Dumbo Feather – February 2019

We have to stop doing that. We have to solve for stakeholder wellbeing. And I don’t mean

just one stakeholder. I mean, count all the stakeholders and all of them have to do well when

you’re done. So in our case we picked out the three big systems: good money, good food,

good energy.

And we believe that they were super critical because without money, food and energy,

a person’s in dire straits. You could say healthcare, housing, there are other big systems

that matter just as much. But working in those three systems we got insights that actually

translate pretty well into others because it’s systems thinking. So in energy we learned that

a lot of societal problems are political and we’ve allowed corporations to have too much

influence over the rules of the game. So political is even more pernicious than just normal

people political stuff. In food I think we realise how much of the ecosystem is tied together.

And in money I simply found out that there is nothing good about concentrations of money.

Not one thing. Not efficiency, nothing. It’s just bad. So the only system that we think will work

is one of distributed power where everybody has a bit of power and nobody has too much.

There’s a woman who wrote the book The Colour of Money which has a really good insight.

Which is, why would you expect black banks and black capitalism to change the pernicious

system of money when you’ve debilitated black capitalism by not giving it any capital? It

takes capital to make capital and it certainly takes capital to change capital. What’s true

for black banks is also true for our bank. We lack the capital strength, the liquidity and the

diversification to take on the whole system. But nonetheless,

It isn’t even good enough to have a hundred good black banks in a bad system. It’s the system

that has to change. So we think about big levers for changing the system, one of which could

be policy. We can’t get it done right now because the corporations are writing all the rules.

So we might like to re-instill in our country what’s called the Volcker Rule. Which is the

prohibition of banks trading securities in their own account. We might wish that forever.

We’re never going to get it passed right now, particularly under this administration and

its lousy administrators. But we could possibly band together as banks and say, “We’re not

allowing the money centre banks into the FDIC insurance system because they’ve violated all

the risk covenants of prudent self-insurance. They’re using deposit capital to finance hedge

funds. We should kick them out.” I imagine there being a populist movement that supports

that and maybe puts the administration up against the wall to have to at least re-invoke the

Volcker Rule or something. But then even beyond that, outside the banking system, I think

we have to recognise and insist on the co-operative nature of all these sectors and natural

monopolies. Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube, banking, agriculture. Agriculture is a

natural monopoly based on land that we aren’t recognising as one and private property rules

are screwing it up. We’re not even treating land as land anymore. Like, as soil. We’re treating

it as space. So I think we have to push on to what some economists are calling “platform

co-operatives,” using our power of defection to say to Facebook or YouTube or Netflix: “Half

of your viewers are going to leave unless you give them a microshare equity in the platform.”

And by the way once we all have some ownership in that network, maybe your net worth

Right.

we have the insights to know that nothing less

than a system’s paradigm shift is going to work.

It’s not going to be good enough to be a good

bank in a bad system.

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KAT TAYLOR

DUMBO FEATHER