Principles of Fiduciary Asset Investment Restraint
Description
'Mother Nature' (Jessie Henshaw?):
"The FAIR rules act as an overflow valve, to redirect excess accumulation of unearned income, used by investors to extract more, back to the pond instead, relieving pressure as if investors collectively showing self-restraint rules safe investment practice for the earth.
Similar to a UBI that provides a Universal Basic Income to every person, FAIR_Money sets a UBD, Universal Basic Distribution, a standard rate at which investors need to distribute their wealth.
Finance works by taking profits from the commons to use for taking more, escalating the financial drain on freely circulating funds. In times like these, the FAIR rules ask investors to spend a share accumulated profits on qualifying long term societal needs, an intervention at scale a bit like a world “Marshal Plan”, doing great good while sustaining the profitability and relieving the growing drain of finance on the producing economy.
The rate of asset spending might start low and increase as needed to bring about balance." (https://synapse9.com/signals/author/mothernature/)
Discussion
'Mother Nature':
"The world financial system has but one value, to use the earth and human societies to use for maximizing the growing concentration if financial wealth, without any primary concern for the resulting depletion of natural capitals or disruption of human societies. To secure the wealth of nature and humanity we must then have fair Fiduciary Asset Investment Restraints to prevent the rapid decline of whole system value.
FAIR is an appealing, comprehensive, and eminently fair way to rebalance the compounding of profits with the long term needs of the rest of the earth and humanity. As part of everyone’s shared duty to serve common interests. That would include correcting the inevitable imbalance between steady earnings from work and exponentially growing earnings for investors who add investment profits to grow their investments. FAIR calls for gradually reducing, not eliminating that imbalance, toward new balance, to not stifle individual financial creativity but to limit its otherwise punishing demands on nature and society. Spending a fixed annual share of accumulated profits from investments in times of need, like today, guided by indicators of harmful societal and environmental economic externalities, would guide investors to value the gift of rich environments and societies.
A portion of business or individual investment assets accumulated from profits (the part that grows exponentially) would be annually spent on qualified impact investments for relieving the excess burdens of compound investment. It’s actually a strategy first discussed by JM Keynes in Chapter 16 iii & iv of his General Theory. I’ve interpreted it as an “overflow valve” to relieve unhealthy burdens on the anthropic earth system to make the macro-economic effect understandable, dialing back extractive investment to relieve the whole economy’s pressure on all our cultural and planetary bounds.
The level of relief from increasing demands on the system would be adjusted with on experience, for argument sake starting at 10% of accumulated profits a year. That would be adjusted to gradually stabilize the economy’s impacts on earth and society at a comfortable level, both for long term profit and to treat a living world with respect. In the end, finance would stabilize and generate steady profit for priority needs, as an ecology and creative cash-cow business. In Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, the equivalent would be for the rich farmer to see the error and use the excess cattle to relieve community suffering, such as using the surplus for periodic feasts to save the community and the commons, becoming a welcomed hero rather than the devil himself." (https://synapse9.com/signals/author/mothernature/)