Honest Brokers Need Not Apply

In a world wracked with crises of confidence in the capital markets, I am puzzled by the dereliction of accountability in the realm of advocates, “independent” rating agencies, and advisors.  In his critical inquiry written in 2009, Université de Montréal’s Professor Stéphane Rousseau details the extensive contribution Credit Rating Agencies had in the conditions leading to the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008.  While rating agencies wilfully ignored evidence of credit quality erosion in favor of propping up phony investment grade ratings on financial products, they have borne no meaningful liability for the catastrophic effects of their neglect.  And while Rousseau and others comment on the massive financial harm done by this market failure, he provides little evidence to suggest that meaningful steps will be taken to address the massive conflicts of interest or user complicity in the environment that creates a dearth of comprehensive transparency.

Now it doesn’t take a degree in economics to figure out that issuer-pays models of credit rating have an inherent conflict.  If investors were truly free to opt in or out of purchasing “investment grade” products, for example, then competition for asset quality may be a countervailing force to hold rating efforts in check.  However, in a world where pensions, insurance companies, banks, and other asset managers are required to hold assets with certain ratings, the notion that there is a market force to hold originators or raters accountable is laughable.  Furthermore, with central banks and sovereigns complicit in issuing bonds that need to preserve the illusion of being “safe”, the ability for true qualitative rating to flourish is a phantasmal illusion.

But here’s the trouble with trying to solve the honest broker problem:  the public is passively or wilfully ignorant of basic financial literacy and thereby neither knows the questions to ask nor the ability to discern the veracity of the answers provided by ‘experts’. 

Let me offer a few examples. 

A country just announced that it is investing public funds into the development of a mining operation within its borders.  It is investing about $120 million into a project – not the publicly traded company allegedly running the project.  For its $120 million, it stands to receive (according to the optimistic interpretation of the agreement) 30% of the economics of the project (an unincorporated joint venture) – not equity in the publicly traded holding company.  During the same time the country was being encouraged to use public funds to invest in the JV, the company raised about ¼ of the amount in an issuance of commons shares for which one of its largest shareholders received a fee of C$2 million.  That’s right, a shareholder got paid to invest in common equity while the country from whom resources will be taken was told to pay for the privilege of getting a minority stake in the venture.  Now, the kicker is the following.  It would be reasonable to expect that a 30% stake of a venture sold for $120 million would mean that the venture must be worth about $400 million, right?  Wrong.  Contemporaneous with the country’s investment, the public markets priced the entire corporation at $224 million.  Oh, and another point.  When the public company bought the license to the project it claims to be worth around $400 million, it paid about $13 million in 2006.  Since then, it’s lost nearly $90 million with no reasonable revenue on the horizon.  Is the company’s auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers to blame for this perplexing market-defying transaction?  Probably not.  Is the country’s finance minister or asset manager to blame for getting terms far worse than the company’s own shareholders?  Probably not.  Is the company preying on market ignorance within the country?  Absolutely.  Would the country or the company’s auditor make different decisions if they were informed of all the facts?  Most certainly.

A high net worth investor has close to $1 billion.  For years, his assets have been the siren for “asset managers” and “private wealth managers”.  Using hundreds of pages of charts, graphs and disclaimers, investment professionals have desperately tried to convince him – for a fee – to allocate funds to partnerships that promise returns or market risk mitigation.  And, once allocated, performance has not matched the modeled returns.  Their explanations are reminiscent of cartoons depicting court advisors and astrologers who express their interpretations of omens and entrails with sufficient generalities to explain either accuracy or fallacy with equal confidence.  All the while, quantifiable risk and return, a measurable (and measured) phenomenon, is ignored in the clamor of professional opinions and explanations.  The illusion of brand credential costs this investor at least $10 million each quarter (for which he pays a few hundred thousand dollars) but is never explicitly recognized.  Is the investor’s staff culpable for this lost performance?  Probably not.  Should the principal be an expert in all global investment products?  Probably not.  Are the paid advisors preying on the product and performance ignorance of the investor?  Absolutely.  Would the investor and his staff make different decisions if they were fully informed of all the facts?  Most certainly.

In both of the examples above, the common denominator of predatory abuse is one party’s willingness to exploit a lack of knowledge while all those being abused are kept in the mists of uncertainty and ignorance.  In both of the examples above, the damaged parties have been informed of the wilful harm perpetrated on them and, in both examples, they have been incapable of responding due to the perception that, in the absence of their own competence or qualifications, it’s safer to go with a branded name than becoming fully informed and acting in enlightened self-interest. 

Which leads me to a rather important question.  Why is it that ‘victims’ of financial abuse are willing to expose themselves to predators even when fully informed of the harm they’ll face?  Whether its pension managers, resource-laden countries, or high net worth investors, the ‘honest broker’ is rejected in favor the consensus predator promoter.  Post-2008 no rating agency suffered Arthur Andersen’s post-Enron criminal fate.  Why?  Because their patrons still are benefiting from their dubious negligence.  Following decades of “resources curse” awareness heads of state and finance ministries still fall for the same illiquid ‘partnership’ deals that let public investors enrich themselves while countries are rife with poverty and corruption.  Why?  Because intimidation of power by corporate and capital elite is more powerful than the will of leaders to defend their citizens.  Despite persistent non-performance and sub-par performance, high net worth individuals continue to cede their stewardship to proven incompetence.  Why?  Because wealth, beyond manageable measure, debilitates those who confidently made it.  And in any of these eco-systems, where is the truth welcome?  Regrettably, nowhere. 

But in each of these cases, it is my contention that the problem actually arises from a deeper paradox.  Those who don’t welcome the truth may merely be evidencing a deep insecurity into the nature of why they’re sitting on such excessive opportunity.  The pension manager may be overwhelmed with the sense of responsibility to those whose funds are entrusted to him or her.  The head of state may be ill-equipped to steward the resources within a nation’s border.  The financially wealthy may doubt their entitlement to the excess that a market transaction placed in their hands.  In each of these instances, the rejection of transparency, truth and honesty may be a protection against the ultimate truth that cannot be confronted – that the steward suffers from a sense of inadequacy or confidence.  Therefore, one of the great opportunities facing those who value transparency and ethical, accountable markets, may be to care for and engage the steward, not the perceived asset, and in so doing, emancipate them from the burden of inordinate, unwelcome responsibility.  Maybe we need a bit less empirical honesty and a bit more compassionate collaboration with those to whom much has been entrusted.

Living Worth Dying For

 It is hard to exaggerate the magnitude of social unrest that's boiling over across the globe.  Accounts out of Syria detail unspeakable atrocities with hypnotizing frequency.  While politicians engage in name-calling, Ukraine's citizens see themselves and their societal fabric fraying reminiscent of the Balkans just a few years ago.  The hollow shell of peace in the Middle East was eviscerated with the cooperation between parties deemed to be "sponsors of terror" while drones rained down death at the hands of the "democratic" and "freedom-loving".  In this, another Spring of Discontent, it is fascinating to observe the ease with which we trade life for ideology - our acceptance of extermination made more palatable by our technologically advanced, sterile remoteness.  It seems that life in the digital age has somehow devalued.

Dogmatically held beliefs of all sorts have variously seduced humans into inhumanity for millennia.  We sit in what many would describe as a pinnacle of technological evolution despite the evidence that we're actually, on a larger scale, regressing into ethnocentric bigotry.  We celebrate our achievements of digital communications and virtual reality failing to observe that, from a certain perspective, we're regressing into animistic paganism where we pay obeisance to that which can be plugged in and has a keypad or touch screen forgoing actual human engagement and interaction.  If information cannot be found within the first two pages of a Google search, it doesn't exist.  "I tried to find him online but couldn't," I recently heard a person state.  As though the physical presence of a person - absent a virtual persona - is somehow less a person. 

In the May 2014 Vanity Fair, Editor Graydon Carter (one of my favorite writers) took on the story of Edward Snowden with a team of journalists.  In their story, "The Snowden Saga: A Shadowland of Secrets and Light", they detail the interplay between the former Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton employee, The Guardian (and other media outlets), and the governments who insist that their opaque intrusions are justified.  On more than one occasion, according to the reporting, Snowden and those around him, were faced with decisions that were cast as potentially jeopardizing their lives.  The cavalier nature of threatened assassination as a means of message control, whether real or perceived in this case, would suggest that the central organizing narrative is incapable of standing on its own.  If shown for all its costs and benefits, apparently "the system" is incapable of weathering accountability and scrutiny.  Somehow the "30 or 40" files that represent a catastrophic risk to "national security" are so vital that they threaten the very foundations of what is purported to be one of humanity's most celebrated experiments.  Spoiler alert: what they most likely threaten is the anonymity of corporations and individuals (who are most likely named in said files) who have become enriched at the expense of a public who would find their complicity unpalatable (for more information on this, read Hank Crumpton's memoirs The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA's Clandestine Service).

This week, I was fortunate to engage in dialogue with people as varied as an NBA superstar and a senior executive at the World Bank.  I marveled at how many of these amazing, accomplished people, at one point either at the zenith of their life or at least seeing it within reach, now sat on the bench watching a suboptimal life play out.  Far from run-of-the-mill monotony, these people influenced millions and yet, in the moment struggled to see how to make a difference at the same intensity that they brought to their 'game'.  In each conversation the dissonance between a world that was perceived to be possible and 'reality' was the source of resignation and looming futility.  And in a world of clandestine carnage - where life is thoughtlessly extinguished for opaque interests - I understand the expedient emotional fatigue that could lurk in the minds of those who are lucky enough to discern the madness.

But at the same time, I wonder if the reason why we're so dismissive of life is that few of us are actually living?  Seriously.  When we wake up in the morning, are we animated into relentless pursuit of purpose or do we begrudgingly stare into another monotonous day seeking to fulfill Maslow's pedantic isosceles aspiration?  If "making a living" or "surviving" enter into one's consciousness, is it possible that we wouldn't recognize the former if it bit us in the face and we're actually slowly killing our vitality in the latter?  Is the luxury of narcissistic drama a mark of 'civilization' or is it the evidence of devolution?

Life is an analog proposition.  It involves complexity that defies digital representation.  Our keystrokes and finger-swipes across conductive silicon are less artistic than the stylus pressed into soft clay that bore the cuneiform advocating tolerance and reverence for the explained and unexplained.  Our social organization - from regent patronage to limited liability corporations - has resulted in the hybridization of our species into far too many laborers and far too few enlivened, vital manifesters.  We're missing the mutations - the wild types - that actually move from prehensile tails alone to the fascinating utility of thumbs.  And when the wild types emerge, our consensus indoctrination tells us to warn them of their imminent extermination if they don't fall into line.  "Is it worth dying for?", is the ominous warning. 

My life is evidence of the fallacy of this question.  I've been warned that challenging corporate tax and accounting fraud, treasonous acts by elected officials, unsustainable monetary systems, colonial tyranny and suppression, all run the risk of jeopardizing "life".  However, I know that far from threatening my existence, they have enriched not only my life but the lives of countless others who see the value of their own 'mutations' from the mechanized consensus.  You see, truly living cannot cost you your life and pretending that it takes some sort of 'super-human' dispensation to 'transcend' fear and oppression is part of the tyranny of suppression.  I love being a person who is learning how to fully live.  And, when age, aggressor, or accident punctuates my life, I'll know that "worth living" was the only motivation I needed. 

To Life

According to the Venerable Bede, this day was the Proto-Indo-European celebration of the Goddess of the Dawn and the Daughter of Heaven who was worshipped for bringing light and life into the spring of the Northern Hemisphere.  For the apparently ubiquity of celebrations of this goddess – Eostre – the Christian church decided to name one of their most important holidays after her.  About 3,300 years ago on this day, the Hebrews were spending the 18^th day of the month of Nisan free from captivity in Egypt.  While the precise date for the Passover or Pesach is not entirely known, the persistence of the lunar cycle helps confirm the approximate date for the persistent veneration of life and liberty.  For the past 1,824 years the precise significance of this day has been the subject of controversy.  Thankfully, 1,700 years ago the Council of Arles decided that the Bishop of Rome should just make up his mind and lock in a date for the celebration of the resurrection.  Regardless of the lineage to which you affiliate, allow me to offer the following diversion from the typical Inverted Alchemy post:

Radiant dawn born from stellar fire
Opulent flora linking soil to sun
Another year we’ll toil and trade the fruit of this mystery
I am a steward giving thanks!

Here’s to Life.

Easily Unsustainable

In his April 9, 2014 comments to the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee, The Hon Joe Hockey, MP, Treasurer of the Commonwealth of Australia stated that “accommodative monetary policy is an easy, but over the long term, unsustainable tool to promote growth.”  He focused a considerable volume of his speech to the aging population in Australia pointing out that the number of “working age” people available to support Australia’s senior citizens will halve between 2010 and 2050.  Like most of the Bretton Woods co-conspirators, the ‘developed’ economy plight of shrinking productive populations is looming while the ‘emerging’ markets are seeing a growth in producers and consumers. 

The Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and the IMF still ponderously lumber towards a dubious future in large part due to the flagging resolve of their creators to sustain them.  What started off as the U.S. hegemonic fiat monetary grab in the dark days of World War II – into which other nations were seduced with the promise of an America that had ‘values’ and a sense of ‘global prosperity’ – now founders as the U.S.-advocated 2010 recommendations are political non-starters in a Congress that cannot think beyond its own policy-by-Twitter cycle.  Out of one side of its mouth, the elite of the G-20 call for global 2% GDP growth while out of the other side, monetary policy alchemy is practiced in the Central Banks in Europe and the U.S. 

Few people seem to connect the G-20 anti-U.S. Congress rhetoric with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report presented in Berlin today.  When Australia’s elderly populations is living way too long in 2050, they’re going to need to be doing so on less than 70% of the combustible fuels than are in use today if we’re to avoid forecasted climate catastrophe.  To put some pieces together for you: we’re supposed to reduce our present carbon footprint (largely consumed by transportation and industry) by over 70% while more than doubling the world’s GDP (from $84 trillion to $171 trillion) in the next 36 years.  Sound plausible?  Absolutely not.  Why?  Because we’re still using Bretton Woods (il)logic, monetary, business, governmental, and social models).  In short, our sustainability dictates a transformed view of the world but our tools and behaviors are still based on the same levers that were being pulled in 1944.

What’s killing our economic future is simple:

1.       Time illusions:  Our obsession with time shows up in some pretty insidious ways.  Time drives our view of productivity.  We assume a world in which a human being has effectively 35 years of “useful” life during which they can possibly add to the ecosystem some economic value.  Now, we’ve got over half our life expectancy during which we’re expecting others to be our provisioning.  Sustainable?  Absolutely not.  We think that the ‘work week’ is sacrosanct.  Thirty-five to forty hours is the ‘reasonable’ amount of time to work in any week.  Really?  So now we’re taking our 700,000 hours of life and assuming that we’ve got to have about 120,000 of those which are productive while the remaining 580,000 are consumptive.  Sustainable?  Not a chance!  And by the way, we’re operating in the ignorance of the fact that the ‘unproductive’ pension years are actually the more expensive ones – getting more expensive as a function of proportional GDP than the younger ones. 

2.       Social Order illusions:  We still seem to think that the State (or the Employer Corporation) is our benefactor.  It isn’t and it never has been.  We draw lines around people and then assume that their interests will naturally fall into alignment.  They don’t.  Whether it’s the Balkans in the 1990s or Crimea today, the geographic domestication of humanity is not, nor has it ever, worked.  This week, Cliven Bundy was the latest in a string of protagonists to dispute the claims that the Federal Government in the U.S. could restrict his cattle grazing on over 600,000 acres of scrub near Gold Butte, NV.  While Nevada and Federal law enforcement officers sought to protect the illusion of lines drawn on maps (and while environmentalists sought to protect the foraging desert tortoise), Cliven invoked the argument that his ancestors had use of the land long before the Bureau of Land Management was ever formed.  From Ukraine teargas to Nevada tasers, governments’ belief in the lines they or their progenitors drew is worth violence and death to reinforce the illusion of beneficent control.

3.       Value illusions:  When the G-20 meet, they’ll be stuck in the echo chamber of money.  Money imbalances create problems yet they are heralded as the solution for problems.  To save our planet from climate ruin, we’ll have to “spend 10% of our GDP” and we’ll have to spend another 13% to keep our elderly population from slipping into impoverished oblivion.  No one at the G-20 nor at the UN IPCC evidenced the creativity or the audacity to suggest that we’d be better served if we opened the conversation to values that did not come in the form of – or have an imagined solution through – dollars.  Approaching a multi-factorial challenge with a mono-factor solution is complete madness.  And having a utility-based economic model that requires conformity – not for efficient ease of use but rather for reinforcement of incumbent commercial and public power interests – further removes distributed, micro-scalable solutions from potential manifestation.

What’s unsustainable is our paradigms – not our earth.  We’re surrounded with heterogeneous power, sustenance and fellowship.  But we want it to come in 60Hz, dollar denominated Styrofoam wrappers.  Well, news flash!  Bretton Woods has Alzheimer’s.  It’s advocates and adherents are sipping mashed potatoes through a straw waxing nostalgic for a past that never was and blankly gazing into a cloudy future through cataract filled eyes.  And as long as we look to them for succor, we’re suckers.  It’s time that We The People look deeply into our collective abundance and start solving local and global challenges with tools that neither governments nor their minions apprehend or master.  Who knows, we might form a Geniocratic Timocracy and make Socrates proud after all. 

Pigs with Lipstick and other Psychoses

An Inquiry into Free Trade

I remember sitting in Dr. Vic Koop’s Abnormal Psychology class in college methodically trudging through the DSM-III and learning about a range of pathologies.  One of the anti-social traits that accompanied a variety of conditions was denial and worst among the deniers were those who vociferously condemned the very conditions they secretly manifest.  We’ve seen this scenario play out numerous times.  A televangelist condemns sexual deviance only to be found himself a serial pedophile.   A president campaigning for election on transparency and condemning the offensive behavior of a previous administration expands the most intrusive secretive surveillance and remote assassination program in modern history.  Within our economic frameworks, I find that the lexicon we use to describe activities typically evolve around this same paradoxical madness.  We use the term “risk management” to mask the predation on marginal exploitation just beyond the edge of sustainability.  “What the market will bear,” is typically associated with a point just beyond what the market can reasonably withstand.  We use the term “credit” when we really mean anonymized debt and indenture.  When we speak of “employment” our focus is on those who are unproductively disengaged. 

There are few extremes of this madness that rival the capitalist-heralded term “Free Trade”.  And to be sure, “Free” trade has never existed just like “Free” markets or any other “Free” illusion.  Over 200 years ago, the illusion of markets being “free” was socialized along with many other humanist ideals.  The degree to which the government needed to interfere with markets for “development” (another lexical illusion) was debated as much in the Adam Smith and Alexander Hamilton era as it is today.  Before committing suicide in 1846, Friedrich List observed that “free trade would be a universal subjugation of the less advanced nations to the predominant manufacturing, commercial and naval power.”  He argued that without equivalence of civilization, political cultivation and power industrially advanced nations would always advantage themselves at the expense of those who were less advanced.  And, as if to simply confirm the prophetic critique of List, South Korea’s Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective recounts the evolution of trade policy that continues to evolve in favor of the 19^th and 20^th century industrial powers at the expense of the rest of the world’s economies.  With List, Chang demonstrates the fact that policies lauded by the ‘developed’ as vital and important in one time are removed from acceptability once they’ve achieved their desired effect in the economies promulgating the rules.  From resources to labor to climate, using a utility until its useful effect is maximized and then changing the rules to limit others’ capabilities to employ the same utility is the dominant meme and is fundamentally contrived and morally reprehensible.

Few places is this more pronounced than in the still-secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.  Allegedly justified to “promote innovation, economic growth and development, and support the creation and retention of jobs,” the TPP is really an imposition of protectionist proprietary enclosure regimes on producer countries for the benefit of incumbent consumer economic power juggernauts.  Ironically, this agreement promoted as a way to foster “free trade” (like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the EU aka TTIP) is being “negotiated” in secret with many of the terms and conditions – and lobbyists for the same – being held well outside public visibility or scrutiny. 

Free trade isn’t.  The term affords social and political cover for manipulative protectionism in which one or more trading entities concede domestic priorities for the promise of some advantage on other fronts. It is a way, for example, to impose patent rights on biological matter in direct contravention to the will of the citizens who live in the “trading partner” country.  It’s not democratic.  It’s not transparent.  And it’s not “Free”.  These agreements, far from creating stability in the global economy and promoting lasting peace, actually enrich political patrons in the short term and fuel inequality-based conflict and uprisings in the medium and long term.  The U.S. wants all TPP nations to open up their markets to tariff-free imports of U.S. agriculture products – most recently and most prone to contention at the moment: pork – but, in the same breath, wants to eliminate the prospect of generic medicine in protectionist favor to U.S. drug producers.  In other words, the U.S. wants restrictions where they aid its interests and the elimination of the same when they harm economic inequality.  Free?  Fair? Transparent?  Democratic?  Not a prayer!

Like the sociopathic behaviors that make their way into the annals of DSM-III lectures, trade negotiations which insist on palatable terminology to mask offensive market manipulation need to be scrutinized in public and held to account.  They harm short term economic growth and destroy integrity and accountability for future interactions.  We can’t afford “free” anymore.

Venom, Vultures, and Rancid Ribs

Had you commuted to work with me each morning this past week, you would have shared the time-lapse experience of watching as vultures reduced a 60kg deer carcass from an anatomical intact road fatality on Sunday to a dancing, disarticulated fragment of ribs by Friday morning.  Courtesy of evolution of microorganisms inside the digestive tract of the American black vulture, Sunday’s bloody abattoir was no more delicacy than Friday’s final rancid ribs.  Given the progression of the week, I was invited to contemplate this theater of consumption and reflect on the meaning I’d find in its presentation. 

My son Zachary is studying herpetology at Christopher Newport University.  During an excursion through the woods behind our house last summer, we discussed the poorly understood evolution of snake digestion.  “Why is it,” I asked, “that certain snakes consume their food alive – albeit envenomed – while others constrict their prey and consume their food dead?”  Having been trained in physiology, I reasoned that there must be some enzymatic explanation for venomous snakes preferring their protein still fresh and oxygenated while constrictors are content to have hypoxic tissue in their diet.  I was disappointed to find that while the nearly 300 species of venomous snakes have been studied with respect to the composition of their neurotoxins and hemotoxins, far less research has differentiated the question I posited while tromping through the forest.  And as I read the few scholarly publications regarding the polyphyletic organisms within the phylogenic superfamily Colubroidea, I was intrigued to find that the same hyaluronidase that melts the wall of the oocyte allowing the sperm fertilize the egg in mammalian reproduction is uniformly found in both neuro and hemotoxic venom.  It turns out that the genesis of mammalian life and agency of reptilian predation share a common goal – dissolving walls that divide and disintegrating barriers to essential, life-giving proteins.

So it is with quite some sobriety that I found myself contemplating the nature of consumption in the guts of snakes and vultures and reflecting on the persistence of both of these animals in cultural iconography over the millennia.  Did our ancestors know more about what was knowable about life, death and their interplay than we do today?  Is that why they pointed us to snakes and vultures in art, religion, poetry, and myth?  Maybe.  Or maybe I’m just juxtaposing unrelated observations to make a point. 

Vultures rely on bacteria within their digestive tract to counteract bacterially produced toxins from Bacillus anthracis and Clostridium botulinum – anthrax and botulism, respectively.  And while we focus on the “how do they eat rancid meat and not get sick like us?” question, we fail to observe that, like snakes, their digestion has been adapted over the arc of evolution to consume with specificity that which is in abundance within their habitat.  The bacterial load with the vulture’s gut and the toxicity of the venom produced say by the Crotalus scutulatus (the venomous pit viper found in the desert Southwestern US) far exceed the amount required for the beneficial toxicity.  In other words, the animal is far more effective in the production of protective proteins to achieve the venomous objective than would be required.  And the reason for this, to say the least, is not understood at present.

But, for a moment, let’s go back to my favorite sentence thus far – the one that ends the second paragraph.  The goal of all of these evolutionary adaptations is to both serve a metabolic mandate for the animal and serve an ecosystem balancing role in the elimination of carrion and prey respectively.  Informative within this reflection is that the consumer has engaged in adaptation to achieve the singular benefit desirable for its engagement within the ecosystem rather than seeking to manipulate the ecosystem to favor its objectives.  And this, ironically, applies both to snake venom, vulture guts, and mammalian reproduction.  Permeability for provisioning life – the enzymatic mandate of hyaluronidases – is not general in its application but rather it is highly focal and specific.  If one were to simply spray these enzymes across the ecosystem, we’d be reduced, quite literally, into a gooey ooze. 

It appears, upon closer inspection, that we could learn a lot from a serpent.  It may be no small coincidence that we’ve developed elaborate social, religious and cultural metaphors to steer clear of what they can teach us.  “Unclean birds” and “serpents” – examples of autogenic consumer adaptation – are relegated to the ick-factor while gluttonous grazing beasts are revered.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I think there are a lot of cows and camels that could teach us a lot about life but I’m particularly fascinated by the consumer evolutionary intelligence of vultures and snakes. 

What would our consumer industrial complex look like if we took on some responsibility to modify ourselves to be more suitable consumers in our ecosystem?  Much of what we seek to describe in economic terms are inefficiencies we project upon our ecosystem so that it conforms to our desires.  Much of our associated conflicts arise from the dissonance we impose on a world we want to manifest in our illusory image.  But, in this impulse lies the seed of persistent conflict.  We – now I’m speaking about the whole of humanity – are no more identical in our aspirational consumption than are the 300 different species of venomous snakes.  Some of us like the crunchiness of a paralyzed mouse while others of us prefer the sedate, lifeless piglet.  And the reasons why our preferences differ is, in part, because of the enzymes in our digestion which make one form palatable over another.  With over 2,700 varieties of snakes – only 300 of which adapted to envenomate prey – and with hundreds of Falconiformes – only a subset which feed on carrion – do we really think that we can find a single enzyme of consumption that is common to all of us?  Not a prayer!

So where does this leave us?  Great question.  What I know is that this parable of consumption was my obsession this week.  I do know that it’s serving as another lens through which I’m observing economic systems.  And I know that, at present, this is merely the carcass of the idea which, when fully digested, will look quite a bit different.  Chew wisely!

Nebuchadnezzar at the Federal Reserve

This week’s decision by the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the U.S. Federal Reserve to formally ditch an unemployment target as a central mandate for determining interest rates is, in no small way, a metric unto itself.  In the most delusional of days, I could erroneously conclude that enough of the Committee have been reading my blog and countless other rational commentators that they realized the fallacy in a metric that fails to measure what it purports.  For those of you who didn’t read the FOMC Statement this week, Janet Yellen’s nurturing leadership debut was marked with a recognition that the Fed’s “highly accommodative stance” cannot be justified by any empirical economic mandate – like employment or price stability.  What she and the Committee did not state is that the rationalization for her cheap money mandate is justified if its real beneficiaries – monetary trade wars with the rest of the exporting world and massive wealth transfers for those who already have excess – are to continue their wanton recklessness.  What I find refreshing is that the masquerade of public good is being expunged from the FOMC’s illusory raison d’etre and, for the first time in recent memory, we can see that ‘accommodative’ is a shareholder interest alone.

We’re now entering the post-empirical divination phase of the Fed where “readings on financial developments” become the new bedrock for policy.  The new alchemy includes ‘measures’, ‘indicators’, and ‘readings’ – an irrational subjectivity so offensive to a few as to lead one member of the Committee – Narayan Kocherlakota, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis – to complain that such euphemism “weakens the credibility of the Committee’s commitment…” and could “hinder economic activity.” 

I remember my 10^th grade train-wreck with reality when my geometry teacher father taught me an important lesson in intersubjective solipsistic dissonance.  He offered to his students the following proposition: Come up with an original and unpublished proof of the Pythagorean Theorem and you get an “A” for the class.  “You can even bring in a pillow and sleep through class,” he promoted at the beginning of the academic year.   Long before Su and Velian published their “spherical proof” (17 years ahead, but who is counting?), I developed a proof using spherical geometry and way more steps than otherwise necessary.  Proudly I dropped my opus on his desk and even more proudly he confirmed that his son had, in fact, achieved the challenge.  What followed, however, was a harsh reality.  The offer of an “A” for the class had an undisclosed exception: “Not if the author of the proof is the son of the teacher.”  And so, for the rest of the year, I had to stay awake, study for exams, and eke out my “A” with the same toil as my fellow students.  My father taught me the important lesson that motivation is productive even if the objective is capriciously subjective.

Now where does a spherical proof of A² + B² = C² and the FOMC Statement merge on this chilly Spring morning just past the flirting ellipse of the precessing equinox?  My answer lies in the more fundamental recognition that confronts the FOMC and us all.  And for my answer I’ll plumb the depths of another timeless geometrical puzzle – the puzzle of Pi.  In 1999 University of Tokyo Professor Yasumasa Kanada and his assistant Daisuke Takahasi performed in 83.5 hours a world record calculation of Pi – you know the one: 3.1415…. – resolved to 206.1 billion digits.  This undertaking smashed the previous record of 50 billion digits and confirmed what the Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Germans, and others have known for a long time – the circumferential relationship a circle has with its diameter is obsessive and transcendental.  According to Dr. James Grime and others, to understand the geometry of the known universe, we only need to know Pi to 39 digits to “compute the circumference of the entire universe to the accuracy of less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom.”  Like the calculations of my good buddy Pythagoras, descriptive formulae are helpful until considered at the assumptive scale at which point they become audacious and ludicrous.  While we think we know that A² + B² = C² and that ∏ = C/d, we don’t know what they mean and we don’t really have a clue why we can’t find the end of these circular and triadic mysteries. 

When it comes to the FOMC, what we know is that what the Fed was established to do and its public cover-story justification have never been in coherence.  Now, before you cast aspersions on the Fed, a note of caution.  The Fed actually performs the banking purpose for which it was established and, in service to its member institutions, it’s done remarkably well.  Former Chairman Bernanke was quite eloquent in reminding members of Congress – particularly the Tea Party activists – that if they didn’t like what the Fed was doing, they were perfectly within their rights to change its mandate (a challenge that no Congressman or woman was willing to do when they found out who they’d have to contend with if they took on the challenge).  The problem comes when the belief of the function is met with the reality of the dissonance between actuality and projected aspiration.  Justification is no more causal than it is accountable.  Just because you think something ‘should’ do something doesn’t mean that it ‘agrees’ or is even complicit in your shared sense of reality.  Therefore, metrics used to justify an illusion – regardless of their prima facie merits – neither hold an individual nor enterprise to motivation nor account.  Just because something is observable and alleged to be measured doesn’t mean that the observational assumptions or the rules for the metrics are shared. 

Janet and the FOMC get an “A” for an emerging honesty from me this meeting for unmasking what other Fed Chairs have been unwilling to admit.  They’re not in this for the U.S. economy – they’re in it for their shareholders’ interests.  This, for all you cynics out there, is progress.  Now we have an opportunity to have a more enlivened conversation about our misappropriated belief (and blame) on an actor in a system that, while justified using idealist goals, never was organized to serve them.  I’m no more motivated to jump on a Fed-bashing bandwagon than try to resolve Pi another few billion decimals.  And no amount of motivation will seduce me into finding another way to “prove” a theorem constructed to explain an interesting, obvious reality.  No, I found this week’s FOMC a breath of fresh air.  We now admit that metrics are what they’ve always been – an attempt to encode a dogma to manipulate others – and, as a result, one more blow has been struck to the feet of iron alloyed clay!  And with that metaphor, hopefully one or two of you can revel in the tapestry that is my allegory.