Crashing The Party

Jay OwenReforming Global Finance, SRI/ESG News, Beyond GDP

“We at Ethical Markets supported IEX in its accreditation at the SEC as the USA’s 13th national securities exchange.  Now the newly launched MEMEX  (Members Exchange) is trying to compete, but apparently without the fairness and ethical features of IEX and its famous “speed bump” which helps to  repulse high-frequency (HFT) traders.

I reviewed two recent books by experts: LSE Professor and green bonds co-founder Nick Silver’s “Finance, Society and Sustainability“ (2018)  and Leontief Award economist Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”(2018). They  help explain  that the function of finance was  deemed a public utility for “value-redistribution“ in the past,  so as to service the needs of the real economy of “value-producers“.  Since these financial services went from non-profit, self-regulated services owned by their broker-members to becoming for-profit companies in the 1990s and listing themselves on stock exchanges  in late 2000s, they  should revert to terms: “value-extractors and re-distributors“!

Ethical Markets convened a seminar and produced the report “Perspectives on Reforming Electronic Markets and Trading“(2015) and a paper: “FINTECH: Good & Bad News For Sustainable Finance“ (2016), for the UN Inquiry on Sustainable Finance (www.unepinquiry.org).

This is why we supported IEX and its founder Brad Katsuyama and urged our fellow members of the United Nations Principles of Responsible Investing (www.unpri.org) to liaise with IEX. We will be watching this new entrant MEMX  and how the SEC views its application.  Public markets still need reforms, which is why so much financing now is channeled through private liquidity networks and family offices!

~Hazel Henderson, Editor“

Crashing The Party