government regulates Finance, Money, Enterprise, the Economy and Society, for Peace.
This new common sense of social decision making gives us a new ambition for measuring whether or not we have the right economy: are people living well tougher, and apart, in peace?
If not, then Fiduciary Money is not realizing its fiduciary minimums. And there is work for all of us to do.