– from a The Finance Lab conversation responding to a finance learning game idea raised by Mark Gater –

Phil Henshaw on 3/18/10

How about if you made it fairly realistic, allowing money holdings to continue growing normally even when the amount of product doesn’t, as it we have now. Keynes proposed his change in the rules for that circumstance, for how to coordinate the emergence of “peak stuff” with a matching “peak money”. Do you think it would be worth designing a money game to see what winners would do with their multiplying ownership of finite goods in that case, and if they’d discover the way out? Continue reading “Distoppley”, the game after “Monopoly” →

I wish I could get the next level of thinking to spread as easily as the old thinking keeps spreading… How we are all “buying better products” is making waves in nature that are indeed simply too big.  But we are regularly taking the wrong message from that and not aware of how we’re making them bigger.

Is there is something wrong with making waves in nature?

It’s so important to NOT take that as meaning that there is something wrong with making waves in nature. What we need is to discover why the waves we make have kept getting so much bigger. Continue reading Green products or blue, doesn’t matter if they multiply… →

Holding corporate money to a higher standard of truthfulness can now becomes profitable with the supreme court’s removal of all controls on corporate speech ..

Friends,

I’ve been sort of waiting for this.

“Fiduciary duty > noun: the legal duty of a fiduciary to act in the best interests of the beneficiary”

It occurred to me some time ago that it would be possible to completely reverse a supreme court decision on campaign finance like what we just got today.

You just need to force “fiduciary duty” to be reinterpreted from having its *habitual meaning* to its *natural language meaning*. Fiduciary duty actually requires acting in the best interests of stockholders and the public *without qualification*.

How it has been treated is meaning that trustees are only obligated to maximize their own short term financial gains in which shareholders would get some share, as if money were the only interest stockholders and the public could have. The world has changed radically in the time since that usage developed.

Now that business is directly causing major threats to the survival our the ecology and economy by broadly shirking responsibility for their environmental impacts and disrespecting their own natural limits and sustainability, the tables are completely turned. Businesses make the physical decisions for how our life support system evolves and adapts to its environment, and so physically steer our path toward or away from sustainability.

The actual meaning of the word “fiduciary” then implies acting in the whole interest of stockholders and the public. That would mean that their public speech would need to meet unusually high standards of balance, clarity, truthfulness and realistic assessment of the possibilities.

How would that sound? ….just fabulous, just simply fabulous!

It seems it could be the law today simply by someone using it, as it already is the law today.  ;-)

Maybe this is a break in the log jam… in disguise, a real opportunity to ask the tough questions.

Take China’s promise to slow carbon release by decreasing its economic carbon intensity. The strange fact, that points to our need to deeply rethink how we’ve been trying to slow down ALL kinds of environmental impacts, is that reducing carbon intensity does not reduce carbon emissions. Continue reading China, reducing “carbon intensity”, not carbon emissions →