Ode to Oligarchs

Conspicuously absent from RT''s coverage of Federal Reserve Board of Governors member Sarah Bloom Raskin's speech to the Society of Government Economists and the National Economists Club was the equivalent data on the asymmetric wealth distribution of the oligarchs of Russia since 2009.  While one can cavalierly dismiss this absence as propaganda, such a response would reveal an imperviousness to the real strain in our social fabric.  In their report on the uneven American economic "recovery" from 2009-2011, the Pew Research Center reported that the mean net worth of the most wealthy 7% rose $697,651 or 28% while the lowest 93% saw their mean net worth decline $6,079 or -4%.  Eight million households with nearly 3/4 million more asset value and 111 million households with $6,000 less asset value - a disparity that is growing in 2013.  Now 2/3s of the denominated wealth of America is in the hands of 7% of the population.  Sarah and the Russians both saw fit to point out that this disparity has short term social consequences and long term fundamental economic consequences.

Before we dive into this information any further, let's put it in context.  America - that great capitalist experiment currently is precisely in the middle of the income disparity statistics for the world's 180 measured countries.  The "richest 10%" have nearly 16 times more than the "poorest 10%" according to the UN's data.  Scandinavia and Eastern Europe lead the world in parity while several African and South American nations enjoy the most egregious dispersions.  Reagan's rhetorical boast of America as, "that God-given place between two oceans… a shining house on the hill," appears to be more aptly described as the working class suburb invested equally  with fast-food joints,  bars,  Wal-Marts, strip clubs and Bible churches.  When "God" gave this place, he obviously had pre-ordained contempt for those who were the previous stewards - groups like the Lakota Nation surviving at Pine Ridge where the per capita income is the decline in net worth for the bottom 93% in the Pew data.  That's right, the Lakota earn what the bottom 93% lost in the "recovery".  In America, our heritage keepers die five times faster at birth and die twice as fast in adulthood all the while being forgotten by a world that entombed them in Franklin D. Roosevelt's Indian Reorganization Act.

Board member Raskin's speech is worth heeding as a vital commentary on the self-evidence of the fraud that is the much heralded "recovery".  The fact that Russian TV found it noteworthy is fascinating in that their treatment of her speech is actually quite reasoned and absent the "I-told-you-so" diatribes of an ideological past.  What's deeply alarming is that, apart from the Russian media, only the Federal Reserve's own site provided much coverage of her speech.  While everyone piled onto Ben Bernanke's effervescence on the innovation economy - the very economy that his banking policy has entirely neglected - no one seemed to hear the oracle that is Sarah Bloom Raskin.  The lonely Reuters report addressed her dissonance on the consensus sunny outlook but missed the moral implications of her address altogether.

Poverty.  I'm fascinated by our inoculation against speaking about inequality and injustice - about Pine Ridge and human trafficking to support Wal-Mart's Everyday Low Prices.  But what I find even more fascinating is the degree to which our society seems to be incapable of recognizing that monetary metrics miss the unraveling at our society's core.  The Pew data showed that most of the asset growth among the wealthy was not in activities that build the future - infrastructure, glorious architecture that once graced all with aesthetic beauty, or community spaces.  Rather it was in speculative trading bouyed by aggressive fiscal intervention and tax manipulations design explicitly for the effect they achieved - the largest wealth dislocation in modern times.  And while the EU finance ministers are responding to the base erosion and profit shifting imbalances that have fostered tax shelter booms, this week Tim Cook will assiduously circumvent Congressional contempt and blame tax policy for Apple's $100 billion tax evasion rather than taking moral leadership in reforming the legacy of Steve Jobs' profit obfuscation for egoic immortalization.   Who is poor?  Apple sycophants or Pine Ridge diabetics?  Tragically, both!

Poverty is a symptom of a more consequential disease.  Its absolute manifestation arises from an inflection in the human condition where individual future uncertainty and fear exceeds the impulse for network resilience.  The moment I decide that my hording for my uncertain future is more important than creating well trafficked exchanges of mutual value, I unleash the conditions for poverty to manifest.  Wealth is not measured in absolute assets.  Rather it is measured in the capacity to engage in value exchanges with reliability.  Sure, at times the hedge fund manager or venture capitalist who has amassed great monetary resources may be seen as "wealthy" but his or her true wealth is not in asset command but in transactional stewardship.  Equally, the poetic homeless magician who has the audacity to interrupt my walk on Charlottesville's Downtown Mall with an apparently random Tarot card "reading" winds up closing a circuit in my brain that unleashes a whole new venture - a venture worthy of venture capitalists!  Whenever we close ourselves off - whether through the illusion of abundance or want - we are impoverished.  Whenever we engage the resources we steward to build network resilience and value exchange - we unleash wealth.

Thank you Sarah Bloom Raskin and Pew Research Center for reminding us to care about the growing unraveling.   I trust that each of you readers share this with your networks and see if we can get a conversation growing that celebrates the value of transacting value so that We the People can regain a humanity that can illuminate a more suitable future.

Capital Complicity

G-7 leaders met this week to discuss tax evasion and currency manipulation.  Well, not really but I'm simplifying for those who didn't read the statements.  The former being an essential element in the illusory "recovery" of U.S. equities with countless U.S. corporations off-shoring their profits only to drip them back home in the form of dividends and corporate debt leverage basis.  The latter serving as the latest evidence of sanctioned collusion - currently a stimulation of last resort for the flagging Japanese Yen and Japanese corporations.  Against the backdrop of criminal conspiratorial allegations on LIBOR and CDS, I find it somewhat ironic that, as long as you meet in public to discuss inappropriate acts they cease to have their legal or moral consequence.  

Noteworthy, I think, that the finance ministers met in Aylesbury just outside of London.  During the English Civil War, Aylesbury served as a center for the Parliamentarians who sought to end the tyranny of a monarchy that was, in the best of days, oppressive and on the worst of days psychopathic.  Paradoxically, our modern metaphor for Charles I happens to be the tiny clutch of men who, armed with their divine right of economist acclaim, ignore the evidence of the futility of their outmoded models and, with patronizing contempt, steer the global economy into deeper ruin.

I am sympathetic to the struggle of the Japanese government and the businesses it seeks to support.  In the late 1990s, Japan's excessive consumption and opaque accountability triggered an economic collapse for which neither policy manipulation nor social reform has constructed an escape-hatch.  The Yen's further collapse will not aid in structural and social reform.  The G-7's willingness to go along with Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda's intervention is not because it's a good idea.  It's because those who are not already executing the same strategy want to know that they're complicity gives them a pass when they implement the same manipulation.  Kuroda's allegation that his intervention is to hit inflation targets by 2015 and not an attempt to "artificially help exporters" is a flagrant assault on integrity.

Base erosion, profit-shifting, currency manipulation and the like are all modern tools of accountability deferral.  The skullduggery in the legendary halls of William the Conqueror are no more beneficial today than they were nearly 950 years ago.  Tragically, while we go about our Hallmark-sponsored celebrations of matriarchal care, the very household stewardship we celebrate is being held in contempt.  This is hardly a surprise. 

Canada's Jim Flaherty is a career politician save his short stint as a lawyer specializing in personal injury cases.  France's Pierre Moscovici is a bureaucrat raised by a psychologist father and psychoanalyst mother who has no entrepreneurial credential.  Germany's accountancy tax lawyer turned minister Wolfgang Schäuble has a career that includes a little ethical hiccup when he resigned his post as Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union courtesy of a dubious donation from an arms dealer.  Italy's Frabrizio Saccomanni actually ran a bank (Italy's) for a considerable part of his career.  Japan's Tarō Asō worked in the Sierra Leone diamond mining business before becoming a politician.  The U.K.'s George Osborne pursued journalism and social research prior to entering politics.  United States Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew studied the law and entered the political arena from the start and had that little stint at Citigroup where he invested in… uh oh, that little housing bet.  Oh, and did I mention that he also helped oversee the tax advantaged (avoiding) subsidiaries of Citi.  Nothing like experience to highlight how much profit-shifting and base erosion harms an economy. 

When you examine the biographies of those who are architects for the global economic reformation, it's little wonder that we're in pickle that besets us.  Like the Heads of State that appoint them, the G-7 ministers have not actually executed the strategies they believe to be efficacious.  They have accepted the dogma dished out by their affiliated Central Bankers who are not surprisingly interested in their member bank profits first and economic collateral implications remotely second.  It is amusing to see that the "Free Market Capitalist" doctrine is entirely based on central planning with socialist justification!  Amusing if it weren't so destructive.

Productive economic policies do not, at their foundation, start with currency manipulation and rate compression on bonds.  They start with an understanding of the enterprise mandate - to create and transact goods and services that have sufficient perceived value that producers and consumers will agree to their exchange.  Counter-productive regimes focus on the capital flow first and then seek to impose capital advantage to centrally-planned incumbencies.  Japan's present failure is not a capital failure and cannot be solved with capital intervention.  

I remember my early business interactions in Japan with remarkable alacrity.  I was a young business executive and found that my ideas - while accepted as prudent and productive - were constantly held to a critical review by 'experts' who themselves had never conceived of my approaches and had no competence upon which they could opine.  A few courageous firms in Tokyo finally realized that convention would smother them and they opted for innovative alternatives.  They were in the minority.  As the success of my endeavors manifested, my business expanded.  However, at no time did I ever experience decision makers who could react at the speed of the global market.  Defaulting to the 'safe' consensus is accepted.  Self-evident innovation is questioned and seldom reflexive.  In a Moore's Law world, the Meiji deliberative method is a friction that stymies adaptation.  Fixing inflation doesn't address that problem. 

While Japan got the spotlight this week, it's hardly the lead invalid with misdiagnosed maladies being treated with charlatan cures.  The ward is filled with ventilated comas.  Housing sales do not indicate economic growth - they indicate investors seeking to find 'safe' places to park money in a market where risk-free sovereigns are an oxymoron.  Employment statistics still do not reflect that actual employable base and still fail to demonstrate what economists predicted QE3 would deliver.  When William the Conqueror landed in England, he reportedly picked up sand and as it slipped through his fingers said, "See I grasp England in my hand."  Nearly a thousand years later, the G-7 ministers equally mired in the sodden muck held the elusive in their hands.  Unlike William, their solidarity to be complicit with one another so that none are held to account will earn them little quarter in march of history.  Emancipated from the divine right of arrogance, We the People need to build what our architects have never seen - productive, engaging enterprises worthy of transaction and accretion of value.

Fulcrumage

It's time to throw some Greek philosophers under the metaphoric bus.  More apropos would be some exotic form of Spartan chariot but those are hard to come by these days.  My speech on Friday at TEDx DelrayBeach highlighted the paradoxical conflict of the cognitive duality that we inherited from guys in togas.  Not surprisingly for TEDx, there were references to the social evolution that we're supposed to celebrate as we transcend the analog age for an ascent into the digital.  Digital?  Have we drunk so much hemlock as a society that we actually think that binary code is the best descriptor of the universe, of knowledge, of communication, of truth?  Are we really so blind that we think that the cosmos can be plumbed using a series of on-off impulses on a chip?  Is there any part of reality that we've ever experienced that actually shows up as binary?

In part, I blame Archimedes' flippant "Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth," for our duality fixation.  He was probably inspired by the Egyptians or the Hittites who celebrated the idea of balance as a binary ideal and merely framed a inspirational poster cliché long before inspiration or posters packed self-help seeking conferences.  The 19th century woodcut that shows the 17th century clad Archimedes with a knee on a plank moving a globe is probably a good idea as you'd see a little too much Grecian virility if he was pictured in a toga in the same pose.

Duality - good vs. bad, rich vs. poor, educated vs. ignorant, sacred vs. profane - is the progenitor of our consensus observational framework.  From this myopic space we gather and celebrate "heroes" who "move the world" and hear motivational speakers "cracking the code" on "empowerment".  The bigger the "problem", the more magnificent the "solution".  From the existential bribe transacted by religion - be good and bathe in riches, fluffy bunnies, and effervescent light; be bad and roast on a pointy spit over a smoldering fire - to the post-modern Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, the pervasive nature of duality serves as the opiate to the masses. 

We like duality because we've been taught to love levers.  Not surprisingly, we've been taught to love levers by those who wield them.  Pass your exams and get a job.  Evidence competency and get promoted.  Good wins.  Bad loses.  O.K., or it least is should work that way, right?  We obsess about duality because we want to know cause and effect.  Our economist alchemists want to stimulate for growth.  Our governments want to decimate liberty so we can be safe.  Not surprisingly, from early education, our mathematical curriculum conditions us to favor duality bluntly indoctrinating the not-so-subtle ideal of equation before we know that we're being drugged.  It starts so simply with arithmetic and before long we're wallowing in regression predicting our own observations with the "scientific method".  Before we know it, we've subordinated experience and perception to the altar of digital models.

The manifestation of our social contagion may be most evidenced in our most celebrated social causes.  Millions "Occupied" Wall Street and called for a return to the nostalgia of 1932-33 Glass-Steagall Act paying no attention to the fact that it was default products traded in Chicago that were eviscerating the economy and transferring trillions of dollars from the public to a select few highwaymen.  Oh, and by the way Occupites, well done.  Your call to reinvigorate the powers of the Federal Reserve - yes that's precisely what your calls to bring back Glass-Steagall actually meant if you read the law you celebrated - were heeded and, since your protests, the Fed has expanded nearly 3 times!  Well done there!  Millions pushing on a lever to move an obstacle only to find that all their energy actually increased the opacity and momentum of a system they didn't know they were empowering.  Millions of people calling for armed response to genocide in central Africa while letting mining and munitions companies fill their 401(k) portfolios. 

Let's pull off the toga on this duality / digital idol.  Archimedes, like many other teachers and philosophers may have been misquoted.  The story of places to stand and levers moving the world may not be verbatim.  Because Archimedes spent a lot of his time describing geometric complexity too.  And in his defense, I might suggest that the real story he was trying to communicate - the one conveniently erased by those who wanted to pedal the perversion of digital levers - was actually about fulcrum. 

You see, the closer you move the fulcrum to the perceived moveable mass, the less the application of force at the end of the lever.  Yes, that means that to achieve the lever's greatest effect, the fulcrum placement has to get close to the thing it seeks to move.  In short, you can't merely get a wise (or idiotic) crowd massed at end of a lever and accomplish anything other than empowering the lever unless you've first discerned the nature of the mass from up close.  Oh, and moved the fulcrum near it without it knowing!  In a world in which we celebrate loud social calls for action, justice, equality, and the like - all laudable in their own right - if there's not a priori evidence of a discerned fulcrum placement, there's no chance that the desired outcome will succeed.

But better still is the realization that the fulcrum of greatest consequence doesn’t move a digital dynamic at all.  The ideal fulcrum is not external to the desired inertial mass requiring change but actually slightly off the center of gravity within the very behemoth.  You see, the most consequential transformation of intractable incumbent inertia comes  when you introduce a wobble within the spinning mass.  First imperceptibly and then with growing effect, a wobble harnesses the very system in need of transformation and uses its own mass and inertia to actually undo its thoughtless motion.  In near effortless consequence, the mass, now subtly imbalanced tips itself.

Rather than protesting the bad and celebrating the good, let's consider discerning objects in motion.  Then let's consider how we might embed ourselves and our ideas within the systems we seek to modify, change, transform, enhance, or destroy and from within use the existing inertia and mass to achieve the desired consequence.  That means that you have to understand the system, assimilate that which allows you access to the interior, and perceive the momentum throughout.  Having thus discerned the system, you then become the anonymous wobble agent - the ultimate fulcrumage - and the system tips itself.  No fingerprints.  No hero.  Just change!

Don't Look a $400 Billion Gift Horse in the Mouth

…unless you live in Troy

Well into its adolescence or awkward 20-somethings, the Knowledge Economy just got its birth certificate of sorts.  To a rather fumbling thud, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) decided to include research and development into the calculation of GDP in their March 2013 Comprehensive Revision of the National Income and Product Accounts reported this past week.  This nearly 3% upward revision comes at a time when the economic headwinds of sequestration - notably the shrinkage of the defense sector - is placing considerable and growing drag on the economy.  If timing is everything, than the BEA's announcement is nothing.

Now to be clear, the headline value of this week's announcement is two decades late but still important.  The fact that we've failed to account for the engine of economic expansion - the genuine innovation of products and services that have marked the past expansion cycles - is moronic.  The fact that economists officially have waited until 2013 to decide that their 1805 GAAP Accounting logic derived from France has failed to describe our economic condition is an indictment on academic and professional economists and their comprehensive anticipatory ineptitude.  While they can precisely describe partial past conditions that conform to their limited assumptions with better than random accuracy, they have failed entirely in their ability to anticipate or respond to forward-looking considerations and risks.

There's no small bit of trouble with the BEA's late arrival into modernity.  Research and development is expensed under GAAP accounting into oblivion.  In taxation, the nuance of the In-Process Research and Experimentation Tax Credit (the IRS' most abused tax shelter that it is "incapable" of policing) is the subject of billions of dollars of tax fraud each year.  Politically desirable as the pork that every good Congressional representative can bring home to the district, this $76 billion dollar loop-hole doesn't support economic expansion.  Rather it shrinks legitimate tax collection and defrauds the taxpayer for the benefit of abusing corporations and their interest holders.  In banking, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is "not aware" of the use of intangibles (the by-product of research and development) as collateral despite the Federal Reserve's own 2007 report in which they estimated that there are over $3 trillion in borrower assets that are not counted in bank collateral assessments.  In short, we can have our little welcome to the Brave New World economics party but, beware.

I hate to break some news to you but I'm the Cassandra to the BEA's Trojan Horse.  And if you don't know this metaphor, go back and read the account of the fall of Troy.  Cursed by Apollo with the "gift" of prophecy, this daughter of King Priam knew that the horse left by the Greeks was the harbinger of the downfall of Troy but her warnings were unheeded.  In the U.S., we'd scarcely recognize research and development if it were a snake biting our face.  Since the 1970's we've used R&D as a mechanism to flow federal and state support to universities due to our social apathy towards funding education; we've inefficiently underwritten R&D to accommodate state-sponsored enterprise through our statutory agencies; and, we've built a highly inefficient corporate tax regime that allows venture capital to pour cash into enterprises and harvest tax losses in over 80% of the failed endeavors.  Real R&D - the stuff that actually makes the world a better place; that brings new products and services to the world - is endangered on the best of days and bordering on extinction.  Basic research - the kind that made solid rocket fuel, that suspended magnetic signals in tape, that figured out dyes on fabric, that understood the chemistry of the elements that describe our world - is barely present.  While we nuance the edges of consumer electronics to jam more video processing into smaller devices so that we can have a virtual world, the real world is more illusive today than it was 100 years ago.  

                                                                                                     

The social schemes of Natural Philosophy enabled a world of inquiry and debate.  Great societies learned how to disagree with reasoned arguments using more than 140 characters to communicate a thought.  Hash tags and contractions did not navigate the oceans or plumb the depths of space.  In our make-believe world, we pretend that Boston's carnage was a new phenomenon.  How quickly we forget Northern Ireland, Spain, and Germany!  Within my lifetime, terror hasn't emerged on the scene.  In point of fact, it is the innovation of the marketing of terror which has been refined to an art form!  London wasn't safer because of police action.  London became safer because the citizens of London were unwilling to be cowed by terror and reopened pubs and restaurants in the face of carnage.  New York didn't become safer because of end of violence - it became safer by a public that would not relent to the dereliction of the city in the 70s and 80s.  See, even when it comes to social innovation, we're innovating less today than just 30 years ago.  And when it comes to that $400 billion - it gets really messy.

Our R&D and "innovation" in the majority are proxies for legal costs and capital markets inefficiencies.  When Apple and Google buy "innovation" from Nortel or Motorola, they're not making new products.  They're making sure that extortionists cannot hold them hostage in patent lawsuits.  When a government contractor selling satellites misrepresents their ownership of technology and falsifies an indemnity for this lie, it is the government and the taxpayer that loses.  Our GDP, buoyed by innovation risk management does not grow our economy - it memorializes our demise.

 

Equo ne credite, Teucri. Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. 

Virgil's Aeneid, Book II.

We the People should count innovation and celebrate the inquiry into the unknown, undeciphered, and forgotten.  We should not mislabel our litigious and capital inefficiencies as innovation.

Pulling the Plug

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2013 Spring Meeting wrapped up this weekend with some staggering insights into just how devoid of creativity the world's economic and defacto thought leadership has remained.  

Financial Committee Chair, Singapore's Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, summarized the 'growth and jobs' agenda with the following statement:  "There was also a strong and common recognition that achieving growth and jobs cannot rest on one policy alone. There is no single bullet that will get us to normal growth and some normality with regard to jobs."  IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde clarified the Chair's statement with the hard-hitting: "Every policymaker is keen to develop jobs and to respond to the demands of the young population in particular;" adding that, "Anything that works to create jobs is on the table."

In the coming months, the IMF's focus will look to "Advanced Economies" to provide "accommodative monetary policy" to strengthen the financial sector - particularly bank balance sheets.  "Emerging Markets and Developing Countries" will need to be "recalibrated and build buffers and guard against financial vulnerability."  "Low Income Countries" will need to manage their "robust growth".  Hold on one second!  The world's elite financial minds just wanted to make sure that the "Low Income Countries" manage "robust growth." 

Let's take a moment and reflect on a few of the assumptions underpinning the august IMF.  From 1944 until the U.S. gold default that collapsed the fixed exchange rate manipulation authorized in the Bretton Woods Agreements (carefully branded to avoid any designation of the dollar as unstable or the U.S. as a credit risk), the 1970's saw IMF intervention on two primary fronts.  On the first, the maintenance of the illusion of the dollar's critical role in denominating international trade - a concession of a defeated Continental Europe and Imperial Japan.  Second, the preservation of the one exchange that the dollar ruled:  the trade of oil.  Some of us can recall that neither of these worked too well:  massive international 'developing debt' collapses attended by despotic puppet government abuses rife with human rights carnage set up and sponsored by the "Advanced" lot.  Who can forget the heady days of oil crises checkering the 1970s? 

So here's a question.  Precisely what period of time do any of the Finance Ministers in 188 member countries point to as the standard for "recovery", "resilience" or economic "health"?  If the IMF was the General Manager of a Football Club, they'd be hauled off the pitch and fired.  If the owners (aka the "Advanced Countries") of the IMF were owners of a Football Club, the franchise would be sold.  Ironically, the folks who love football and would love to buy the franchise are the very economies that are those pesky "robust growth" ones! 

As the Chairman of a company that is in a growth transition, I've been fortunate to meet with countless professionals across the capital markets.  With few exceptions, I am perplexed to see the cognitive sclerosis evidenced by individuals who were credentialed during this past economic cycle.  The irrational self-entitlement afforded to modest performance - the error of thinking that presiding over market inertia is equivalent to savvy leadership and strategic management - is epidemic.  I've seen well meaning people who think that their individual contribution to a venture involving hundreds is worth 10-50% of the resulting productive enterprise!  Seriously?  The malignant irrationality attending something as modest as the business I steward is merely the microcosm of the carelessness evidenced in the IMF's Spring fling.

Being in the room when a deal was negotiated does not make you competent to find, design and execute the deal on your own.  Being in graduate school in business or economics during the Clinton Administration does not mean that you understand anything about an economy or how it works.  God forbid, being an economist within the marketing arm of a country desperately trying to preserve an illusion of hegemony may get you VIP access to a few clubs on the Continent but it in no way qualifies you to understand youth, productive engagement, or system level size optimization.  If it did, you wouldn't hear the MIT, Chicago, and Harvard monotony of "jobs" and "growth" as the mantra for the world.

Many of the countries that are experiencing economic engagement and expansion at present have made considerable strides in expanding education; limiting near-slave labor conditions which supported G-20 profitability conveniently out of the eye-sight of an ignorant consuming public; and, coming up with post-colonial models for domestic natural resource stewardship.  Ironically these things don't stabilize bank balance sheets in the near term but they sure reduce long term political risk which… well… would stabilize balance sheets! 

On October 18, 2008, I posted by first Inverted Alchemy entry:  "Bailout Solutions Use the Wrong Economic Model".  On January 30, 2009 "The Defibrillator is on the WRONG patient" was another observation that the economists charged with 'fixing' the symptoms that surfaced in 2008 were evidencing their incompetence by applying the wrong intervention on the wrong anatomy.  This week's IMF mania not only reinforces these half decade old observations but suggests a more critical intervention.

The "Advanced Economies" (formerly known as militant interventionalists, colonialists, imperialists, and otherwise entitled) have been brain dead for a long time.  Nothing wrong with the rest of the organism called the global community - just a brain that barely responds to reflexes and surely evidences no higher function or creativity.  Like the entitled executives who ran the businesses that were the machine sustaining the illusion of the past 25 years who think they are equity holders of a future that they did nothing to steward into being, the IMF can be an organ donor.  Take the pieces that work and use them with gratitude to build an institution that addresses: wealth distribution; productive engagement; and the harnessing of the ingenuity of youth to rehabilitate that which has atrophied and synthesize what needs to be new.  Take out the tube!  Unplug the ventilator!  Let nature take its course.  Let's run into tomorrow without entitlement but with commitment to be a productive svelte athlete.

By Any Other Name

'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What's Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Act II, Scene II - Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

We are crossing that fateful anniversary of Edward Smith's command in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.  One hundred and one years ago at this moment, all of the necessary objects in motion were in motion to conspire to bring about maritime's most celebrated disaster.  Smith, known both as a "safe" and "the Millionaires'" captain was, by the turn of the last century one of the most renown captains sailing the upper class from Liverpool to destinations far flung across the Atlantic.  Having credentialed himself as the 'safe' choice for the aristocratic class of intrepid seafarers who wanted crystal and chandeliers rather than timber and grog, he sailed right past his little 1911 collision with the HMS Hawke in which he sheered the bow off of a warship.  While he damaged the RMS Olympic in the collision and nearly sunk the White Star Line financially, his reputation for safety among the monied elite put him on the collision course with history 101 year nights ago. 

'Safe'?

Gold is the 'safe' investment in economic turbulence.  Treasuries are the 'safe' haven in the current cycle.  Why is it that after millenia of experience, the havens where the wealthy coalesce for 'safety' happen to be the same places where contagion and destruction are most cataclysmic?  With quantitative easing manipulating the price and supply of 'safe' assets and creating an El Niño superstorm-in-waiting, Bloomberg went as far as to suggest that we're seeing a "safety bubble" forming.  Once again blurring the ontology of "safety" and "risk", the market continues to see massive asset relocation into assets that are shrouded in near perfect market ignorance, laden with sovereign manipulation experience, and promoted as 'safe' and 'low risk'.  

What would happen if we called 'safety' what it actually is?  The 'safety' that the market seeks is a preservation of money so that an isolated individual can horde resources in the present to manage expectations about a future in which money will have equivalent utility.  Is it the individuated, miserly, hording impulse that seeks insure that self-interest will be financed at some point in time when distress happens?  'Safe' investments celebrate past performance rather than investing capital in productive engagement.  They represent capital holders disengaging from a expansive future; from geographies of heterogeneity; from financial products that invite broader participation and activism.  When will we realize that safety may actually attend those who build networks of shared trust and success in which mutual aligned interests are celebrated in success and resilient in times of want?  

What would happen if we actually took a step back and measured risk?  I have spent the past decade working with private wealth managers, families, and institutional investors.  To date, I've yet to meet a single one who can actually explain what they mean by risk with a definition that does not include: a) consensus beliefs unsubstantiated by data; and, b) complete lack of understanding regarding the conditions in which they could preemptively discern that the 'risk' would change.  In other words, 'risk' in the market is a barrier to inquiry - ignorance arbitrage as I've called it - rather than a quantifiable unit of expected loss.

If we called safe, low risk investments by their other name - reclusive miserly ignorance arbitrage - we'd celebrate it a lot less.  We'd also spend more time informing ourselves about the investments we make and the degree to which they build networks of resilience around our present engagement and future sustainability.  

Greedy for the Sun

April 1 was no joking matter for me this year.  At 12:01 AM I had the opportunity to put a real price tag on my value for stewardship - it's greater than $50 million dollars.  In the monotony of unconsidered capitalism, I was asked to put in jeopardy the interests of investors in one of my enterprises for great personal advantage and benefit.  It would have been 'good' for my interests as I would have been in more direct line to greater monetary benefit, more influence, and less headaches from the nuisance of governance that attends a world including many inconsiderate, passive shareholders.  While some of you were reading my fresh blog post in the Pacific, I was pressing 'send' on an e-mail that said "No" to an offer of a lifetime.

"And so in war; if the campaign is in the summer the general must show himself greedy for his share of the sun and the heat, and in winter for the cold and the frost, and in all labours for toil and fatigue… the princely leader and the private soldier may be alike in body, but their sufferings are not the same: the pains of the leader are always lightened by the glory that is his and by the very consciousness that all his acts are done in the public eye."

When I said "No" to a massive capital partnership, I was not diminishing the value of provisions for our enterprise.  In fact, I neither rejected the money nor the party offering to fund; rather, I was rejecting the form in which it was offered.  To achieve what we seek to manifest, the utility of capital is a critical component of our endeavor.  Without it, the market perceives risk where little actually exists.  But the idea of dishonoring those who have provisioned our enterprise to this point for the excessive benefit of the latest to arrive on the scene is beyond the pale.  And, quite frankly, illogical.

Imagine a world in which you are to be trusted with the resources of others.  You will be held to public and private scrutiny - success or failure.  You will be asked to apply yourself each day to the productive deployment of resources for greater returns.  The only catch is to start out, you must disavow pledges - actual and implied - that you've made to those who, with similar expectations, merely had the curse of preceding the present beneficiaries.  Gregory Bateson sought to disentangle this paradox in his effort to explain the roots of schizophrenic pathologies in what he referred to as the "double-bind".  

"I want you to be loyal," pleads the new investor, "so I want you to abandon the returns expected by all those who came before."

"But if I'm prepared to be disloyal to those who came before, how can you expect my loyalty to persist for you?"

"What I will do is place golden handcuffs on you so that you are penalized for any act of future disloyalty," the new investor stipulates.

"Than you don't seek my loyalty - you seek my indenture for which one day I will loathe my condition and you."

What on earth could be salutary in this social dynamic?  I was advised that the answer is the non-answer: "That's just how the system works."

Well, on April 1, 2013, that system stopped working, at least for one instance.  I said, "No." 

"Now some of his scholars showed such excellent aptitudes for deception and overreaching, and perhaps no lack of taste for common money-making, that they did not even spare their friends, but used their arts on them.  And so an unwritten law was framed by which we still abide, bidding us teach our children as we teach our servants, simply and solely not to lie, and not to cheat, and not to covet, and if they did otherwise to punish them, hoping to make them humane and law-abiding citizens. But when they came to manhood…, the risk was over, and it would be time to teach them what is lawful against our enemies."

Cultivate values of accountability and stewardship, loyalty and integrity through life but to succeed, be prepared to apply them selectively!  Is it any wonder that we see our system in the throes of collapse with integrity failings at both great and small?  Is it any wonder that remarkable abuses of law and public trust go unprosecuted when those who take oaths to uphold and defend are blissfully suckling at the tit of the treacherous?  

"Many have won the very wealth they prayed for and through it have found destruction."

There are many who seek some karmic or eschatological resolution for this consensus delusion of selective accountable stewardship.  For them, I am afraid that you'll find ample evidence of perpetrators of ill intent who were enriched by their treachery and who die fully sated in the life that they led.  Equally, paupers' graves are filled with principled folk who took the road of morality and died ignominiously.  The ends-and-means justification question is a naïve catechism.  It neither informs critical moral development nor does it resolve the shrouded reality.  I cannot tell you that the decision I made on April Fools Day was astute or absurd. 

Here's what I can tell you.  For the past six days, my life has been surrounded with dozens of remarkable people - some in disbelief - who have seen a decision taken on principle and have rallied to the notion that there is path that does not require acquiescence.  Exposed at the vanguard, I have been surrounded by allies and together we press on.  Bring on the sun, the heat, the cold, the frost because our toil has been lightened!

(All quotes in italics are from Xenophon's Cyropaedia)