My daughter and I joined an estimated 50,000 demonstrators in Washington, D.C. marching against the XL Pipeline that would connect the Canadian Tar Sands to American refineries.  After a half century on this planet, I took to the streets.  Here’s why.

The “business as usual” arguments in favor of building the pipeline as articulated by the liberal and...

After visiting an awe-inspiring women’s empowerment program at work in several rural villages north of Delhi, our host at the Ashram, scanning his Blackberry, related the news: a horrific shooting…assault rifle…children slaughtered…in a school…in Connecticut (my son’s school is in the state)…and then after what seemed like an endless pause as I...

No scientist will tell you with certainty whether doping was the reason Lance Armstrong won any particular leg of his seven Tour de France titles. You know where I’m headed with this reasoning.

Bloomberg Businessweek put it rather succinctly on this week’s cover: “It’s Global Warming, STUPID.”

For the first time since 1984, not one challenge...

In her New York Times Magazine cover story on the fall of the well-regarded Ina Drew titled “Swallowed by the London Whale,” Susan Dominus ends the article quoting Drew’s former colleague who recently lamented with Drew: “You know, Ina, sometimes I think I’d give my right arm to return to those (good ol’) days at Chemical (Bank), you know?...

It’s officially election season, and (surprise) we’re off to a terrific start. There are plenty of very real short and medium term issues for the candidates to mold their ideologies around. Most notably, like much of the so-called “developed world,” the US has a jobs crisis, both in quantity and quality, that challenges modern capitalism for answers it does not have...

Like Lloyd Blankfein with the Abacus fiasco, and Jamie Dimon with “the whale trade,” Barclays CEO Bob Diamond has an unparalleled opportunity to surprise us this week during his appearance before Parliament to explain the most recent financial scandal involving the systematic manipulation of LIBOR, the benchmark interbank lending rate upon which hundreds of trillions of dollars...

Much needs to change in the Anthropocene, including our willingness to have constraints placed on our precious right to individual freedom.  This is particularly challenging for Americans whose country was founded on an Enlightenment-inspired understanding of freedom, uninformed by the advances of modern...

Much has been written about the trading—not hedging—debacle at JPMorgan.  Jamie Dimon’s mea culpa is intended to head off deeper questions. No cover-up on his watch—get out in front, be direct, deal with it, move on.  Right?  Not so fast.

Last week I participated in the inaugural Public Banking Institute conference in Philadelphia - not a coincidence, freedom from tyranny of the banks underscored the program.   When I first learned of this idea of state-owned banks as a solution to our economic challenges, I was a real skeptic.  Just what we need, our government...

Reactions to departing Goldman derivatives salesman Greg Smith’s “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” which appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times last week, have ranged from the hyperbolic — Robert Reich’s “...

Co-authored by Peter Malik, Director of Center for Market Innovation at the NRDC

Generation Investment Management’s recently released white paper calls for a “paradigm shift” to Sustainable Capitalism. It is an admirable and important contribution to the discussion...

I was honored to join Majora Carter, Eban Goodstein, and Elysa Hammond at the launch of Bard College's new MBA in Sustainability last week to discuss how finance has been a major factor driving our ecological and social crises and how fixing finance must be a part of the solution.  The ideas I presented - an all hands on deck, bottom-up and top-down/systemic approach to sustainable...

This former banker, and now sustainability investor and humble blogger, will not offer grand predictions for 2012.  Forecasting in a world of rising uncertainty suggests a lack of understanding about uncertainty.  Instead, inspired by my holiday reading, Debt: The First 5000 Years, by anthropologist...

Last week, I had the privilege of meeting Colonel Mark (“Puck”) Mykleby, recently retired from the US Marine Corps.  Puck was a “Top Gun” pilot, and finished his military career working in the Office of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, as a senior advisor on strategy reporting to Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. 

Last Friday, I participated in a Special Briefing on Capitol Hill in support of the Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). I came as a seasoned practitioner speaking on behalf of the real economy, not for the interests of the Wall Street trading community.  What I tried to convey was that what the US and World needs is enhanced capital market function, and that an FTT can help bring it...

Bloomberg View has joined its Wall Street customers in coming out against the Financial Transactions Tax proposed by Germany and France, and recommended by the European Union, declaring it politically unfeasible while undermining economic growth.  

Presuming for a moment that the politically unfeasible can become reality when good ideas are pursued in a real democracy, it...

Jobs.  Depending on how you count, the challenge is 7 to 10 million net new jobs in the United States over the next 5 years or so from a current base of about 130 million.  A five to seven percent increase, the sooner the better.  Here’s how.

First, we need to break the challenge down into two pieces:  emergency triage, and long-term...

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the situation is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. 

                   - John Maynard Keynes, Speculator and Economist

You know you’ve hit a hot button when publicly traded...

- A $20 trillion “externality” appears to present civilization with its BIG CHOICE: economic destruction or ecological destruction, both with chilling global security implications.  Here’s why, along with a practical and more hopeful alternative to “Sophie’s Choice.”

Carbon Tracker has released an illuminating report,...

Somehow I missed the release of a new collection of essays by Wendell Berry in 2010, What Matters: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth.  The introduction is by Herman Daly, whose clarification of how scale limits transform economics remains the most important idea still not acknowledged in mainstream economics today. 

When two of my heroes collaborate on a book...

Foreign Policy’s recent “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis” reflects the dangerous, myopic thinking all too prone to “blame Wall Street” that is a natural consequence of Wall Street’s appalling, anti-social behavior in recent...

So declared JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon regarding the prospect of a US default on its debt, after which he received a standing ovation at the University of Colorado’s Denver School of Business.  Hmm…Let’s do a little press review - the following items quoted from recent news articles:

• JPMorgan Chase recently lost a class-action lawsuit...

 "The fact is that no compound growth is sustainable.  If we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.  We must substitute qualitative growth for quantitative growth."  -  Jeremy Grantham, GMO Quarterly Letter

I returned late last night from the second Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) Conference which took place at Bretton Woods. This was the site of the historic Bretton Woods Agreement signed in 1944, establishing the IMF and the World Bank, and creating the global world financial order...

The NY Times report by David Kocieniewski on GE’s aggressive tax strategies under the leadership of John Samuels, a former Treasury Department tax lawyer, which enabled the company to pay no income taxes to Uncle Sam on their $5.1 billion of US-based income has many...

I attended the annual US Department of Agriculture conference this week in Washington DC.  My job was to participate on a panel with The Savory Institute, organized by the Risk Management Agency of the USDA.  Our topic was “Critical Thinking: The Best Risk Management Tool.” 

My message was about systems thinking, and how the financial system collapse...

“We conclude first and foremost that the crisis was avoidable,” declared Phil Angelides, chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.  No act of God.  Thanks Mr. Chairman.

The report is weak and inconclusive, with no clear root causes.  The FCIC is no Pecora Commission, the exhaustive, two year inquisition into the causes of the 1929 crash in which...

I have discussed the problem of reductionist thinking, grounded in the Enlightenment, in the past.  Nowhere is reductionist thinking more in force than in finance.  Derivatives disaggregate risk into component parts, and then atomized parts are reconstructed into new wholes using securitization.  This process goes on, with greater and greater leverage applied until it...

The mystery of derivatives, the secretive multi-trillion dollar market that few understand but is believed to be at the heart of the financial meltdown needs illumination. Without it, policy makers have no chance of getting much needed regulation right.  The recent NY Times piece, “A Secretive Banking Elite...

After my Thanksgiving turkey, I digested two recent commentaries on the financial industry, “Inside Job,” the mostly fair but incomplete documentary narrated by Matt Damon, and the balanced and accurate New Yorker essay, “What Good is Wall...

Obama had a bad week at the G20.  He was rebuked by Western leaders on the weak dollar consequences of QE2, and he failed to secure a Trade Agreement with South Korea.

There is something not terribly compelling about a trip to India, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea, and pitching these countries on expanding exports from the US to create US jobs.  After the pummeling he...

I recently gave the keynote at the annual meeting of Oregon Rural Action in La Grande, Oregon, “Making the Shift: Building a Vibrant Local Economy Amidst the Broken Global Financial System.” (My slide deck is posted on our resource section here.) To...

The global economy now uses 1.5 times the earth’s capacity to regenerate the natural capital we use every year, up from the 1.4 times of the prior year, according to a report of the well-respected Global Footprint Network.  In their Living...

I recently attended a school function and was chatting with a friend (“Pam” for the sake of this post) who is a buy-side analyst at a major asset management firm, the kind that manages hundreds of billions of pension fund assets, and 401Ks. Pam’s firm, like many mainstream asset management companies, is a signatory of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). ...

We immerse ourselves in facts and figures; turning real life suffering into an abstraction.  The official unemployment rate is 9.6 percent in the United States. Estimates vary about the additional unemployed who have given up looking for a job.  Some say the real number could exceed 15 percent.  The unemployment for black youths in America aged 16 to 19 is 44 percent.  ...

An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from antisocial conduct. These are two definitions of one thing.  The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of cooperation.

The...

Capital Forum's current series on "Reducing the Wealth Gap" ties in nicely with Edward Luce’s July 30 piece in the Financial Times, “The Crisis of Middle Class America,” a sobering reality check, putting real people behind the statistics.  ...

Last week was a busy week in the world of financial reform.  Congress passed “the most sweeping financial reform legislation since the Great Depression" (at least measured by its 2,300 pages).  Treasury appears to be blocking the selection of Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer financial protection agency, despite its denials.  And the SEC...

We are delighted to congratulate Capital Institute Advisory Board member Allan Savory and his 

team at the Savory Institute for their well deserved...

No doubt, we've all been to conferences that are both stimulating and exhausting at the same time. 

The George Soros backed Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) inaugural conference that took...