Fiduciary money has scale, mission and duty

Duties of Care, Loyalty, Impartiality, Negotiation, A Safe Future and Common Good

By inventing fiduciary finance, Bank of Nature is going to use fiduciary money to do what it isn’t doing right now. That’s stewardship: fixing climate, and other global pandemics, and paying for endgame sustainability.

We need a planet-scale structural shift that directs big money toward stewardship that pays for big solutions. This requires an adaptive evolution in the way big money, like pension funds, moves today.

Money is humanity’s currency for expressing ingenuity, excellence, enterprise and progress. It is often, concurrently, horrifically abusive, short-sighted and self-destructive.

Money isn’t going anywhere — not now, nor in our climate-changed future. So, Bank of Nature accepts that we have to make money work toward our mission.

Pick a pandemic. How would you spend a trillion to fix it, regardless of how it fits into traditional business and government spheres? Seems like an opportunity, right?

Presently, there is no “work around” to the challenges of our stuck society, like the closed doors of industry and government locked by issues like corporate capture, without something like a Bank of Nature. There is no alternative to the failing status quo without the strategic implementation of institutional fund-driven fiduciary finance that uses money at scale.

Fiduciary finance, made possible by big money instutional investors, leads to endgame sustainability. It makes them heroes.

Fiduciary finance is what makes Bank of Nature viable in the real world. It’s why we spend so much time and creativity on the subject of money, when money is a trigger for many concerns.

How does money fix our global pandemics? An economic shift:

  1. From unsafe status quo to a safer alternative
  2. From extractive of nature to interactive with nature
  3. From excluding nature to including a proxy for nature
  4. From market-based finance to fiduciary finance
  5. From actions of individuals to actions of institutions
  6. From speculation to stewardship
  7. From growth to sufficiency
  8. From climate impasse to climate engagement.

At Bank of Nature, we see money as a unifying tool toward a good Anthropocene — if we channel big institutional money into a dedicated, size-appropriate fiduciary alternative to today’s speculative capital markets.

While speculative markets, like Wall Street, were designed for individuals to express their self-interest, institutions have been afforded the same discretion. That means conventional finance allows public trusts to gamble in investor markets never designed for institutions and where they play a dangerous and outsized role.

Conventional market theory says that the economy moves with the aggregated choices of those “utility maximizing rational actors acting rationally”. Again, this economy is distorted by the heft of institutions acting in self-interest.

And, so far, conventional finance excludes nature and ignores the negative byproducts from the convention extractive status quo. Institutions, gambling on Wall Street, are complicit in that willful blindness.

At Bank of Nature, we are creating a safer alternative where the financial might of institutions can direct their influence toward the leadership we desperately need to grapple with global pandemics like climate.

“There is a pearl hidden in modern finance:
The intergenerational fiduciary duty of pensions and endowments.
That’s how we finance Bank of Nature.”
Tim MacDonald, co-founder, financial philosopher, 2021

Fiduciaries aligned on purpose

Fiduciary money is money owned by Pensions & Endowments as Institutions of Intergenerational Fiduciary Loyalty and Prudence. Their purpose is to earn cash flows through financings for enterprise that will be sufficient to keep themselves ongoing, paying benefits to this generation and the next, forever.  The purpose of Bank of Nature is to Make More Nature sufficient to keep Society ongoing, for this generation and the next, forever.  They are aligned.

Fiduciaries aligned on action

Fiduciary Money is stewardship money, and stewardship means interacting with Nature, and with Humanity. Not extracting. Either from Nature, or Humanity. That’s the only way we, as society can be well both today and tomorrow. And keep ourselves ongoing. Bank of Nature is transforming our relationship with Nature, from extractive to interactive, through financing for profit and not-for-profit enterprises that interact with Nature as prudent stewards. They are aligned.

Fiduciaries aligned on powers

Fiduciary money is large – tens of trillions, worldwide. It is programmatic, aggregated into actuarial risk pools (or endowment equivalents) operated to provide certainty against certain of life’s uncertainties. It is evergreen. It just keeps going.  That gives it the size, the purpose and the time it takes to negotiate.  Spreadsheet technology adds the capability to negotiate priorities on cash flows. Bank of Nature is about prioritizing cash flows for Nature. They are aligned.

Fiduciaries aligned on accountability

Fiduciary Money is Other People’s Money, and the Fiduciary Owners of Fiduciary Money are accountable under the law to the common sense of reasonable people of relevant knowledge and experience. We all have relevant knowledge and experience in choosing a future that is good to grow into.  Bank of Nature is a speaking with a Voice for Nature as a Proxy for Nature, to us and our common sense of the right relationship between Humans and Nature, between our present and our future.They are aligned.

Fiduciaries aligned on duty

Fiduciary money is owned by Fiduciaries who are burdened under the law with duties of intergenerational loyalty and prudence. They are required by law to make choices for today with a mind for the impact of those choices on the choices they will be able to make tomorrow. Bank of Nature is about making choices to Make More Nature today so that Nature will be there for us tomorrow. They are aligned.

Fiduciary finance is the right-sized channel for fiduciary money managed by fiduciary managers to exercise their fiducary duties to this and future generations. Fiduciary finance makes big money the hero of climate security and resolutions to other worrisome planet-scale pandemics.

Bank of Nature is The Untaken Safer Alternative, the next last line of defense in the climate impasse and a strategy to reengage fiduciary values in an economy that takes care of the future. We invite contributions that make connections, improve our plan and move it forward.