[p2p-research] Fwd: TRANSFORMING FINANCE STATEMENT --please sign if you agree!
Michel Bauwens
michelsub2004 at gmail.com
Fri Sep 10 10:35:31 CEST 2010
Dear Chris:
can you publish this statement on our blog, with the following paragraph
starting it as a blockquote?
see:
*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.*
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Admin for Hazel Henderson <admin at hazelhenderson.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 2:06 AM
Subject: TRANSFORMING FINANCE STATEMENT --please sign if you agree!
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>, "Zipp, Susan J." <
suezipp at mcn.org>, "Zipp, Susan J." <suezipp at worldcitizen.org>, Gijs
Graafland | Planck Foundation <graafland.gb at planck.org>
Dear Friends:
Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and John Fullerton's newly launched
Capital Institute co-convened, with Prof. Leo Burke of the Mendoza School of
Business at Notre Dame and Steve Waddell of Networking Action, an expert
meeting and TV taping here August 29-Sep1st. Here is our Statement,
highlights of which will be incorporated into a Press Release next week.
Many of you have already signed it. Please add your name and title:
*Transforming Finance Group's Call 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 and 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<http://www.ethicalmarkets.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/survey-results-beyond_gdp_poll_globescan_sept_07.ppt#256,1,International+Public+Opinion+on++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 <http://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 <http://www.greentransitionscoreboard.com/>. 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<http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/productdetail.kmod?productid=70>
*, 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*
Bryan Martel, Managing Director, Environmental Capital Group LLC
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*
Lawrence Bloom, Executive Chairman, Bhairavi Energy; Chairman, Connolly &
Callaghan, London
Rinaldo Brutoco, JD, Founding President, World Business Academy
Christina Carvalho Pinto, President, Full Jazz Communications Group; and
Mercado Ético/Ethical Markets Brazil
Ladislau Dowbor, Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil
Ashok Khosla, Chairman, Development Alternatives, Delhi, India
Ron Nahser MBA, PhD, Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul
University
Ann Pettifor, Fellow of the new economics foundation, and co-founder of the
PRIME network of economists
Richard Spencer, Head of Sustainability, Technical Strategy Department,
Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales – ICAEW, UK
Tessa Tennant, Co-Founder, Association for Sustainable & Responsible
Investment in Asia, ASrIA, UK and Hong Kong
Shann Turnbull, PhD, Principal: International Institute for Self-governance;
Founding life member and Fellow, Australian Institute of Company Directors
Eva Willmann de Donlea, MBA, Director, Sustainability Intelligence Pty Ltd,
& Chair, The Climate Council Inc., Australia **
We already have press interest and we will send you the Press Release, If
you are a signer., we can add your name if you would like to comment to
journalists.
Warmest wishes and our thanks for your leadership over so many years!
Hazel Henderson and John Fullerton
*HAZEL HENDERSON***
*D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, author, futurist, president - Ethical Markets Media, LLC*
*PO Box 5190, St. Augustine, FL 32085; Phone: 904/829-3140, Fax:
904/826-4194*
*www.EthicalMarkets.com**, **www.EthicalMarkets.tv**, **
www.hazelhenderson.com**,
**www.calvert-henderson.com*<http://www.calvert-henderson.com/>
**
Check TV listings for *Growing the Green Economy* on the Documentary Channel
and our latest show *The Money Fix* on PBS affiliates.**
--
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