Press Release: Financial Group Recognizes Finance As A Global Commons
The Committee on Transforming Finance, a multinational network of career market participants: investors, asset managers, business executives, philanthropists, academics and financial authors, holds that the financial system is a global commons and calls for a new set of rules that would allow it to be governed in full conformance with this reality.
We as beneficiaries and active participants in capital markets affirm our responsibility to reform them from within, so that all those still-voiceless stakeholders who are now excluded and exploited can be heard and their communities appropriately served. If we are to avoid future systemic failures in the global financial system, we must re-think the underlying design flaws that precipitated the financial crises. We must move beyond Bretton Woods, where this financial commons was first defined within a set of global rules and institutions in 1945, as well as beyond recent attempts at reforms that have not addressed fundamental questions, including:
- What is the purpose of finance in human societies?
- What human values and principles should guide finance and its institutions?
- What are the limits of markets, money-based trading and transacting within the global commons?
- How can finance serve equitable, ecologically-sustainable governance of the global commons (climate, biodiversity, oceans, atmosphere, space) while reducing inequality, respecting human rights and acknowledging non-market-based, traditional societies?
Because we all benefit from healthy eco-systems, financially sound institutions and thriving human communities, rethinking the design assumptions of the regulatory framework of capital markets is an urgent global priority. Our call comes in the face of insufficient response by national governments to the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the demonstrated failure of traditional economics theory that markets are efficient in allocating capital, growing global interdependence, intensifying environmental crises, global social inequity and the technological interconnectedness of global financial markets. These 24-hour markets are dependent on satellites, internet and other technologies which were largely financed by taxpayers as public infrastructure investments.
Financial markets are founded on trust – now eroded by the irresponsible and unethical behavior of many players, including many of our leading financial institutions. Unbridled, greed-driven speculation, the improper use of public infrastructure technology for activities such as high-frequency trading, together with a misguided self-regulatory ideology reduced system resilience, damaged trust and thereby damaged the financial system commons. This led to unhealthy “financialization” now dominating vital businesses and activities in the world’s real economies. In order to re-build trust, the Transforming Finance initiative seeks to democratize finance and widen the debate on reform by including all stakeholders and the innovations of many experts and groups advocating deeper re-structuring and reforms.
The key operating mechanisms necessary to build trust in the Global Financial Commons include:
- Stabilizing the value of national currencies and establishing a reliable global currency regime.
- Channeling savings into productive and sustainable investments that build real wealth.
- Managing fail-safe, transparent payment and settlement systems.
- Appropriate, dependable, transparent tools for managing financial risks and assuring that issuers, insurers and counterparties are accountable.
To correctly reframe global finance as a commons, the finance system needs to incorporate the following commons principles:
- Stakeholder co-governance,
- Access for all participants without sudden, cyclical capital market disruptions,
- Acknowledgment of the intrinsic value and assignment of rights to the environment,
- Decision-making at the most local level possible (subsidiarity),
- A commitment to environmental sustainability and social justice globally.
Since Bretton Woods, this commons approach has been expanded and well articulated in the theories of global public goods and their financing, and in many international UN conventions: the International Labor Organization (ILO), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the international rule-making bodies for securities exchanges and accounting standards as well as the Universal Postal Union, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and the UN Principle for Responsible Investing. Many multi-stakeholder groups include the carbon market of the Kyoto Protocol and its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the Global Reporting Initiative, the Club of Rome, the Carbon Disclosure Project, the World Social Forum, the Earth Council, the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, and financial groups, including the Investors Network on Climate Change, the Microcredit Summit Campaign, New Rules for Bretton Woods, the Global Compact and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change.
The conventional wisdom of the “tragedy of the commons” articulated by biologist Garrett Hardin (Science, 13 December 1968, 1243) who maintained that common property is poorly managed, was based on outdated economic theory now challenged by endocrinologists, behavioral and brain sciences. This outdated view has been challenged by many scholars, who have documented how many societies over centuries have developed sophisticated mechanisms for sustainable decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, allocation of common resources and rights.
We applaud the progress made by many innovators and groups as traditional markets for what economists call “rival goods” have morphed toward serving today’s markets based on new common scarcities and needs of the now 6.8 billion member human family for: clean air and water, restoring lands, forests, biodiversity and providing sustainable ecosystem productivity and stabilizing our global climate. These new needs require a commons approach where markets, as tools, can be designed to allocate these indivisible “non-rival” public goods and infrastructures for equitable access and opportunities for human development. Traditional competition for private goods is complemented by cooperation in organizing larger markets for public goods and services.
We will continue our own efforts to modernize capital markets to serve human societies as one of the tools for managing the global commons. As our Chinese colleagues say, markets are good servants but bad masters. Thus we will continue re-designing models of asset-management beyond outdated “efficient markets” and “rational actors” theories to expand use of “triple bottom line,” ESG (environment, social, governance), integrated, ethical auditing standards and the criteria of thermodynamic efficiency: Energy Return on Investment (EROI) as well as Social Return on Investment (SROI). Prices must include social and environmental costs of production reflected in company accounts. Corporate funds and private money should never corrupt votes in politics.
Beyond these new company accounting standards, we support similar innovations to overhaul GNP/GDP money-based measures of national progress still using obsolete macroeconomics, ignoring social and environmental costs in national accounts (UNSNA). Beyond economics, systems metrics include the many indicators of health, education, environment, poverty gaps and quality of life, human wellbeing and goals of happiness presented at the European Union’s Beyond GDP Conference, November 2007 (www.beyond-gdp.eu), and the global survey, International Public Opinion Measuring National Progress: 2007, by Globescan and Ethical Markets Media which found huge majorities in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Kenya and Russia that favor including these new indicators of human development. The next survey update will be released by the BBC in late 2010, including China and the USA.
We draw attention to many innovations to serve our common needs in stabilizing climate and creating equitable tools for the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012, including: a floor price on carbon, removing the billions of dollar subsidies on fossil fuels, equitably allocating by auction all permits to emit carbon, reforming the Clean Development Mechanism and assuring that markets created for reducing atmospheric carbon and other pollutants damaging air, water, biodiversity and ecosystems are transparent, strictly regulated to prevent speculation. We recommend that proceeds from any sale of permits accrue to the public at large and to citizens of each country, and to finance the new 21st century infrastructure and public goods required in the global transition now underway from early Industrial Era technologies based on fossil fuels and unsustainable resource extraction (www.GTInitiative.org).
The shift to cleaner, greener, information- rich, more sustainable, equitable economies of the Solar Age is accelerating, as measured by the Green Transition Scoreboard. We support the carbon market of the UNFCCC and the proposed International Bank for Environmental Settlements (www.undp.org), both which were authored by Graciela Chichilnisky, and expanding the “common trust” models of Alaska’s Permanent Fund and the Norwegian Fund for holding revenues from oil in trust for all citizens and future generations, and that these trust funds (Peter Barnes, Who Owns the Sky?, 2001) include other energy resources: solar wind, geothermal, hydro, etc.
Therefore, we the undersigned share a vision of a world in which the financial system serves a flourishing and sustainable human, ecological and spiritual future. We pledge to continue our efforts in Transforming Finance and invite all others who share and work toward these goals to co-sign this declaration.
Co-conveners of the Committee on Transforming Finance
Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, author, President and Founder, Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil), syndicated columnist, InterPress Service, member, Club of Rome *
John Fullerton, MBA, Founder, Capital Institute, former Managing Director, J.P.Morgan *
Prof. Leo Burke, Mendoza School of Business, University of Notre Dame *
Steve Waddell, MBA, Ph.D, author, Societal Learning and Change: Innovation with Multi-Stakeholder Strategies, Principal of NetworkingAction *
Drafting Committee on Transforming Finance
Ellen Hodgson Brown, JD, author, Web of Debt, columnist, Huffington Post
Prof. Graciela Chichilnisky, Columbia University, UNESCO Chair in Economics and Statistics, author, Saving Kyoto, creator of the International banks for Environmental Settlements and the carbon market of the Kyoto Protocol.
Prof. Zhouying Jin, author, Global Technological Change, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing
Alan F Kay, PhD, founder AutEx, author, Locating Consensus for Democracy
Karl Kleissner, PhD, Co-founder KL Felicitas Foundation
Rosalinda Sanquiche, MA, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media
Katie Teague, MA Counseling Psychology, founder Storm Cloud Media LLC, director/producer Money & Life
Stuart Valentine, MBA, President, Iowa Progressive Asset Management
Signatories
Rebecca Adamson, Founder and President First Peoples Worldwide, USA
Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, Thailand
Lawrence Bloom, Executive Chairman, Bhairavi Energy; Chairman, Connolly & Callaghan, London
Rinaldo Brutoco, JD, Founding President, World Business Academy, USA
Christina Carvalho Pinto, President, Full Jazz Communications Group; and Mercado Ético/Ethical Markets Brazil
Sam Daley-Harris, Founder, RESULTS the and Microcredit Summit Campaign, USA
Sami S. David, MD, Author and Director, Fifth Avenue Fertility, USA; co-host
Susan Davis, President, Capital Missions Company, USA and Ecuador
Mark T. Donohue, Babson College, Clean Technology Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Ladislau Dowbor, Prof. of Economics, Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil
Riane Eisler, author of The Real Wealth of Nations, President, Center for Partnership Studies
Prof. Orio Giarini, Director, The Risk Institute, Geneva – Trieste, EU – Zagreb, Croatia
Gijs Graafland, Director, Planck Foundation (research institute for energy politics and energy finance), Amsterdam, Netherlands
Prof. Heitor Gurgulino de Souza, Vice-President, Club of Rome; Former Rector of the UN University
Michael Haradom, President, Fersol and ALINA (Latin American Association of National Chemical Industries), Brazil
Prof. Dr. Margrit Kennedy, Founder, MonNetA – Money Network Alliance for the Development and Implementation of Complementary Currencies, Germany
Ashok Khosla, Chairman, Development Alternatives, Delhi, India
Ross Jackson, co-founder, Gaia Trust, Copenhagen, Denmark
Alejandro Litovsky, Director, Volans Innovation Lab, UK
David Loye, author, Bankrolling Evolution, Measuring Evolution, co-founder, General Evolution Research Group and The Darwin Project
Marc Luyckx Ghisi, Senior Advisor, Business Solutions Europa, Brussels, Belgium
Jordan MacLeod, Founder, Partner and Director, Cornerstone Global Associates; author, New Currency: How Money Changes the World as We Know It
Tony Manwaring, Chief Executive, Tomorrow’s Company, UK
Susan Meeker-Lowry, Author, Economics as if the Earth Really Mattered and Invested in the Common Good; Publisher, Gaian Voices, USA
Paul E. Metz, PhD, co-founder European Business Council for Sustainable Energy; speaker of Dutch Alliance for a Fair & Green Deal, Brussels, Belgium
Terry Mollner, Co-Founder, Calvert Social Investment Funds and Foundation; Chair, Stakeholders Capital, Inc.; Member of Board of Ben & Jerry’s. USA
Robert A. G. Monks, Founder, ISS, The Corporate Library, the Lens Fund, a founding trustee of the Federal Employees Retirement System, author of Corpocracy and other books, USA
Herman Mulder, Board Member, GRI, TEEB (the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) and Tomorrow’s Company; initiator of the Equator Principles, NL
Ron Nahser MBA, PhD, Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul University,USA
Ann Pettifor, Fellow of the new economics foundation, and co-founder of the PRIME network of economists, UK
Simon Rich, Educator (Duke University), Investor, Farmer, former CEO; board member, Capital Institute
James Robertson, Working for A Sane Alternative; author, Creating New Money: A Monetary Reform for the Information Age, UK
Philip Sadler, CBE, Senior Fellow, Tomorrow’s Company, Vice President, Ashridge Business School, UK
Elisabet Sahtouris, author, A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us; consultant on ecological finance, EU
Robert W. Shaw, Jr., President, Aretê Corporation, USA
Rena Shulsky David, Founder, Green Seal; CEO Shire Realty, USA; co-host
Richard Spencer, Co-convener, Finance Lab; editor, Journal of ICAEW, UK
Woody Tasch, Founder, Slow Money; board member Investors Circle, USA
Tessa Tennant, Co-Founder, Association for Sustainable & Responsible Investment in Asia, ASrIA, UK and Hong Kong
Tim Toben, President, New Economics Institute – NEI, USA
Shann Turnbull, PhD, Principal: International Institute for Self-governance; Founding life member and Fellow, Australian Institute of Company Directors, Australia
Allen White, Senior Vice President , Tellus Institute, Boston
Eva Willmann de Donlea, MBA, Director, Sustainability Intelligence Pty Ltd, Australia
We the undersigned ask you to sign our petition.
Melanie Feliciano
Mokhethi Moshoeshoe
Ian Browde
As the 21st century unfolds we are discovering that the emerging economy and its accompanying social, ethical, environmental, health, cultural and political meta-framework are all creating to a new way of relating to self, others, life on Earth and the Earth itself. Without this new, deliberate, conscious meta-context -- given so many people and such significant ecological changes already underway -- life could be almost intolerable for most. This is why I endorse this petition and support the wonderful, loving and spiritual work being proposed and undertaken.
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Patricia Hetter Kelso
Louis CF Bohtlingk, Founder/Director of World Finance Initiative and Care First World Ltd, The Nethe
Yes we can share the understanding that we, as humanity have the freedom to regulate the flow of money according to our deepest wishes and heart’s desire and that there is no need to accept the mess we are in; that we can find the clarity together to heal the financial world at its heart and that this is the same as the healing of our own heart. The healing of our own heart will give us the clarity to direct money in this new way.
HERMAN mulder
Financial sector should restore trust in it by being systemic in driving the Green & Inclusive Economy throughout its value chain
Hal Brill
Linda Buzzell-Saltzman, M.A., M.F.T.
As Herman Daly once said, "the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment." Until we recognize this simple fact, our financial statistics are based on fiction.
Rosalind Copisarow
Rachel Sinha
Milton D. Lower, PhD
Luis T. Gutierrez, Ph.D. The Pelican Web
Tony May
Thornton J. Parker
Author, What If Boomers Can't Retire? How to Build Real Security, Not Phantom Wealth
Jina Penn-Tracy, Owner, Raeheart Financial
Jan Juffermans
Member of the Dutch Platform for a Fair & Sustainable Economy, which has started the Alliance for a Fair & Green Deal in 2009.
I am glad that there is also a reference to the 'Beyond GDP-conference' in Europa, and I hope that the process will get a good follow up!
Alice Chapple
Director of Sustainable Financial Markets at Forum for the Future, UK
Jan Amkreutz
Because of digital technology as the handyman of human knowledge, we, the 7 billion humans currently alive, are the painters and the painting of a singularity in reality itself. While we live our last chance to become human, at we mean by "economy" has to change as deeply as life changed our planet.
thanks for the work you do.
Sharif Abdullah
Author, Creating a World That Works for All; Executive Director, Commonway Institute
Elisabet Sahtouris, PhD
As an evolution biologist, I note that our bodies evolved into collaboratives of 50-100 trillion units (cells) each of which is as complex as a large human city, with roughly 1,000 banks setting limits on stored-value debit cards that are recharged as needed with no repayment due. Our human error was making money itself a profitable commodity, and that must be undone. Trust your body to know how!
Nancy Roof
Angus Cunningham MBA, Principal, Authentix Coaches
"What human values and principles should guide finance and its institutions?"
A decade or so again I began to define the value disciplines that I felt Authentix Coaches should live by in our relationships with clients. In subsequent years, working with organizations to help them define their values, I made the amazing discovery that every organization has need of the same set of kernel value disciplines and also a core around those that are peculiar to the particular markets in which it operates. The kernel set is the following:
Honesty: The discipline of avoiding either falsehood or deception and of being reciprocally open about intents and evolving intentions
Verbal Integrity: The discipline of being true to one’s word, or promptly honourable in warning of exceptions arising because one was unable to anticipate intervening circumstances
Empathy: The discipline of being actively present to understand the needs, wants and interests of others in one’s client, team, prospect, or community and of eliciting or anticipating accurately the sensitivities likely to be excited by one’s desires to share or hide potentially painful or disturbing possibilities or hypotheses with such people
Accuracy: The discipline of caring enough about the communication of data, observations, facts, hypotheses, findings, questions, assertions, requests, and recommendations both to avoid misdirection and to engender mutual trust that the goals of the team/organization/community are being respected intelligently
Clarity: The discipline of making sure that a message, either outgoing or incoming, has been understood before concluding that a communication cycle is satisfactorily complete
Courage: The discipline of (1) either asserting or forbearing when seemingly idiotic convention supports the opposite, and (2) either accepting responsibility for a job, project, engagement, contract, person, team, organization, or community, or articulating honestly and accurately one’s reasons for declining to accept it – but only after carefully ascertaining that one is doing neither out of either bravado or egotistical desire for acclamation
Discretion: The discipline of making faithfully practical protection, or properly authorized recognition, of the proper ownership of valuable or sensitive information
Coherence: The discipline of (1) searching for, and either eliminating or explaining, the paradoxes underlying one’s own behaviour, assumptions and aims and (2) gently helping others to do the same.
Shouldn't these same value disciplines animate financial and political organizations? I suspect they do in some degree. But the power vested in such organizations to change the climate of cultures by which we will or will not transition to a fairer, greener, and more emotionally prosperous world, means that the margin of error allowable to leaders thereof is every day less than it used to be.
Sue van Eesteren
Only by 1st placing fair + just value (in monetary terms) on what Nature has gifted us to 'use' + using this Carefully, can we even begin to give what we create + do fair + just monetary value. We need to Care 1st for All Life, then we can fairly allocate monetary values.
Winsome McIntosh
Sandip Sen ( ecothrust)
Sustainability can be achieved only once we start using our resources efficiently. Whether it is Capital or Technology its efficient use is important to mankind. The problem is the US and European nations, even China along with the private players like the Wall Street Banks or the glitzy technology companies are generating using excessive capital to run the economies and business. Nobody is talking about optimum capacity utilisation in this age of maximisation. We are simply wasting resources and that must be stopped and perhaps re-allocated.
To achieve that we must start using the 4 forces of globalisation more effectively. Capital , Technology, Enterprise and Markets are the 4 forces of globalisation. We must use the Entrepreneurship and Mass Markets of the emerging economies and blend it with Technology and Capital from the West to create an efficient product flow cycle and meet the global demand. Mass markets is the only way we can make renewable energy and other key products cheaper and affordable for humanity which ultimately must benefit both the east and the west. Such cost reduction will enable us to use our resources more efficiently and make the balloon economics of today redundant and obselete. And cost reduction and better resource utilisation is the key to sustainability
Regulators as we know can be corrupted and easily marginilised. So it is only by achieving a streamlined global business cycle, that efficient resource utilisation can be achieved and the spin doctors of high finance can be marginalised.
Mary Sue Schmaltz
I would very much like to help move this forward in anyway possible. Let me know what I can do to add my energy to the effort.
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Stephen Viederman
A few brief comments:
-we must get away from defining ourselves as stakeHOLDERS.
We are in fact stakeOWNERS. HOLDER is passive; OWNERSHIP is active, and so should we all be more active.
-Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, was not about a true commons, but was about the problems of open access.
-HBS professor Michael Jensen's work on integrity (wholeness, honoring one's word...) as the basis for trust is highly relevant here.
-Finally, JK Galbraith's reflection (The Economics of innocent Fraud) that he learned during his varied career the difference betweens conventional wisdom (accepted belief) and reality, noting that reality always won.
Ernie Robson
I am please to add my name to this group of Visionaries who help humanity find its way to the global commons!
J.T. Brown III (C4DG.net)
This work is fundamental to creating ethical and sustainable economies. Enthusiastically supported!
Bernard Lietaer
The global monetary system as a planetary commons makes enormous good sense. Humanity needs a responsible, stable, sustainable monetary system, just as we need sustainability for the global oceans or the air. Furthermore, with cheap computing and communication widely available, the technologies for radical improvements in the monetary domain are now available...
Simran Sethi
Edward Fullbrook
Stewart Wallis
Michaela Walsh
Terry E. Hallman, Founder, People-Centered Economic Development
Elizabeth Florescu
Changing the present system of values and the economic paradigm is sine qua non for a potential switch towards sustainable development.
Mark Wallach
Robert B. Zevin
I welcome and enthusiastically endorse this statement. Congratulations to the convenors and co-authors who produced it. The human saga has taken a wrong turn. It is late, but still not too late, to reintroduce our connections with each other, with the whole of our wonderful environment and with our imperiled future, in our finance arrangements as well as all other aspects of our lives.
Aryt Alasti
