We are taught today to believe that institutions do not matter; that all social choices made by society are just the sum total of the aggregated choices that we each make through the exercise of our own personal moralities, as individual self-interested, utility-maximizing rational actors acting rationally to match Supply to Demand (or Demand to Supply) through competition on price under conditions of scarcity in markets for maintaining market clearing price.

Common sense and common experience tell us that is nonsense.  None of us at work gets to make work decision based on our personal likes and dislikes: we have to do what is good for the company; and what is good for the company is usually whatever the boss wants us to do.

Business – the company – is one form of social institution. Others include civil society enterprises that are more for-purpose that for-profit, as well as government and, yes, also finance.  Each of these institutions has its own unique culture, its own logic, it’s own way of doing things.  If we, as individuals, insist on doing things for an institution in our own way, we get chided, reprimanded, disciplined, or ever fired. We lose our jobs!

It’s just not true that institutions don’t matter. They matter very much.

Institutions are how society makes social decisions, and the decisions that institutions make are determined by the institutional logic of that institution. NOT by individuals working in that institution doing whatever they individually feel is the right and proper thing to do.

This is true also of Pensions & Endowments as institutions of fiduciary ownership with fiduciary duties of intergenerational loyalty and prudence providing their unique institutional logic for institutional decision making.

Supposedly.

Today, actually, not so much.  Today the logic they are using is more the logic of moment-to-moment speculation than of intergenerational stewardship.

Bank of Nature is changing that, restoring authenticity to the institutional logic of institutional decision making by Pensions & Endowments as financial institutions of intergenerational fiduciary duty to our shared future.

Pensions & Endowments are fiduciary owners of social trusts that are created and supported by society because they serve important social purposes: pensions provide a certainty of income in a dignified retirement for large portions of the population who are retired from work-a-day working; endowments provide a certainty of income to a wide rage of civil society institutions from education to arts & culture to nature conservation to social activism and personal engagement in civic life.

A key feature of the social importance of these social constructs is that they provide benefits to society today, and tomorrow across an evergreen succession of todays and tomorrows continuing on into the future, forever (or as nearly forever as is practicably possible).

Legally, these institutions are burdened by society, through the common law of fiduciary duty, with a duty of prudent loyalty to current and future beneficiaries.  This makes their fiduciary duty intergenerational.

This means the law prevents them from providing for today at the expense of tomorrow, as well as from providing for tomorrow at the expense of today.  They have a duty of loyalty to the present and the future, both equally.

This legal fiduciary duty to the present and the future, both equally, is the part of the institutional logic for institutional decision making for Pensions & Endowments that makes their money the unifying tool that Bank of Nature will use to finance a good Anthropocene.

We see a fundamental failure of loyalty to future generations by Pensions & Endowments in their current practice of financing GROWTH through speculation of market prices in the Exchanges & Funds markets for maintaining market clearing prices.

Bank of Nature will empower authentic loyalty to present and future generations by Pensions & Endowments that choose to finance ENOUGH through negotiated agreements on formulas for sharing in enterprise cash flows that are prioritized for social and environmental justice in the conduct of commerce, where “enough” means enough ongoing cash flows from financings to meet the assumptions made by the actuaries in their design of a pension’s actuarial risk pool (and the functional equivalent for endowments) as sufficient to keep their pools correctly full and prosperously flowing benefits to their current and future retirees (or other beneficiaries, for endowments), forever.

Pensions & Endowments are large. Individually, many pension and not a few endowments one billions to tens of billions to hundreds of billions of society’s shared savings. Collectively, worldwide, they control tens of trillions.

Pensions & Endowments are programmatic. Each is created by design, and supported by society, to provide their current and future retirees, or other beneficiaries, with socially sufficient cash flows, now and in the future, for as long as it continues to be beneficial to society to provide those cash flows to those beneficiaries.

Pensions & Endowments are evergreen. They just keep going. This is a characteristic we keep returning to, because it is one of the most important ways in which Pensions & Endowments as institution of social decision making through Finance uniquely powerful and socially important.

This means that Pensions & Endowment have the size, the purpose and the time it takes to negotiate with enterprise of any size and any kind on formulas for sharing in enterprise cash flows that are prioritized, by agreement, for intergenerational loyalty to now and later, which means also, to humanity and Nature, both equally.  No other institution of social decision making through Finance in modern society has that capability.

Add to that the power that Spreadsheet Technology offers, to model expectations for future cash flows, for prioritizing those cash flows, and for sharing them according to agreed formulas for honoring the actuarial assumptions (or endowment equivalents) that define Pensions & Endowment as institutions, and you get untapped power to finance enterprise values, and not set to speculate on enterprise value.

This is a power that we, as individuals, do not have.

It is a power that no other institution for social decision making has.

Bank of Nature will tap into that untapped power.

We live today within a popular narrative that all failings of Money & Finance are a consequence of the moral failings of bad actors who act badly.

Within that narrative, Money as a social construct does not matter. Neither does Finance as a social structure for social decision making. All that matters are the personal choices and personal moralities .

This is Old Thinking.

New thinking, Bank of Nature Thinking, thinks that Money as a social construct does matter, and so does Finance as a social structure for social decision making.

Bank of Nature Thinking thinks that Money is about people living together, and apart, in a world of technology surpluses that we collaboratively co-create out of the world of Nature into which we all are born. This world of technology surpluses that we collaboratively co-create for ourselves is a world of constant changes and the endlessly ongoing, and in that sense evergreen, evolution of prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes through the collaborative co-creation of new technology surpluses that are better fit to changing times.

In every moment of every day we live with the constant and evergreen question: 

What future world will we collaboratively co-create today?

Who decides?

Who decides who decides?

How do we hold our deciders accountable for the decisions they make about the future we are collaboratively co-creating?

Institutions are how society makes these choices today.

• Civil Society institutions feel the changes in the air and investigate to evolve new learning
• Enterprising Institutions see the possibilities for put new learning into action collaboratively co-creating new technology surpluses that will be better fit to the changing times
• Financing Institutions decide which new technology surpluses can, should and will be made available through investment in enterprise
• Government Institutions regulate the actions of Civil Society, Enterprise and Finance
• Popular Choice holds all these institutions accountable for the choices that they make.

Our focus at Bank of Nature is with the institutions of financial decision making and in particular with fiduciary institutions of intergenerational loyalty and prudence.

Pensions & Endowments are burdened under the law with fiduciary duties of prudent exercise of their powers of fiduciary ownership for the sole benefit of their beneficiaries.

Who are their beneficiaries?

What are their powers of fiduciary ownership?

How do we hold them accountable under the law?

We have talked about their beneficiaries being open classes of current and future recipients of money (retirees or civil society grantees), and their fiduciary duty being intergenerational. They cannot benefit current beneficiaries at the expense of future beneficiaries and still be true to their fiduciary duty.

We have talked about how their size, purpose and time gives them the power to negotiate, a power they can exercise using Spreadsheet Technology to model formulas for sharing in prioritized cash flows. They do not have to speculate.

We have talked about how their size, purpose and time gives them the power to negotiate, a power they can exercise using Spreadsheet Technology to model formulas for sharing in prioritized cash flows. They do not have to speculate.

We need next to explore how by continuing to speculate, and not negotiate, Pensions & Endowments are harming future beneficiaries – and the future of all of us – by contributing to a future of climate insecurity and endgame unsustainably, for their beneficiaries, in particular and for all of us, more generally.

As we continue to articulate the harm they are causing to their beneficiaries and to society through speculation, we can begin to develop a new theory of legal liability in tort for failure to take the Untaken Safer Alternative, or stewardship through negotiation over boom-and-bust speculation.

Can fiduciary owners of our Pensions & Endowments be exposing themselves to legal liability for injunctive relief, and maybe even money damages, for willfully refusing to take the Safer Alternative to speculation through negotiation with Bank of Nature?

Can business leaders who choose to remain financed by speculation in the Corporate Finance markets also be exposing themselves to legal liability for money damages for their willful failure to choose negotiation with Bank of Nature as the Untaken Safer Alternative?

We are evolving within Bank of Nature, and by extension within Pensions & Endowments, and society more generally, a new culture of stewardship in our new institution of Fiduciary Finance for directing Fiduciary Money into a future of Enough.

Some of the qualities of this new culture will be:

• an awareness that the fiduciary money we are directing into the economy is not our money; it is money others are entrusting to us to use for their benefit; we can’t just do whatever we want with it;
• an awareness that we are agents for institutions that exist in service to a good future for all;
• a sensitivity to the quality of life we are creating through the financings that we negotiate;
• a sensitivity to the impact on future possibilities that we are creating through the financing that we negotiate;
• a sensitivity to the equity within society now and in the future that we are creating through the financings that we negotiate;
• a sense of duty to our fiduciary purposes for now and later, both equally;
• a sense of accountability to society for the due and faithful execution of our duty to now and later, both equally;

• a sense of the value sufficiency in all our financings;
• a sense of the value of enough for now and later, for us and others, in building a good Anthropocene;
• technical proficiency in thinking about cash flows through enterprise, and the economy, at global scale over future times;
• technical proficiency in financing the flourish and fade of social contracts between enterprise and popular choice;
• expectations that times change;
• commitment to leadership in financing timely adaptations to changing times;
• accountability to the common sense of reasonable people;
• a commitment to evolving through our financings prosperous adaptations to life’s constant changes for all of society, now and in the future;
• a sense of the importance of history in getting us to where we are, and showing us where we can and should be going next;
• engagement with Science, and guidance by Science Thinkers;
• engagement with the Arts, and guidance by Art Thinkers;
• the importance of vision; and
• the value of evergreen learning.

One of the many incongruities in Money & Finance today is that we are being told to believe that all social decisions are really being made by us, as individuals, by a system in which many of us feel very poignantly that we, as individuals, have no real agency in deciding how the future that we are going to be living in is being made by the deciders who decide where the money can, should and is being made to go.

Peer Benchmarking of Asset Managers by Asset Owners is giving away our personal agency in holding intergenerational fiduciary money accountable to their intergenerational fiduciary duties to Asset Managers who really only accountable to each other: what is prudent has become whatever other Asset Managers are also doing.

Bank of Nature is taking that personal agency back, transforming Asset Owners back into Fiduciary Owners and returning fiduciary prudence to its proper legal standard of the common sense of reasonable people, not the Best Practices of Professional Asset Managers.

Climate action is the great challenge of our changing times. It is a challenge of scale that is unprecedented in all of human history. It is a challenge that requires action of collaboration that is unprecedented in all of human history.

It requires Fiduciary Owners of Fiduciary Money united in common cause across boundaries of national interest and cultural identity.

Only Fiduciary Money has the mission, the duty and the scale to take action at the scale of climate and other changes in our changing times at the scale of climate.

Right now, this money is trapped inside Corporate Finance through speculation on market prices over the Exchanges and through Funds.  Corporate Finance does not have the mission or the duty – although it does have the scale – to act on climate.

Bank of Nature is setting Fiduciary Money free from Corporate Capture, so that the Fiduciary Owners of this Fiduciary Money can become the Heroes we need, on Climate Security and real Endgame Sustainability.