Objects in the Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

While I was not a huge fan of the movie Jurassic Park, there's no doubt that one of the best pieces of cinematographic humor is the fleeting shot of the rearview mirror during a near death escape from a rogue Tyrannosaurus Rex.  With his yawning terrifying dentifrice taking up the whole of the mirror, the camera focuses on the words: "Caution: Objects In The Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear."  While I'm applying a bit of Moore's Law to an analogy, allow me to remind you of the observation of Charles Mackay's timeless commentary on John Law's shenanigans in 1720:

"The regent, who knew nothing whatever of the philosophy of finance, thought that a system which had produced such good effects could never be carried to excess. If five hundred millions of paper had been of such advantage, five hundred millions additional would be of still greater advantage. This was the grand error of the regent, and which Law did not attempt to dispel. The extraordinary avidity of the people kept up the delusion; and the higher the price of Indian and Mississippi stock, the more billets de banque were issued to keep pace with it. The edifice thus reared might not unaptly be compared to the gorgeous palace erected by Potemkin, that princely barbarian of Russia, to surprise and please his imperial mistress: huge blocks of ice were piled one upon another; ionic pillars, of chastest workmanship, in ice, formed a noble portico; and a dome, of the same material, shone in the sun, which had just strength enough to gild, but not to melt it. It glittered afar, like a palace of crystals and diamonds; but there came one warm breeze from the south, and the stately building dissolved away, till none were able even to gather up the fragments. So with Law and his paper system. No sooner did the breath of popular mistrust blow steadily upon it, than it fell to ruins, and none could raise it up again." 

- From Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

Now our T-Rex in J-Park spanned a bit greater an epochal reach showing up in the mirror of an SUV but his toothy menace should give us considerable pause as we look at the financial news coming from the U.S. and Europe.  Like the ill-fated impulse to see if you could reintroduce giant paleontological behemoths into a theme park, manipulation of things we don't fully understand, regardless of the novelty of the rationale for it, usually ends with something as elegant as the digestive track of a raging lizard.  I have frequently reminded Inverted Alchemists that our obsession with reductionist statistical models - an impulse borne of the celebrated "scientific method" - is central to our societal undoing.  Nothing could be more germane to the moment than the announcement that leading rating agencies have downgraded many of the world's largest banks.

To fully understand the contempt with which I hold this news, we may recall the forbearers of our economic 'innovations' that date back to the very regent co-conspirators of the infamous John Law.  To support the popular delusions of fiat economies (both then and now), it is imperative for an alleged group of observers to provide 'empirical support' for the risk-free nature of the sovereign.  This concept, which should have long found its way into the Museum of Unnatural History, is as alive and well today as the virtual T-Rex was in the park.  To see how little things have changed in 300 years, I commend to your reading at least the first section of Mackay's Memoirs.  However, it's important to note that rating agencies - operating under the SEC and government's modern NSRSO oligopoly blessing - are, at their core, marketing agencies.  Their 'risk assessment' neither correlates to, nor is derived from, verifiable, reproducible data.  That said, they never were supposed to do so.  From the life insurance mandate for long-duration investments leading up to the 1913 creation of what is our current Federal Reserve system to the present, when the economy gets tough, rating agencies must manufacture 'investment grade' rationale for people (and, more importantly, their fiduciary intermediaries) to invest. 

Whimsically, Moody's, S&P, and Fitch - the arbiters of independent risk rating - actually had a rather ironic proclivity to see their risk ratings actually correlate to the world's 60 largest banks' need for government bailouts in 2008!  The better you scored in risk, the more unsound you were.  However, given my aversion to ALL correlative logic for the fallacies upon which it is built, I only offer the preceding observation to kick sand in the face of the proverbial laggard.  The point is that the 15 bank downgrade of this past week actually had very little - if anything - to do with the banks.  Rather it had to do with a recursive error built into the rating process itself - an error that was wired in from day one and is setting us all up for a big, toothy shock.

Now, for a moment I'm going to pick on Moody's - not because of a greater contempt but, to their credit - for their published Bank Financial Strength Ratings (or BFSRs) which go further in describing their process than either S&P or Fitch have the courage to disclose.  I love their dog-ate-my-homework / get-out-of-jail-free disclaimer that stated in 2007, "barring systemic stress and provided that there is reasonable client confidence…" prior to describing how they navigated the markets into the rocks of the sirens!  In other words, "If we actually did measure what the public actually thinks we do, we'd be extinct but, since we don't, business is booming."  According to Moody's, their inputs include: 1) Franchise Value; 2) Regulatory Positioning; 3) Regulatory Environment; 4) Operating Environment; and, 5) Financial Fundamentals.   They go on to state their explicit bias stating that financial fundamentals contribute to 50% of the risk score in "developed markets" and only 30% of the risk score in "emerging markets".  After all, a financial stability rating should have a minority of quantitative inputs coming from financial data, right?!

So, what we've got are a group of soothsayers publishing their contempt for actual risk modeling with impunity who are desperately trying to put lipstick on pigs.  Why?  Well, a huge number of investors, by law or by charter, must buy investment grade assets.  In other words, we require an inventory of good investments be manufactured whether they're good or not!  Pension, life insurance and other insurance companies, banks, etc. are all required to buy fixed income products which are deemed 'safe' so that their public fiduciary obligations can be met.  Now, we've got a T-Rex sized problem which we're trying to cover up with a fig leaf.  Government debt - once the stuff of "risk-free" capital designations - is seeing public confidence collapse like the hanging brick in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (if you don't get it, look it up).   Investors the world over have been willing to buy as much corporate and municipal debt as they can get their hands on and the inventory is not what the demand requires.  The European summer and the U.S. Fall (and I do mean over the cliff) all suggest that government debt is going to continue smelling like a Greek fishing village on a hot afternoon with no breeze.  To stay in business, rating agencies who only exist at the pleasure of their sovereign authorizers, have to preemptively make government debt appear more desirable relative to other investment products.  Lest you think this is my commentary, make sure you read all rating agency disclaimers which explicitly state that they're ratings of relative risk - not quantitative risk.  However, this short-term fix is a long-term madness.  By undermining the investment quality of the financial sector, the financial sector, in the short term will be forced by regulatory capital mandates to become bigger consumers of (you guessed it) government debt.  And they'll have to buy it up at the same time that the government debt becomes lower quality which, as you can readily discern, will degrade financial institutions even more.

What's the point?  Well, to keep my streak going, what I'm stating is that the bank downgrade was not about bank risk but rather an impending down-grade in government confidence.  It's the opening act of a comic tragedy that will end with most of the actors with knives in their backs or hemlock in their goblets.  It wasn’t an accident that the bank rating cuts punctuated a week when several governments were debating a unified European debt issuance.  After all, what better a time to have the few productive economies of the EU prop up the majority who are illiquid?  By forcing fixed income buyers and reserve managers into a debt demand for which there is no quality supply, suddenly what is economically suicidal appears to have momentary expediency.  And, as with John Law in the run up to 1720 no one dare question that, in the end, the sovereign knows best.

By this point we're both frustrated.  Many of you faithfully read my blog and share with me your critique that I don't deliver messages in a clear and concise (accessible) manner.  This is not for lack of trying.  When I see the T-Rex in the rearview mirror, I'm not prone to sugar coat the fact that we're about to experience the prey side of the food-chain.  However, in a world where we have Twitter-fed economic literacy, the transparency of the problem hides the treasonous acts in plain sight with virtually no one taking note.  So I'm going to attempt to deliver a punchline that is accessible.

This week's move by the rating agencies was no more about bank risk than the events of 2008 were about real-estate.  You're being fed propaganda and it tastes of carrion.  It was about creating an illusion to cover an up-coming junk debt fabrication and subsequent sale by governments.  If you have any life insurance or long-duration investments (like a pension) you'll be having your money used to fuel the Madness of Crowds.  By downgrading banks, they simultaneously:

a.         Decreased the appetite for investors to support bank equity;

b.         Increased the demand by banks to buy government-issued debt;

c.         Created the illusion that government debt was 'better' than other options (the same phenomenon that has propped up the U.S. Treasuries for the past several months as a relatively safe alternative to Europe because we're deferring addressing our problems until the election which thankfully happens in November);

d.         Failed to measure quantitative risk; and,

e.         Failed to restore credibility in themselves or their models.

What this means to you is that, far from being over, we're about to see a deepening collapse of the heralded 'recovery'.  Going into the next few months, public sentiment is going to be encouraged to falter and, We the People, are going to be invited into the despair that primes the pump for another irrationally unjustified paternalistic intervention. 

So, what can you do?  Well, for starters - DON'T DESPAIR.  These events are the inevitable and timely fruit of a tree planted in an aspirational Eden called Bretton Woods.  If you listen to the snakes and eat from the fruit of the tree…, well, I think you know how that story played out.  This is a time to build productive, essential enterprises at scale.  While intervention-minded policy makers will scamper about trying to tell you to live in fear, explicitly live in a manner that seeks to build value within your communities of proximity and diversity.  Rely on your ability to steward the resources you influence - your abilities to build the context for value and its exchange.  Rather than looking to remote 'solution providers', realize that the 'problems' are not essentially real.  They are but the illusions projected from a master delusion and the less you respond to them, the less power they'll wield.  In short - Live Fully and realize that this past week, we just passed another signpost of the end of a system that did not work for most of the world.  That's good.  Rather than fearing what's looming in the rearview mirror, its time that we look down the road ahead of us and start driving with our eyes on the road through the wind shield.  Between here and there, we'll have a few bug splats and some pterodactyl poop but, that's why we've got wiper blades!

P.S.  I cannot let today pass without calling your attention to the elections in Papua New Guinea today, the elections in Mongolia this week, and the recent statements by President Evo Morales in Bolivia.  These contemporaneous stories all are a referendum on whether the world is going to allow the holders of modern legalized piracy - the colonial equivalent of Letters of Marque - to continue to use colonial business models to take billions from countries while leaving people in financial and social poverty.  Glencore, the latest company to appeal to the tired, pathetic whining about "fairness" - like Rio Tinto in Mongolia and countless others - need to know, that together with artifacts of inhumanity like slavery, racism, and colonialism, they need to exterminate their tactics of entitlement and lead by engaging in true resource development partnerships.  In PNG, Mongolia, Bolivia and scores of other countries, there's enough to go around.  Failure to lead with ethical governance will lead to tired reprisals.  If you want a different outcome, initiate more conscious leadership!  While Rio Tinto seeks to white-wash its reputation by sponsoring human-rights events around the Olympics, I trust that all readers take these democratic events seriously and increase the scrutiny on those operators who have profited far too long at the expense of millions suffering in their shadows.

It's the Heteroscedasticity, stupid!

Let's assume that somebody knows what to do when it comes to the U.S. and European economic and banking situation.  And let's assume that they'll come back from their extended vacation (or coma, as the case may be) at some point in the next few months and put things in order.  Further, let's assume that all the destructive decisions that were cemented into the foundation of our current crisis in the fourth quarter of 2001 can be jack-hammered into tiny bits and used as aggregate for paving the path out of the mess we're in.  Assuming all of this (aided by some mythical unicorn tears, pixie dust, and the whisker of a saber tooth tiger - yes, it's one of those potions) and you don't need to know what heteroscedasticity is and you can just return to your nostalgic Father's Day festivities.  However, assuming that any of the aforementioned fail to materialize, read on.

As with most of the statistics we use to make sense out of our world, a plethora of assumptions - both implicit and explicit - undergird our consensus 'knowledge'.  I have yet to meet any individual expert or group of scientists in any field who have the academic or social integrity to actually state the assumptions that they have opted to deploy untested and have the further decency to critique their own conclusions based on the failure for those assumptions to hold.  I marveled at the digital tautology infused in the papers presented at a conference from which I recently returned.  The scientific method, if invoked, meant that whatever statement or conclusion was to follow must enjoy some hegemonic priority in the minds of the listeners.  Let there be statistical significance in a regressed set of variables and, voilà, we've got truth.  InvertedAlchemy readers are acutely aware of my critique of our untested assumptions in general and their tragic behavioral and policy consequences.  However, it's worth noting that the current economic interventions being proposed in the G-20 are actually doing grave damage to our ability to even sustain our statistical myth.  And that, is the subject of this week's observations.

Now some of you are more familiar - because you were unwilling to sit through one of my statistics lectures at the University - with the concept of dispersion than you are with the term heteroscedasticity (and yes, I'll forgive that indiscretion).  And, for you, allow me to explain the following.  Let's assume that you make a series of observations that seem to work most of the time.  For example, let's say that we survey the world's middle class and find that, with additional money, we find that people report a better quality of life.  Using regression, we conclude that, with more money, quality of life increases.  However, when we extrapolate that observation to the whole population, we find that the relationship not only doesn't hold but we find that some people at very high levels of monetary wealth are miserable and some people at very low levels of monetary wealth are quite self-actualized.  Rather than rejecting our correlation 'truth', we explain the information that challenges the correctness of our hypothesis as 'outliers' or 'unexplained' rather than holding the possibility that we had the wrong hypothesis for which we applied the wrong metrics to confirm an imposed outcome.  And we do this because, in the name of convenience, we need to understand the world efficiently.  I don't want to ask everyone from every culture to respond to my attempt to understand the world.  I want to ask a few people a few questions and draw sweeping conclusions therefrom.

And here's the problem.  When the variables I think I'm assessing or measuring have dispersions creating heteroscedasticity (frequently a function of metrics at the measurement extremes of data), to gain confidence in my observations and the resultant conclusions, I limit the data that I gather to insure: a) self-fulfilling hypothesis retention; and, b) consensus among my scientifically-minded colleagues who, like me, want reductionism over complexity.  Ironically, the most damaging effect of heteroscedastic variables is not in their essence per se but rather in the 'error' or 'unexplained variance' that they represent to the generalizability of the model and its conclusions.

Now, take a deep breath, grab a nutritious snack (possibly some nerve conducting friendly egg yolks for your brain) and strap in for the reason why I've used James Carville's 1992 presidential campaign slogan for this post.  The world - sorry to all of you intelligent designers out there - is heteroscedastic.  And that's the case for the part we think we understand.  That's bad news for all you adherents to the method advanced in the 10th century by Ibn al-Haytham and modernized in the 16th century by the likes of Galileo and Kepler.  Most of what we confidently know that we know, we don't know.  But here's what's worse.  What's happening in Washington, Brussels, and capitals across the G-20 is that we are adding scale to variables we do not understand in the first place.  We already don't know how monetary supply behaves in manipulated interventions so we put MORE money in.  We don't know how real property deflation (a risk of currency inflation) will impact our long-standing social obligations so we create currency supply bubbles of gargantuan proportions.  We know that 'sovereign debt' has the full faith and confidence of governments at a time when no one has faith and confidence in governments so we develop schemes to issue more sovereign debt!  In other words, we are increasing the dispersion in a variable set that we've already evidenced a complete absence of mastery around and we somehow wait to see it show up in a model that was wrong in its creation.  At the apex of this irony is the fact that the most wealthy - yes the uber-1% - are clamoring for returns to invest their ill-gotten spoils and they're stuck with, you guessed it, currency and sovereign debt.  It must be a bummer to steal all the jewels only to find out that the jewels are just paving stones!

So here comes the punchline.  What we need is to shrink.  We actually need to have the courage to strive for a more elegant less.  Now the cool reality is that we'll get there one way or another.  We can either take the elixir of living within our suitable means or we can be served the ipecac from less charitable hands.  Starting with a deflation of our egoic, dominion-infused certainty of control, we need to accept that, in our finest moments, we describe, not explain (and certainly never predict).  Rather than seeking to control, we are more suited to steward that with which we are entrusted.  This does not suggest an aversion to accretive impulses.  It does, however suggest that we need to increase the heterogeneity of the variables we measure while decreasing the expectation of successful imposition of conclusions on disregarded populations.  Realizing that unexplained variance is more likely a reflection of the sum of our projected social monotony plus observational sloth rather than an unfathomable mystery, we need to confront the reality that more input into a broken model actually speeds the propagation of the problem rather than introducing any remedy.  Heteroscedasticity is not our enemy but our ill-conceived piling into its maelstrom will be our undoing.

In Integral Accounting parlance, we can seek phase and state coherence where all of the utility we desire from a system is achieved leaving the system with as much retained optionality as possible.  Simply put, we must engage in a process of removing ourselves from the end of consumption and see ourselves in participation with a cycling and recycling of matter and energy.  In a bizarre paradox, we may find ourselves DOING MORE with LESS.

An Inquiry into Human Nature and the Cost of the Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith would be far less popular today were it not for his indolent generalizations about the march of progress in America and his contempt for Asia.  Nearly 240 years later, as we watch as the economies built on his perfunctory musings crumble despite the most impassioned interventions, it is ironic that we still blindly follow our Hobbesian Narcissism to his Echo.  Wealth is Power, we hear in the romantic distance and gaze longingly into the pool of our reflection puzzling over the beauty of our own projection.  Like the woodland nymphs of antiquity, European leaders intervene in Spain this weekend while the U.S. Congress and the sparring presidential campaigns blissfully ignore the 'fiscal cliff' looming at year's end.

In his Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith writes:

Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniencies, and amusements of human life. But after the division of labour has once thoroughly taken place, it is but a very small part of these with which a man's own labour can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labour of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase. The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.

It is ironic that this Spring and Summer of European discontent is emanating from economies that have long shunned the very labor celebrated by their economic demigod.  Far more insidious is the abject failure with which U.S. economists and their operators adequately price the cost of our economic dependency built on our militarized extreme of the "command" of labor.  Our "fiscal cliff" is looming larger than all estimates given the fruit borne of our unconsidered resolution to violent control of commodities which, having yet again lurched into military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan from which we will have no quantifiable gain, we will seek to repatriate our soldiers and repurpose our industrial complex only to find that we've built nothing of transferrable value.  While at the end of the Great Wars we were able to forge a civilian manufacturing base, exactly how do you repurpose unwitting mercenaries and nation-building consultants who failed to build what they were handsomely paid to build?  Bringing our soldiers home to unemployment and having austerity hit our defense budget in January leaves the U.S. in the unenviable position of adding violence to austerity.  And we thought that with our wealth came power.  Hobbes didn't see that with violent power comes moral poverty. 

The fallacy of historicism so richly imbued in Smith's view and so warmly embraced by his protégés is built upon a linear regression that suggests that:

Free Natural Resources + Commanded Labor = Colonial Wealth.

Now we clearly don't wish to think of ourselves as still living in the bigotry of colonialist models.  However, as I pointed out in last week's post, the shareholders of Rio Tinto's Bougainville Copper Limited celebrate surrogated cannibalism when they turn a blind eye towards the death of 20,000 people so their company can enforce a mining concession granted by the U.N.-sanctioned colonial administration of Bougainville by Australia!  When Smith's 'command of labor' is taken to the militarized extreme, we find ourselves building an entirely unsustainable order of affairs which is sure to collapse - most probably in the most inelegant of ways.

In my presentation tomorrow (the manuscript will be published in the Proceedings and is available upon request), I will be suggesting that wealth needs to be redefined and liberated from its dominion-based, colonial empowered moral bankruptcy.  In an argument suggesting that sustainability is a function of the ability to enjoy non-destructive utility of matter and energy while preserving as much essential optionality as possible, I propose that:

wealth = utility x retained optionality^∞

where ∞ = ∫ of all users across all value dimensions

When one considers this formula, one can readily see that the greatest wealth is experienced when the maximum benefit can be derived (in number of participants) from the least phase and state alteration (for more on this, take a look at my previous postings on Phase and State Coherence).  And the more value (in terms of integral accounting) dimensions can be simultaneously appreciated by the more participants, the greater the momentary and residual wealth.

In future posts, we will broaden the inquiry into this expansion of Buckminister Fuller's view of wealth which he described as the, "organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."  By liberating this definition from its linearity, one can see that a Common Wealth can emerge, be characterized, and, in application, be the basis for a More Perfect Union.

End of a Gun

You’ve read most of this story hundreds of times before.  In fact, it’s so old that the civilized world has anesthetized itself and sterilized a blight on our civilization with terms like the “Resources Curse” and “Dysfunctional States”.  Countries rich in minerals and energy where poverty – both in economic and social terms – run rampant; where officials are prone to bribery and corruption; and where, when faced with a world turning a deaf ear and a blind eye to the people, desperate people turn to violence in a predictable last grasp for something to control.  Blood runs.  Families are destroyed.  And the perpetrators sponsor lavish seminars with their elite friends to discuss the hopelessness of a world filled with savages.  Paradoxically, Rio Tinto’s CEO reportedly has decided to participate in a campaign to “raise awareness” around human trafficking as part of the firm’s London Olympic sponsorship despite the labor abuses, impoverished living conditions, and sex trade affiliated with its mining operations.  Apparently “awareness raising” serves as his copper and gold Pontius basin in which he launders his conscience and that of his investors.  And best of all, in the name of Corporate Social Responsibility, even PAX Global and Praxis Core Stock Fund (funds that prey on the disembodied conscience of uninformed investors) invest in the perpetrators who, according to them are necessary components of investment portfolios despite being part of a “messy and imperfect” compromise.

But you haven’t read THIS story.  Because this story hasn’t been told before.  And if you listen to Australian media (ABC, to be specific), you may have been led to believe that this story could not be told.

In 1967, under the UN-authorized colonial custodianship of Papua New Guinea by the Australian government (jointly liable for the atrocities described herein) and eight years before independence, the Bougainville Copper Agreement was executed granting occupiers the control of one of the world’s largest copper (and other mineral) assets.  This agreement, forced into the “peaceful” independence agreement in 1975, granted a company (now Bougainville Copper Ltd – majority owned by Rio Tinto) rights to 42 years of mining with compulsory 21 year renewals irrespective of any law or Act of the government.  This provision, in a letter to then Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare, was invoked by BCL Chairman Peter Taylor demanding that the Company enjoy renewal of its mining license prior to its expiration at the end of 2011.  Peter was simply reminding Sir Michael Somare of the agreement he had signed with R.W. Ballmer of BCL in 1967.

Bougainville became synonymous with the worst of mining.  Politicians were pitted against their citizens’ interests; clans were variously favored or ignored by the Company leading to bitter enmity and violence; and, in the late 1980s, the situation became intolerable.  A landowner conflict erupted into a war in which the Company was forced to cease its operations and over 20,000 people were abducted, tortured and killed.  And, to add insult to injury, in the fig leaf promoted as a Peace Agreement, the Bougainville government was given the 19% equity ownership once provided the National Government – equity that gave no PNG party any meaningful corporate or economic controls when issued – and an interest that, without production, had negligible value to Bougainville. 

To listen to the international media regarding Bougainville since the conflict in 1989 is to see images of fierce armed fighters, destroyed infrastructure, and destitute living conditions.  To hear BCL speak of the mine and the project is to hear about the need to pacify people for which they’ve exhibited nothing but contempt for 45 years.  The vitriolic propaganda spewing from remote shareholders is only outdone by opportunistic bureaucrats seeking to use their public office to pander to would-be operators who would love to rip new holes in the fabric of the land and its people with just another destructive operation.  To watch the footage from ABC in Australia, you would be advised that this is a place of dysfunction, lawlessness and hopelessness.

But that was before this week.  Because this week, during the consummation of a six week global financial and corporate literacy program that we helped develop and deploy, I had a chance to spend time in Panguna and Arawa and meet the people that have been the object of Australian, UN, and global contempt for decades.  Teaching them about the unconscionable acts that formed the BCA prior to independence and the intolerable supra-national rights granted to a company by a custodial administrator acting under the authority of the UN, we saw hundreds of people realize that those who they were told were “development partners” had in fact been complicit in grave injustices.  Showing them a corporate structure – like so many in Papua New Guinea and around the world – where equity, financing, leasing, taxation, and self-dealing arrangements aid in the misappropriation of assets to the detriment of the people awakened a level of passion unseen since the beginning of this stain on humanity’s record.  And, much to the surprise of the common narrative promoted by remote privateers, the people did not resort to violence.  Rather, they sought more information.  Because, as is always the case, abusers maintain their power by the persistence of ignorance, not by transparency and full exchange of facts.  

And then what happened next was most poignant.  Sitting in the back of the room at a 3 hour session in Arawa was a muscular man with a fatigue hat on his head.  He sat motionless for 3 hours looking at me with piercing eyes.  And before I was finished, he left.  The next morning, my companions said, “Chris Uma wants to meet with you.”  Chris is one of the men who the outside world – the world terrifyingly romanticized by a company that wants another bite at its ill-gotten apple – has been told to fear.  This General of the Mekamui Defense Force – most often pictured with battle-hardened visage and armed with automatic weapons wanted to meet me.  Meeting with Chris was not part of my plan but that’s part of the story.

Chris may very well have the firmest handshake in Papua New Guinea.  He’s muscular, powerful and our first interaction involved the dissolution of every one of the propaganda-laced messages that have been littered around the world by those with something to hide.  “We know that we’ve been lied to for all these years,” he said, “but now finally someone – a white man – has come and told us the truth that we all knew must be out there.”  And after that statement, Chris, many of his men, and our delegation had a long conversation about what true resource development could look like.  Together we went to the “NO GO ZONE” on the road to Panguna.  And when there – a world away from the terror that has been promoted by so many who have so much to hide – we had fun.  We picked flowers and put them into the barrels of the weapons that, in a moment of honest exchange, served no hostile purpose.  We sat together and talked about a future built on mutual respect.  And best of all, we agreed that it was time for the world to see a new picture of Bougainville.  Rather than the story of brokenness, violence, death, and treachery, an image of what happens when people sit together with mutual respect was allowed to emerge.  And then, the man the world has been told to fear; the man who has been enraged by the injustice meted to him and the people living around him; the man who only saw violence as a means to have a voice; that man removed his hat and placed a flower in his hair while the gun barrels that once blocked a hostile world became vases for the flowers of a new day.  

We, the Citizens of the World are better than colonial privateering and plunder.  We are better than violence fueled by willfully perpetuated ignorance.  We are better than standing idly by while corporations – aided by their servant governments – act with complete impunity and derision knowing that half a world away, no one is watching.  Whether it’s in Bougainville or in the Rio Tinto sponsored Olympics in London, it is time for us all to realize that violence is the fruit borne of a Tree of Willful Ignorance and productive futures are harvest from those who plant the Seeds of Knowledge and Mutual Respect.  Do the world a favor.  Send this blog post to as many people as you can.  Repost it so that search engines across the world show another picture of Bougainville.  Not one defined by violence but one that holds the fragile blossom of hope!

Swindling Futurity on a Large Scale

Today, I am accompanying my dear friend and colleague, Mr. David J. Pratt in a lecture at the James Madison Museum (http://www.thejamesmadisonmuseum.org/events).  Our lecture is entitled: ‘Banking on the Future: Madison and the Closure of the First National Bank’.  We expanded on some of these themes.

In a letter to his esteemed philosopher and scholarly friend Mr. John Taylor in 1816, Thomas Jefferson famously stated:

"I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

While this sound bite has captured the #OWS crowd with patriotic zealotry, the unquoted sections of the letter of May 28, 1816 are equally or more admonishing of our current state.  And in this week when Wall Street banks had to cover their own “irrational exuberance” in the Facebook IPO bubble, we find a world in which the funding of human enterprises is devoid of consideration as much today as it was 200 years ago.  With JP Morgan unveiling its reckless synthetic illusions which have both helped the bank manufacture illusory profits and distribute dividends at the expense of the publicly-back accountability deferrals and with breathless CNN, Fox, and CNBC commentators fawning over NASDAQ: FB complete with TD Ameritrade screen shots instructing an uneducated populace into the abattoir of opaque speculation, all of Jefferson’s concerns find themselves landing on a modern America and G-8 devoid of any creativity. 

Consider:

“The system of banking we have both equally and ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away in its progress the fortunes and morals of our citizens. Funding I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it; every generation coming equally, by the laws of the Creator of the world, to the free possession of the earth He made for their subsistence, unencumbered by their predecessors, who, like them, were but tenants for life.”

Jefferson went on to lament that, “Much I apprehend that the golden moment is past for reforming these heresies.” What was the proximate cause of his melancholy?  Setting aside Jefferson’s personal economic proclivities which had frequently pitted his profligate consumption at odds with moneylenders, Jefferson seemed to discern that, given the opportunity to be swindled, the populace, in the main, would be seduced.  Given his profound distrust of Alexander Hamilton’s ‘big government’ impulses – fearing that they would undermine the experiment of the Republic – he reflected that, “the evils flowing from the duperies of the people are less injurious than those from the egoism of their agents.”  Resolute in his opposition to the First Bank of the United States and facing a diminishing pool of allies in his opposition to the expediency-laced formation of the Second Bank of the United States, established in large part to deal with debts from the War of 1812, Jefferson was certain that the adverse consequences of sovereign banks would lead to the undoing of his life’s aspirations.

From 1791 to 1836 – allowing for the nearly 4 year gap between the expiration of the First Bank charter and the promulgation of the Second Bank – furious debate raged over how a relatively new country, filled with industrious people and unquantified resources, would grow.  Two major wars, three financial panics, and untold scandals later, our banking system and associated laws took their first tentative step in to setting the economic stage for the Civil War.  

So, in this week of irrational exuberance ranging from Jamie Dimon’s callous façade regarding the reckless synthetic positions constructed under his leadership at JP Morgan to Mark Zuckerberg’s gravity-defying circus in which the final act will likely involve “audience participation” (think Water for Elephants), I find myself intrigued by the news on the opposite side of the Earth.  

In Mongolia, “anti-investor” legislation – if you read Western pundits – was passed seeking to insure that the nation would be able to participate in the development of its vast metals and energy resources.  Most media outlets have followed the passive-aggressive narrative suggesting that instilling fear of failing foreign investment should play a role in national sovereignty.  Tragically, these fear mongers fail to understand that there are more resource investors in the world than once controlled the market and, if asked to chose between cooperation with nationalists or no access to energy and metals – participating access will prevail.  In New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, facing the electoral consequences of delayed justice, Prime Minister Peter O’Neill finally released $9 million held by the Mineral Resource Development Corporation seeking to placate a rather vocal voice that could swing his political fortunes.  What was conspicuously absent from this transaction was any meaningful participation in Newcrest Mining’s nearly $3 billion gold revenue – close to 20% of which is derived from its Lihir operation.  

During the next few weeks, I will be working with my colleagues in the Pacific to educate a number of communities in an effort to limit the “swindling of futurity”.  It’s as relevant in the U.S. as it is in Papua New Guinea.  Ironically, what’s missing here is what’s missing there.  First, a public sector for the people and by the people.  Second, a population taking the time to be informed.  And finally, recognition that linking productivity to socioeconomic benefit is essential for any economy – regardless of political monikers.  While many of you visit this blog on a recurring basis each weekend, I trust that next week, as I’m in the midst of one of the most significant resource conflict and violence-torn parts of the globe, you take your InvertedAlchemy moment to reflect on this and other posts and share this dialogue with others.  In so doing, we may rekindle the taper Jefferson sought to light and reinvigorate a public accountability much needed in our time.

Fair winds and following seas until next time…

Less Than Zero – Beyond Infinity

please follow the link at the end of this post

Thomas Kuhn, the author of the 1962 controversial treatise, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions opened public discourse (and fierce, often polarized debate and acrimony) around the prevailing historicism-laced linear progressive world view.  Defiant in the face of a Cold War context of manifest destiny in which ‘progress’ was both dogmatic ideology and the battle cry for iconoclasts, his suggestion that revolutions were punctuations (‘paradigm shifts’) created by intellectual dissonance with incumbent systems was heretical and, well, come to think of it, revolutionary.  Most troubling for the purveyors of institutionally coalesced ‘knowledge’ – a.k.a. scientists – was his positing that endless pursuit of anomaly resolution (resolution of error from which expertise is derived and lauded) was unlikely to be the proximate cause for breakthroughs.  Revolution, he suggested, comes from those who challenge assumptions rather than from those who refine precision around consensus.

When we observe the entire incapacitation of the current masters of economy and industry – be they Central Bankers, Finance Ministers, Economists, or Corporate Titans – in their collective inability to assess the direction, duration, and scale of current economic dislocations, we could conclude that the “revolutionary” inflection is upon us.  This inflection, according to Kuhn, would suggest that what will emerge is an “incommensurable” set of methods and metrics heretofore unknown or unperceived.  Applying a modicum of discernment to our present socioeconomic paralysis, one can clearly see that our Pythagorean obsession with the ‘created order’ being essentially a numeric inevitability gives us no escape from our numerically constrained archetypes and memes.

Kuhn’s inquiry, taken together with his critics’ analysis of his work, collectively seem to conspicuously ignore one artifact – NUMBERS.  In all of my blog posts of late, I’ve toiled to admonish us to find the unquestioned assumption upon which the balance of our experience and understanding is poised and, once found, jiggle the fulcrum and see what happens.  Like an engineer balancing a spinning turbine; like a piano tuner seeking perfect pitch; one can apprehend coherence and frictionless function best by willfully introducing dissonance and then tuning it away.  To that end, I would like to propose the following:

The stronger the impulse to enumerate, the greater absence of trust.

Let us explore this for a moment.  Whether for Euclidean metrics to describe; King David’s egoic impulse to count and conscript; Pharaonic and Persian mandates to tax; or Newtonian requirements to codify finitude; the impulse to number bridges the sacred and profane with remarkable consistence throughout much of humanity’s collective expressions.  Through numbers we can limit and delimit; we can compare and contrast; and, under the euphemism called ‘the scientific method’, we can compute divination and regress our world into a series of statistically reproducible dogmatically held postulates.  Challenge the assumption that humanity and its ‘progress’ requires numbers and you’ve entered the Olympian Halls as a mere mortal.

I had the good fortune of sitting with one of the world’s most respected quant traders a few years ago and demonstrated what was possible when you understood market dynamics with intent-based linguistic analysis rather than using the nine degrees of freedom (the statistical principle of the number random vectors in an expression or model prior to the final deterministic completion of a model or set) by which numerical analysis is constrained.  The 25 degrees of freedom afforded by the alphabet and the nearly 1.013 million degrees of freedom afforded by words in global use today far surpasses any numerically constrained model and, when deployed, gives far superior understanding of market dynamics.  However, whether it’s 9, 25, or 1.013 million degrees of freedom by which we enumerate and denominate, we’re still limiting our understanding when we’re constrained by finite symbols (numbers, letters, or words). 

So back to Thomas Kuhn: why is it that neither he, nor Karl Popper (one of his great critics), nor any of his other critics were willing to challenge the concept that, through the applications of numbers, we may have actually extinguished human potential rather than seeing its progress?  After all, some of the greatest puzzles which plague modern self-proclaimed ‘scientists’ is how pre-linguistically recorded civilizations achieved great feats of navigation, architecture, and communication “without numbers” or “without knowing about zero”.  Could it be possible that they achieved these wonders because they didn’t have numbers?

Now all of this becomes quite relevant when we realize that numbers serve a very important role in our social systems and their possible irrelevance (or even the contemplation thereof) can be quite disconcerting.  We’re sure that we need numbers.  But, I would suggest that our “need” for numbers is inversely correlated to our access to and acceptance of TRUST.  Certainty, laws, science, wealth, identity, power, and faith all hinge on numbers and their control.  If one had absolute confidence in the perpetual source of animating energy in the universe – as propagator, transmitter, and consumer in simultaneity – than the need to constrain or describe anything would be rendered obsolete.  It’s when we lack confidence in the undeniable and absolute abundance of universal energy – when we need to harness, control, or lord over the same – that enumeration is perceived as necessary.  And when this shows up in the microcosm of economics and currency, the postulate seems to be reinforced.  My desire for a “stored unit of value” – the consensus definition of money – is a proxy for my inability to TRUST that future performance will be remembered, much less honored.  By introducing the surrogate of an artifact of value storage and exchange, I’m stating that the TRUST between transacting parties is untrustworthy when compared to the confidence in an inanimate consensus artifact.  The artifact, which can only express value when used in a community sharing a consensus illusion is, by definition, a paradox.  Since I don’t trust you, I’ll trust a system in which we share an illusion where a disembodied enumeration instrument has more “faith and confidence” than the individuated actors in the system. 

You want to try something fun?  Try a day without numbers.  See what happens when you show up without metrics or constraints.  See what happens when all you have to deploy in transaction with others is yourself and your TRUST.  Try it and then let me know if this may be the fulcrum of our society’s undoing and the infinite mass through which something essentially new and human might be born.

My dear friend and colleague Richard David Hames published a great companion discussion on his Five Literacies blog at http://fiveliteracies.typepad.com/richard_hames/2012/05/dichotomies.html

A More Perfect (Monetary) Union

I recently had a wonderful correspondence with a dear friend and colleague in which I had written the following two sentences in response to an impassioned inquiry into how to solve a funding need for a truly inspired project.  In response to my letter, these two sentences were described as “dense” and “in need of unpacking”.  As I wrote my response, I realized the applicability of this conversation to many others and so, courtesy of my friend’s valuable criticism, I’m inviting you all into a deeper discussion.

“…I have never encountered anyone who has an ‘abundance of scarcity’ when it comes to accessing money.”

“I have frequently encountered impulses who want to emerge without being defiled by the surrogacy that comes with money.”

Let’s start with the first absolute statement.  Money, in terms of Integral Accounting, is a surrogation-utility of value transfer.  Money, in its agnostic form is neither credit nor debt; neither sovereign nor communal.  Rather it is the manifestation of a consensus promise – explicitly in the form of an artifact – of temporally stored value.  When one states a “lack” or “abundance of scarcity” around accessing money, this can often be discerned as a symptom emblematic of either a detachment from communities of trusted consensus or an obsession with a particular form of artifact.  In a fiat or central bank-linked debt denominated currency system like the one in which we find ourselves, we may perceive scarcity of dollars in a world overflowing with artifacts of temporally stored value. 

The effort required to expand our understanding of Money in an inclusive sense is monumental if we’re looking for dollars, euros, rupees, or yuan.  While I can accept on one level that one may have an abundant scarcity of accessing these sub-class artifacts, I would suggest that the deeper issue is an incapacity to see other value storage units that are present for which no explicit account has been taken.  Too often our self-imposed exile from deeper interaction and engagement comes from our unquestioned assumption that we are compelled to suspend our inquiry when it comes to money because “the system” mandates our acquiescence to its ubiquity.  This is merely the Stockholm Syndrome in which we are confined within, and defenders of, the agency of our captivity.  Worst of all, we heartily defend our dependence on a utility inextricably linked to our enslavement sacrificing even our most deeply held aspirations on the altar of, “I would have, but for…”

My second observation – if you can imagine it – is even more controversial.  Much of the world has seen well-intended actors watch helplessly as great animating impulses whither for the “lack” of money.  What is abundantly ironic in this sociopathic state is our unwillingness to consider that the impulse may not want to be animated by an artifact that could one day destroy its purity.  Many people would classify me as an entrepreneur.  I find that classification repugnant not for its literal illusion to the ring master of an itinerant French circus but rather for the mistaken cavalier personality customarily associated with the moniker.  Among the endeavors of greatest consequence in my over two decades of commercial business, funding neither animated nor validated the efforts I’ve undertaken.  In fact, when I set out to create M•CAM in the mid to late 90s, I knew that the greatest market inefficiency was the unaccounted value for state-sanctioned artifacts of human innovation (the fact that banks took intangible asset liens but could not count them as explicitly valued collateral).  The scale of the commercial banking side of our business alone is conservatively measured in the trillions of dollars!  However, the explicit requirement that our business had was not reckless monetary financing – it was ratable balance sheets.  Inviting investors and financial institutions into a dialogue where they were asked to keep their money but merely lease access to their assets was the most perplexing value proposition they’d ever heard.  And, mind you, this is while dot com madness was frothing a bubble with valuation multiples exceeding 1000 times revenue or more on ludicrous delusions.  Their incredulity notwithstanding, our company persisted for over 14 years and it is only now that people are starting to get that to access the largest banking and conventional capital market in modern history, we don’t need funding!  We need collaborative asset counter-party agreements. 

You see, even at the white hot core of the monetary and banking system, the single largest monetary denominated transaction in history (yes, even bigger than Facebook’s IPO or Apple’s ephemeral valuation) can only occur in an ecosystem where counter-party asset interaction (in Integral Accounting parlance “Custom & Culture”) is the predominant value.  Here’s the rub.  When we take a step back from what we perceive to be indicted for “lack of monetary endorsement or funding”, we may very well be seeing an opportunity to be unconstrained from the limitations imposed by a debt-based currency.  Now many of you will see what I'm describing and contextualize it some paternalistic 60s or 70s communal nostalgia.  This is not the case.  Right now, the biggest economic (monetary) growth engine on the planet realizes that narrow views confusing "currency" with "money" is contrary to its growth.  When China recently entered into its transaction clearing agreements with Japan and India, the value did not accrue to their respective currencies.  Rather, it accrued to the Custom & Culture friction reduction between cross-border businesses.  While the explicit currency clearing agreement uses money, the value of the AGREEMENT is an explicit acknowledgement of Custom & Culture harmonization.  Neither the Japanese nor the Indian agreement explicitly expanded wealth transfer or trade but both did create a common market into which new types of relationships would be possible (saying nothing of their disintermediation of the U.S. dollar dependency). 

Much of what we collectively judge to be impaired by insufficiency in funding is, to the contrary, begging to thrive independent of money’s insidious constrictions.  In their recent Thrive: The Movie, Foster and Kimberly Gamble stated that on their path to documenting narratives of humanity thriving, they kept running into the horror of humanity held hostage by money and its nefarious lords.  My heart breaks when I see a film nominally about ‘thriving’ conclude with a call to abolish the Federal Reserve.  Money isn’t the problem.  The Federal Reserve isn’t the problem.  Heinous, sociopathic corporate titans aren’t the problem.  Large banks aren’t the problem.  The problem is a humanity that elects to actually empower these entities by continuing to participate in the system devoid of willful, more expansive, more imaginative engagement.  I’ve spent time with the people and the corporations of the Gamble’s inquiry.  And, as odd as it sounds, many of the people (yes, there are real people in the upper echelons of the rarified 1%) are enthusiastic when they hear about initiatives to diversify the calcified dependence on an anachronistic debt-laden dollar denominated system.  And while I would not suggest that there is unanimity in the stratosphere of the financial elite with respect to an appetite to abdicate the power they perceive to wield, I have had too many experiences of profound behavioral shifts from those that see an alternative form of engagement explicitly apart from their monetary narrative.

To conclude that every illumined path must eschew all currency artifacts is the stuff of myths and is a luxury of the elite.  But to ascribe to currency a supremacy at the expense of all other temporal value surrogates is to serve oneself Hemlock and begrudge the death.  We must realize that the persistent passion, when not attended with money or any other accounting artifact around which we perceive animating necessity, may still be an impulse worth following.  In one instance, our struggle to provision it may merely be a teacher to allow us to see the world in a new manner.  In another, it may give us the opportunity to discern the true emergent signal clarified from the metaphor we constructed when the impulse first arose.  And in yet another instance, we may be invited to manifest an impulse without defiling it with provisioning that is incompatible with the intended scale, duration, or intent. 

Now don’t you wish I had just stated all of this in two short sentences?  Oh, that’s right, I did.  But I’m thankful that you needed me to unpack the “denseness”.  I hope this helps.