Hazel Henderson's Instablog Hazel Henderson is author of Ethical Markets: Growing The Green Economy (2007) and co-creator with the Calvert Group of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators regularly updated at www.Calvert-Henderson.com (http://www.Calvert-Henderson.com). She can be reached at www.EthicalMarkets.com (http://www.EthicalMarkets.com) and, her TV shows are at www.ethicalmarkets.tv (http://www.ethicalmarkets.tv). Hazel Henderson http://seekingalpha.com Review of Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky and The Keynes Solution by Paul Davison http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/244947-hazel-henderson/40340-review-of-keynes-the-return-of-the-master-by-robert-skidelsky-and-the-keynes-solution-by-paul-davison?source=feed 40340 Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky (PublicAffairs 2009) and The Keynes Solution by Paul Davison (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)         

 

These two new books re-introduce John Maynard Keynes to current policy makers dealing with the failure of de-regulated financial markets.  They also introduce Keynes to a new generation and provide excellent background information on how Keynes' legacy is being re-applied in today's fiscal and monetary policies, stimulus plans and debates at the G-20 on how to reform global finance (see my own proposals at www.ethicalmarkets.com).

 

Both Skidelsky and Davidson offer similar and excellent policy advice based on Keynes' concepts and proposals.  Both authors call for a re-instating of an updated Glass-Steagall law to again separate "plain vanilla" retail banking still insured by FDIC to protect depositors and disallowing investment banks from participating in any government insured access to financial bailouts or subsidized credit from Treasury or the Federal Reserve.  We at Ethical Markets have advocated this since 2008, along with the levying of a 1% financial transactions tax by G-20 agreement; a Financial Crisis Insurance Fund assed on all excessive risk-taking financial firms; a "too-big-to-bail" statute to allow for orderly break-up of oversized banks that pose systemic risk; banning credit default swaps not cleared on regulated exchanges, and other provisions to downsize overgrown financial sectors that have become predatory on the real economies of "Main Street."

 

Neither Skidelsky or Davidson go this far, although both cite the need to tame finance and its unregulated global casino unleashed on the world in the 1980s by US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  Neither author addresses the issues still outside most economic boxes: the devastation of the planet's ecosystems by 300 years of fossil-fueled extractive industrialization.  The need is to internalize such devastation and social costs into prices, company balance sheets and national accounts.  Nevertheless, both these books do shed light on the deficiencies of political reforms currently debated in Washington, London and other capitals of OECD and G-20 countries.  Both authors offer ideas for restructuring  and reforming global financial architecture but stop short of fundamental re-thinking of models of human development beyond economics and GDP-measured growth.  Skidelsky is the deeper thinker and draws conclusions from Keynes' longer-term vision on how to break the hold of money-obsessed economic ideas of "progress."  Skidelsky goes beyond Davidson's prescriptive policies and examines ethical and moral issues ignored by economics and calls for more inter-disciplinary approaches to social progress.  Neither author touches on the pressing need to reform money-creation itself and the fractional reserve banking which turned money-creation over to private banks as backed only by debt on their loan books.  The widespread movement to audit, reform and even fold the private US Federal Reserve System into the US Treasury are not mentioned by either author as proposed by the American Monetary Institute.  Clearly, we must now move beyond Keynes, important as his reforms are, and re-integrate public policy using inter-disciplinary systems approaches that enfold, but go beyond economics – revealed again by both authors as a profession with few if any pretensions as science.    – Hazel Henderson



Disclosure: no positions]]> Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:02:53 -0500 Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky (PublicAffairs 2009) and The Keynes Solution by Paul Davison (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)         

 

These two new books re-introduce John Maynard Keynes to current policy makers dealing with the failure of de-regulated financial markets.  They also introduce Keynes to a new generation and provide excellent background information on how Keynes' legacy is being re-applied in today's fiscal and monetary policies, stimulus plans and debates at the G-20 on how to reform global finance (see my own proposals at www.ethicalmarkets.com).

 

Both Skidelsky and Davidson offer similar and excellent policy advice based on Keynes' concepts and proposals.  Both authors call for a re-instating of an updated Glass-Steagall law to again separate "plain vanilla" retail banking still insured by FDIC to protect depositors and disallowing investment banks from participating in any government insured access to financial bailouts or subsidized credit from Treasury or the Federal Reserve.  We at Ethical Markets have advocated this since 2008, along with the levying of a 1% financial transactions tax by G-20 agreement; a Financial Crisis Insurance Fund assed on all excessive risk-taking financial firms; a "too-big-to-bail" statute to allow for orderly break-up of oversized banks that pose systemic risk; banning credit default swaps not cleared on regulated exchanges, and other provisions to downsize overgrown financial sectors that have become predatory on the real economies of "Main Street."

 

Neither Skidelsky or Davidson go this far, although both cite the need to tame finance and its unregulated global casino unleashed on the world in the 1980s by US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  Neither author addresses the issues still outside most economic boxes: the devastation of the planet's ecosystems by 300 years of fossil-fueled extractive industrialization.  The need is to internalize such devastation and social costs into prices, company balance sheets and national accounts.  Nevertheless, both these books do shed light on the deficiencies of political reforms currently debated in Washington, London and other capitals of OECD and G-20 countries.  Both authors offer ideas for restructuring  and reforming global financial architecture but stop short of fundamental re-thinking of models of human development beyond economics and GDP-measured growth.  Skidelsky is the deeper thinker and draws conclusions from Keynes' longer-term vision on how to break the hold of money-obsessed economic ideas of "progress."  Skidelsky goes beyond Davidson's prescriptive policies and examines ethical and moral issues ignored by economics and calls for more inter-disciplinary approaches to social progress.  Neither author touches on the pressing need to reform money-creation itself and the fractional reserve banking which turned money-creation over to private banks as backed only by debt on their loan books.  The widespread movement to audit, reform and even fold the private US Federal Reserve System into the US Treasury are not mentioned by either author as proposed by the American Monetary Institute.  Clearly, we must now move beyond Keynes, important as his reforms are, and re-integrate public policy using inter-disciplinary systems approaches that enfold, but go beyond economics – revealed again by both authors as a profession with few if any pretensions as science.    – Hazel Henderson



Disclosure: no positions]]> Review of Powering the Green Economy by Miguel Mendonça, David Jacobs and Benjamin Sovacool http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/244947-hazel-henderson/40339-review-of-powering-the-green-economy-by-miguel-mendona-david-jacobs-and-benjamin-sovacool?source=feed 40339 Indispensible guidebook to all the public, private and civic methods of shifting our energy from fossil fuels and nuclear power toward solar, wind, energy efficiency and more sustainable communities!  Here is all you will ever need to know about feed-in tariffs and all the other viable ways to introduce such new policies and initiatives in your town, state, as well as nationally.  Belongs on the shelf of every green activist and decision maker in the USA and Europe particularly.     – Hazel Henderson



Disclosure: no positions]]> Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:00:04 -0500 Indispensible guidebook to all the public, private and civic methods of shifting our energy from fossil fuels and nuclear power toward solar, wind, energy efficiency and more sustainable communities!  Here is all you will ever need to know about feed-in tariffs and all the other viable ways to introduce such new policies and initiatives in your town, state, as well as nationally.  Belongs on the shelf of every green activist and decision maker in the USA and Europe particularly.     – Hazel Henderson



Disclosure: no positions]]> Review of Climate Policy – Linking Emissions Trading Schemes, Volume 9 issue 4 2009, guest editor Andreas Tuerk http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/244947-hazel-henderson/40337-review-of-climate-policy-linking-emissions-trading-schemes-volume-9-issue-4-2009-guest-editor-andreas-tuerk?source=feed 40337 A very narrow view of emissions trading schemes and the "efficiency" of global inter-linkages.  This study completely ignores the more efficient tool of taxing carbon, other pollutants and waste while lifting tax burdens from incomes and payrolls.  Apparently, the new opportunities for economists in carbon markets which banks see as their next big profit center overwhelms their interest in other ways of moving societies from the Fossil Age to the Solar Age.  Thus, the entire focus of the report is inside the box of assumptions that cap and trade schemes are the best way to reduce greenhouse gasses and stabilize the planet's climate. 

 

An important peek into the mindsets of economists who transpose obsolete economic theories into the carbon-trading field.  Ignored are removal of perverse subsidies; direct investments in Solar Age transitions to low carbon re-industrialization as well as the private sectors' $1.248 trillion invested in growing greener economies since 2007, as reported by the Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® at www.ethicalmarkets.com.  Hopefully, setting a global price on carbon can be achieved through mutually agreeable national carbon taxes. Cap and trade schemes have been ruled by the US Congressional Budget Office as taxes-by-another-name.  We hope that plain, transparent taxes will replace cap and trade schemes which are excessively complex, bureaucratic and subject to regulatory capture, gaming and fraud.  INTERPOL has warned that cap and trade schemes and carbon derivatives trading will become the next global white collar crime wave.     – Hazel Henderson

Disclosure: no positions]]> Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:58:45 -0500 A very narrow view of emissions trading schemes and the "efficiency" of global inter-linkages.  This study completely ignores the more efficient tool of taxing carbon, other pollutants and waste while lifting tax burdens from incomes and payrolls.  Apparently, the new opportunities for economists in carbon markets which banks see as their next big profit center overwhelms their interest in other ways of moving societies from the Fossil Age to the Solar Age.  Thus, the entire focus of the report is inside the box of assumptions that cap and trade schemes are the best way to reduce greenhouse gasses and stabilize the planet's climate. 

 

An important peek into the mindsets of economists who transpose obsolete economic theories into the carbon-trading field.  Ignored are removal of perverse subsidies; direct investments in Solar Age transitions to low carbon re-industrialization as well as the private sectors' $1.248 trillion invested in growing greener economies since 2007, as reported by the Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® at www.ethicalmarkets.com.  Hopefully, setting a global price on carbon can be achieved through mutually agreeable national carbon taxes. Cap and trade schemes have been ruled by the US Congressional Budget Office as taxes-by-another-name.  We hope that plain, transparent taxes will replace cap and trade schemes which are excessively complex, bureaucratic and subject to regulatory capture, gaming and fraud.  INTERPOL has warned that cap and trade schemes and carbon derivatives trading will become the next global white collar crime wave.     – Hazel Henderson

Disclosure: no positions]]> Review of bazaars, conversations and freedom: for a market culture beyond greed and fear by Rajni Bakshi, http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/244947-hazel-henderson/40336-review-of-bazaars-conversations-and-freedom-for-a-market-culture-beyond-greed-and-fear-by-rajni-bakshi?source=feed 40336 Indian economist Rajni Bakshi has elegantly woven all the threads in the ongoing saga of the human family's  search for better ways of living on Earth.  In this brilliant, engaging and readable book, Bakshi emerges as a pre-eminent global systems thinker.  I recall the time Bakshi visited me and our wide-ranging discussions on everything from what was wrong with economics and how to reform this too-influential profession to examining the potentials of humans to evolve into more caring, cooperative behavior and develop more ecologically-aware, harmonious societies.  This book is destined to become a classic with the kind of perennial wisdom and relevance of E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful.  Here are the fundamental underpinnings of sustainability and shaping a good life for all on our small planet.     – Hazel Henderson, Dec. 2009



Disclosure: no positions]]> Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:56:23 -0500 Indian economist Rajni Bakshi has elegantly woven all the threads in the ongoing saga of the human family's  search for better ways of living on Earth.  In this brilliant, engaging and readable book, Bakshi emerges as a pre-eminent global systems thinker.  I recall the time Bakshi visited me and our wide-ranging discussions on everything from what was wrong with economics and how to reform this too-influential profession to examining the potentials of humans to evolve into more caring, cooperative behavior and develop more ecologically-aware, harmonious societies.  This book is destined to become a classic with the kind of perennial wisdom and relevance of E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful.  Here are the fundamental underpinnings of sustainability and shaping a good life for all on our small planet.     – Hazel Henderson, Dec. 2009



Disclosure: no positions]]> NEW GLOBAL CLIMATE PROSPERITY SCOREBOARD FINDS OVER $1 TRILLION INVESTED IN GREEN SINCE 2007 http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/244947-hazel-henderson/38476-new-global-climate-prosperity-scoreboard-finds-over-1-trillion-invested-in-green-since-2007?source=feed 38476

Washington, DC – December  4, 2009 – Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and The Climate Prosperity Alliance today launched their Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® which tracks private investment in companies growing the green economy globally.  This new, never before reported number, showing $1,248,740,645,993.00 (over $1.248 trillion) in total investment since 2007, indicates how investors and entrepreneurs are leading governments in promoting sustainable growth.  The scoreboard totals investments in solar, wind, geothermal, ocean/hydro, energy efficiency and storage, and agriculture.  We purposefully omitted nuclear, "clean coal," carbon capture and sequestration, and biofuels.  We indicate which investments have been publically announced and committed by major companies for 2010 and beyond.

 

 Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Global Urban Development and Chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance, said, "This $1.248 trillion of investments are not only from North America and Europe, but also from China, India, Brazil and other developing countries.  They indicate that the private sector currently is ahead of governments in understanding that during the 21st century, people, places, and organizations can only get richer by becoming greener and only earn more money by using fewer resources and reusing more. Private capital investment is now leading globally in promoting technological innovation and resource efficiency that will accelerate environmentally and socially sustainable industrial growth and economic development throughout the world."

 

Dr. Hazel Henderson, futurist, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (Chelsea Green, 2006) and president of Ethical Markets Media, serves as vice-chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance together with vice-chairs C.S. Kiang (China), Rodrigo Loures (Brazil), Lawrence Bloom (UK) and James Nixon (USA).  Dr. Henderson said, "Ethical Markets Media's mission is reforming markets and growing the green economy globally.  Our Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® will be updated regularly to show progress toward the ecologically sustainable economies that are vital to our common future.  Societies are transitioning from the 300-year old, polluting, fossil-fueled Industrial Era to the advanced technologies of the information-rich Solar Age."

 

The Climate Prosperity Alliance, a volunteer, global network of financiers, businesses, economic development authorities, scientists and NGOs is based on earth systems science, showing the widespread evidence of destruction caused by the now-obsolete technologies of the combustion-based Industrial Revolution and its extraction and exploitation of the Earth's capital: oil, coal, gas, minerals, forests, water, land and biodiversity.  Human societies are now gradually re-industrializing our economies using the Earth's income – the renewable energies of sun, wind, ocean/hydro, geothermal and non-agricultural biomass – based on human capital: new knowledge of planetary processes and ecosystems, designing our economies with Nature.

 

The Climate Prosperity Alliance uses the Climate Solutions 2 computer model of Australia's Climate Risk Pty., showing how $1 trillion invested every year for the next 10 years can assure the global transition to sustainable prosperity and job growth.  This $10 trillion is less than the bailouts of failed banks in the USA and Europe and less than 10% of the world's pension and institutional funds of $120 trillion.  Institutional fund managers can shift 10% of their assets away from hedge funds, risky derivatives and commodity speculation to real investments in a greener global economy, thereby assuring their beneficiaries a healthier future.

 

"While we encourage progress toward directly investing in growing the green economy, we urge government officials meeting in Copenhagen December 7-14, 2009, to follow the lead of these private investors that have already committed $1.248 trillion.  We applaud our pension fund colleagues of the UN Principles of Responsible Investing who have joined in pledges to allocate more of their members' $19 trillion of assets into similar green companies.  Now, governments must go beyond arguing over targets, caps and carbon-trading – and follow the lead of China and the USA in their comprehensive plan for cooperation on clean energy and climate change.  Such a general agreement in Copenhagen can promote and underwrite more direct investments and growth of the green economy," said Dr. Henderson.

 

The new Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® is researched and compiled by the Ethical Markets Media expert team: Timothy Nash, M.Sc., principal, Strategic Sustainable Investments, Toronto; Rachel Tubman, M.Sc., senior researcher/futurist; assisted by The Cleantech Group and members of the Ethical Markets Sustainability Research Group.  As these investments increase, the scoreboard will track totals, providing investors and governments with tangible evidence of the growing green economy.

 

Contacts:

  • Dr. Hazel Henderson, president, Ethical Markets Media, www.ethicalmarkets.com, hazel.henderson@ethicalmarkets.com, 1-904-829-3140

·        Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO, Global Urban Development; and Chair, Climate Prosperity Alliance, www.climateprosperity.com, marcweiss@globalurban.org, 1-202-554-5891.

  • Rosalinda Sanquiche, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media, rosalinda.sanquiche@ethicalmarkets.com, 1-904-826-1381
  • Timothy Jack Nash, Co-founder, Strategic Sustainable Investments, nash@ssinvest.com, 1-416-821-9179


Disclosure: no stocks mentioned; multiple positions in industries mentioned]]> Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:05:12 -0500

Washington, DC – December  4, 2009 – Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and The Climate Prosperity Alliance today launched their Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® which tracks private investment in companies growing the green economy globally.  This new, never before reported number, showing $1,248,740,645,993.00 (over $1.248 trillion) in total investment since 2007, indicates how investors and entrepreneurs are leading governments in promoting sustainable growth.  The scoreboard totals investments in solar, wind, geothermal, ocean/hydro, energy efficiency and storage, and agriculture.  We purposefully omitted nuclear, "clean coal," carbon capture and sequestration, and biofuels.  We indicate which investments have been publically announced and committed by major companies for 2010 and beyond.

 

 Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO of Global Urban Development and Chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance, said, "This $1.248 trillion of investments are not only from North America and Europe, but also from China, India, Brazil and other developing countries.  They indicate that the private sector currently is ahead of governments in understanding that during the 21st century, people, places, and organizations can only get richer by becoming greener and only earn more money by using fewer resources and reusing more. Private capital investment is now leading globally in promoting technological innovation and resource efficiency that will accelerate environmentally and socially sustainable industrial growth and economic development throughout the world."

 

Dr. Hazel Henderson, futurist, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (Chelsea Green, 2006) and president of Ethical Markets Media, serves as vice-chair of the Climate Prosperity Alliance together with vice-chairs C.S. Kiang (China), Rodrigo Loures (Brazil), Lawrence Bloom (UK) and James Nixon (USA).  Dr. Henderson said, "Ethical Markets Media's mission is reforming markets and growing the green economy globally.  Our Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® will be updated regularly to show progress toward the ecologically sustainable economies that are vital to our common future.  Societies are transitioning from the 300-year old, polluting, fossil-fueled Industrial Era to the advanced technologies of the information-rich Solar Age."

 

The Climate Prosperity Alliance, a volunteer, global network of financiers, businesses, economic development authorities, scientists and NGOs is based on earth systems science, showing the widespread evidence of destruction caused by the now-obsolete technologies of the combustion-based Industrial Revolution and its extraction and exploitation of the Earth's capital: oil, coal, gas, minerals, forests, water, land and biodiversity.  Human societies are now gradually re-industrializing our economies using the Earth's income – the renewable energies of sun, wind, ocean/hydro, geothermal and non-agricultural biomass – based on human capital: new knowledge of planetary processes and ecosystems, designing our economies with Nature.

 

The Climate Prosperity Alliance uses the Climate Solutions 2 computer model of Australia's Climate Risk Pty., showing how $1 trillion invested every year for the next 10 years can assure the global transition to sustainable prosperity and job growth.  This $10 trillion is less than the bailouts of failed banks in the USA and Europe and less than 10% of the world's pension and institutional funds of $120 trillion.  Institutional fund managers can shift 10% of their assets away from hedge funds, risky derivatives and commodity speculation to real investments in a greener global economy, thereby assuring their beneficiaries a healthier future.

 

"While we encourage progress toward directly investing in growing the green economy, we urge government officials meeting in Copenhagen December 7-14, 2009, to follow the lead of these private investors that have already committed $1.248 trillion.  We applaud our pension fund colleagues of the UN Principles of Responsible Investing who have joined in pledges to allocate more of their members' $19 trillion of assets into similar green companies.  Now, governments must go beyond arguing over targets, caps and carbon-trading – and follow the lead of China and the USA in their comprehensive plan for cooperation on clean energy and climate change.  Such a general agreement in Copenhagen can promote and underwrite more direct investments and growth of the green economy," said Dr. Henderson.

 

The new Global Climate Prosperity Scoreboard® is researched and compiled by the Ethical Markets Media expert team: Timothy Nash, M.Sc., principal, Strategic Sustainable Investments, Toronto; Rachel Tubman, M.Sc., senior researcher/futurist; assisted by The Cleantech Group and members of the Ethical Markets Sustainability Research Group.  As these investments increase, the scoreboard will track totals, providing investors and governments with tangible evidence of the growing green economy.

 

Contacts:

  • Dr. Hazel Henderson, president, Ethical Markets Media, www.ethicalmarkets.com, hazel.henderson@ethicalmarkets.com, 1-904-829-3140

·        Dr. Marc A. Weiss, Chairman and CEO, Global Urban Development; and Chair, Climate Prosperity Alliance, www.climateprosperity.com, marcweiss@globalurban.org, 1-202-554-5891.

  • Rosalinda Sanquiche, Executive Director, Ethical Markets Media, rosalinda.sanquiche@ethicalmarkets.com, 1-904-826-1381
  • Timothy Jack Nash, Co-founder, Strategic Sustainable Investments, nash@ssinvest.com, 1-416-821-9179


Disclosure: no stocks mentioned; multiple positions in industries mentioned]]> Changing the Game of Finance http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/244947-hazel-henderson/37298-changing-the-game-of-finance?source=feed 37298 Invited paper for "The World as We Want It to Be" SRI in the Rockies 20th Anniversary, October 25-28, 2009.
 
                                          
 
Marking the 20th Anniversary of SRI in the Rockies offers more than an opportunity to review the hard-won progress of investors to prove that socially responsible investing is viable and now clearly out-performs traditional mainstream investing. Since the credit crises of 2008-2009, we can now assert with confidence that investing for long-term sustainability and taking ESG factors as material to asset valuation could have actually helped avert these crises.[1] We investors are now winning the paradigm battle and cite the evidence to show that the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is bunk and by the same token show that the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and, yes, even the sacred tenets of the "rational investor" and the Black-Scholes Merton Options Pricing Model will soon be part of history.[2]
 
Thomas Kuhn, told us in 1963 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we often must wait until a generation passes from the scene. Today, we humans are out of time. Climate chaos is upon us and our limiting factor is not money – it never was, since money is simply one form of information. Time is now our limiting factor, as we have until 2020 to keep CO2 and other greenhouse gases, methane, as well as soot, ozone and other pollutants from raising global temperature more than 2˚C.  This means that the game of finance must change to address both its internally-generated global crises and the climate crises which finance has and continues to exacerbate with its blindness to ESG factors and its culture of greed, myopia and short-termism.[3] We were encouraged by our colleague Mindy Lubber's remarks at the introduction of the statement on September 17th of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC): "We are ready and willing to up the ante and finance the transition to a low-carbon economy.[4]
 
Some 15 years ago, I, Steve Schueth and Wayne Silby began creating the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators (calvert-henderson.com) in the belief that incorporating ESG factors into asset valuation and corporate accounting at the micro-economic level would be necessary but not sufficient. We and Calvert CEO Barbara Krumsiek knew that traditional micro-level accounting when aggregated into national accounts such as GDP would inhibit the needed corrections at this macro-economic level. We knew that GDP would also have to include ESG factors; otherwise, its faulty, narrow, short-term view of national "progress" would drive us closer to environmental collapse, social inequality, disease and conflicts. Economist Joseph Stiglitz agrees and warned of the dangers of "GDP-fetishism" in his report to France's President Nicholas Sarkozy.[5]
 
Today, UN-PRI, CERES and other groups of institutional investors continue to lead in promoting ESG and longer-term asset valuation and the need to address climate change. Yet too often, these worthy organizations and their institutional investor members are still captive to the discredited paradigms of finance I have mentioned. Until trustees and shareowners change incentives for their asset managers and consultants, they will still obsess over benchmarking each others' performance according to these now destructive criteria and models. Financial networks are complex, adaptive systems,[6] but reliance on this approach serves little more than to comfortably abstract the debate. Some critiques, such as that of Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England,[7] analogize financial networks to electrical grids. This overlooks the different purposes of these networks: an electrical grid is designed to deliver a useful service: electricity to human societies. Financial networks have expanded globally to increase and speed up the activity of trading which is linked to compensation of the actors and the financial returns of firms. That humans have a propensity to barter and trade is commonplace,[8] but trading for trading's sake has become pathological, an addiction similar to gambling, obsessions with pornography and sex.
 
Addiction to trading and internet-use are now studied by psychologists as is the elevated testosterone levels exhibited by traders in London's financial markets.[9] Thus, one cannot expect any human actors embedded in today's financial networks to think more deeply about their purpose, social utility or the systemic risk that finance now clearly poses to all societies and to ecosystems. At what point did financial markets metastasize to become a cancer on their host: human societies? To ask individual traders or companies would be analogous to expecting the patients and psychiatrists in a mental hospital to design a more optimal system to address dysfunctional aspects. Even less charitable criticism comes from Prof. Simon Johnson at MIT, former chief economist of the IMF who comments on Wall Street's capture of politicians of both parties in the US Congress as "mind control" (Baseline Scenario, October 8, 2009).
 
Britain's head of the Financial Services Authority Lord Adair Turner questioned the social usefulness of finance[10] and proposed to downsize financial sectors by imposing a financial transactions tax (originally proposed by James Tobin in 1978)[11] and by Lawrence Summers in 1989.[12] To re-think financial networks requires going outside the box of all current economic models and the financial "innovations" from which they are derived.[13] Current models derived from faulty economics include: the aforementioned EMH, MPT, CAPM, and VaR. The Black-Scholes-Merton Options Pricing Model is now challenged as plagiarized from options traders' practice by Nassim Taleb (Financial Times, October 12,2008). Human investors do not conform to economics' "rational actor" model, but are revealed by neuroscience (not neuro-economics) as being of two minds: the forebrain (logic, foresight ad higher analytic functions) and the amygdala (the primitive, reptilian brain that responds to emotional stimuli). Thus, financial markets, far from being "efficient," are typical examples of herd behavior (monkey see – monkey do!, see my editorials at HazelHenderson.com and ethicalmarkets.com).
 
The key issues in reforming financial networks are: human social purpose, design criteria and assumptions. Using analogies from architecture and engineering: a bridge, if well designed on physical principles, mapping the forces of nature correctly, will be robust; if badly-designed, as the famous Tacoma Narrows bridge, it will respond to natural forces of wind and oscillate with ever greater amplitude until it collapses. The same applies to buildings that are not designed to account for the laws of natural systems. My late friend Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen made similar observations about economists' love of abstraction in his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) which I reviewed in the Harvard Business Review. 
 
Therefore, financial networks must be examined from these perspectives and we see their design flaws immediately: they were designed by individual actors and firms to maximize their self-interest and produce rewards in money terms. They were never designed to optimize at the societal level, let alone to function within natural system constraints. Furthermore, they optimized for trading as the primary means to money rewards (hence the growth of proprietary trading desks, day traders, high frequency trading and algorithmic program trading which now dominates market activity). This is why a financial transactions tax is urgent and why I and my partner, mathematician Alan F. Kay, designed a computer program which can be installed on all trading systems to collect such a small tax, the Foreign Exchange Transaction Reporting System (FXTRS) for which we were granted a US patent (see hazelhenderson.com FXTRS).[14]
 
Beyond the pathologies of trading with ever-faster computers, we must next examine the other huge design flaw underlying financial networks: money-creation and credit-allocation. These activities are designed not to create stable, healthy, equitable sustainable human societies. Here, again, money-creation and credit-allocation follow power laws and are designed by sub-system level actors and institutions (banks, central banks, local and national government agencies). Their design criteria are fitted to highly abstract goals: containing or targeting inflation, increasing or decreasing the money supply, NAIRU formulas for unemployment levels, fostering private investment – all vague generalities and measured with dubious statistics: the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), M1, M2, M3 (now deleted as too revealing of monetary expansion).
 
The good news is that today's confluence of global crises in finance and climate are revealed as crises of human perception: a mirror our mother GAIA is holding up for us to see ourselves and our myopic value-systems. The Information Age, as I predicted at SRI in the Rockies in 2005 has morphed into the Age of Truth. Our native American nations and the world's indigenous peoples have been articulating these truths for centuries now echoed by the President of the UN General Assembly in New York, June 2009.[15]
 
The movement toward planetary awareness is now worldwide and goes by many names: One Planet, socially responsible investing, sustainability, the Global Green New Deal, the Green Economy Initiative, the Climate Prosperity Alliance, Transition Towns, Green Jobs, Green for All, "green stimulus," the Global Marshall Plan, the Post-Carbon Society, the State of the World Forum, the Phoenix Economy, Breaking the Climate Deadlock, Climate Bonds, as well as the hundreds of thousands of groups in over a hundred countries calling for new forms of sustainable livelihoods in their own languages. NGOs are leading and governments are devising responses to protect the most vulnerable populations: women, children, the poor and the least-developed countries from the crises' impacts.[16] Connecting all these groups working on these same interlinked crises can achieve their shared vision of "The World as We Want It to Be."
 
All our crises are closely related to the dying fossilized paradigm of "economism" and its deadly addiction to continuous economic growth measured in money, whatever the social and environmental costs.[17] The disparate social movements of the past 30 years began coming together over the internet and at the World Social Forums, launched in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1999.  Today, in their statement on reforming finance, they are coalescing over these ever-accumulating threats to life on earth, now culminating in global climate disruption.[18] The United Nations joined with civil society in calling the financial and climate crises an opportunity to transition to fairer, cleaner, more sustainable forms of human development.[19]
 
Ever since the UN's climate agreements in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, the evidence from the scientific community of this mega-threat to our collective survival has grown stronger and more ominous.[20] Still the biggest per capita polluter, the USA refused to sign the Kyoto protocols and, with some of its misguided environmental policy makers, forced their "market-based" cap and trade approaches on  successive UN climate conferences. Their idea of capping carbon emissions was sensible enough, using government targets and regulating continuous reductions. But instead of backing enforcement of carbon caps and shifting tax burdens from incomes and payrolls to taxes on carbon and all other pollution and waste,[21] the US "market fundamentalists" demanded that "allowances" to continue emitting carbon be given to polluters to trade with each other. The disgrace of Wall Street has now made trading carbon derivatives as suspect as the credit default swaps that caused such havoc in financial markets. Widespread public objections forced governments to agree to auction pollution allowances, but fossil fuel lobbies have kept their give-aways.[22] INTERPOL, the UN crime-fighting agency, warned of carbon fraud and that carbon-trading could become the white collar crime of the future (www.heatisonline.org).
 
Bankers, stock market traders and commodity brokers saw carbon as a new trillion dollar "asset class" and profit opportunity.[23]   Yet the "cap and trade" emissions schemes in Europe created proliferating bureaucracies with caps on emissions easily lifted by lobbyists.[24]  Ironically, the very financial players who caused the global financial crisis see carbon trading as their next big profit source.[25]  As carbon markets failed to reduce carbon emissions, this has shown the efficiency of simply taxing carbon. The Copenhagen conference in December 2009 can include a global price for carbon. 
 
This debate as well as on how to alleviate the impacts of the financial meltdown and meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals and the Monterrey Consensus of 2002 were forced into the narrow calculus of costs in money terms. Economic methods usually favor quantifying costs to incumbent sectors and existing institutions, rather than estimating savings, benefits and revenues from new ways of doing business, new technologies and social policies. For example, the climate debate focuses on GDP growth "losses." Critiques of GDP-measured growth, including my own over the past 30 years, are finally gaining traction, including the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, making headway with the accounting profession and at the European Parliament's Beyond GDP Conference in 2007 which the European Commission will begin implementing in 2010.[26], [27]  Yet the financial sector still dominates US politics: bailing out Wall Street firms was deemed necessary to "restore" the financial system. Investing in growing the green economy, our children's health and education for a prosperous future are deemed "too expensive," even as a BBC-Globescan poll in 20 countries found 72% of their public's support governments investing in renewable energy and green technology.[28]
 
At last, focusing on carbon emissions in the obsolete fossil-fueled sectors no longer trumps quantifying the uncounted savings, benefits and avoided costs of investing in a global transition to the green post-carbon economy based on energy efficiency, wind, solar, ocean and geothermal sources.[29], [30],[31]  Guy Dauncey, author of Stormy Weather adds up all the estimates of savings so far at $1.7 trillion annually in the USA alone.   McKinsey & Company finds that a $520 billion investment in energy efficiency would yield $1.2trillion by 2020 and reduce US demand by 23%.[32]  Meanwhile, some still view financing for meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals as a cost when in reality, such finance belongs in the investment category. The "rearview mirror" economism calculations must no longer dominate the financial and climate debates – spreading increasing gloom and fear while governments pour trillions into trying to restore the broken status quo.[33] Meanwhile, fossilized asset-allocation models still blind security analysts to the growing companies in the expanding sustainability sectors of the world economy.[34]
 
Meanwhile, the greener, sustainable sectors are still growing worldwide, as renewable energy investments by 2008 exceeded investments in coal power plants.[35] The grassroots movements for sustainability are growing as well. The Obama administration in the USA and the General Assembly of the United Nations grasped the potential of the shift to the green, sustainable sectors worldwide.[36] The rigid G-7 and G-20 summits gave ground to the G-192 as all the member countries of the UN came together in New York in June 2009, adopted the Stiglitz Commission Report[37] and declared their support for the new just, green, sustainable global economy led by UNEP, UNDP and the ILO.[38] Eighteen other UN agencies also support what is now called the Global Green New Deal.[39]  The European Union's president called on the USA to make bigger commitments to cut its carbon emissions and assert more leadership on climate.[40] All now see the meltdown of the global financial casino and the climate crisis as a chance to create a new, more just, green economy promoted for decades by civil society.[41] 
 
Finally, the world can put economism in its place and downsize finance to its limited role facilitating real production. An efficient financial sector should constitute less than 10% of a country's GDP.  Britain’s Financial Services Authority head, Lord Adair Turner shocked many insiders, but his proposals for a financial transactions tax are now supported by many academics and NGOs.  Financial firms not covered by FDIC should pay into a Systemic Financial Risk Insurance Fund (SFRIF) to protect the world’s taxpayers from future bailouts.  As our Chinese friends say, "Markets and money are good servants but bad masters."  Thirty-four percent of China's stimulus package and 81% of South Korea's are focused on investing in solar, wind and green economic growth.[42] UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon praised China's President Hu Jintao for these green economy initiatives.[43] China's "green technology sector" is expected to grow to 15% of its GDP by 2013.[44] As policies of John Maynard Keynes are back in vogue, many forget that his main insight was about the inherent uncertainties and instabilities of financial markets.
 
The spectacle of the US and other central banks printing money on TV helped raise public awareness that money is not real wealth but just a clever invention of humans to track our promises and intentions and keep score of our transactions and uses of natural resources. The many electronic trading exchanges are flourishing, such as Entrex, showcasing and steering capital to small companies; peer-to-peer lending sites, Prosper, Qifang and Zopa; barter sites  Craigslist, and Freecycle that facilitate sharing, recycling; microloan sites, Microplace and Kiva, and Global Giving, Global Greengrants for charitable donating, as well as local currencies and LETS systems. Today information-based trading has illustrated that money circuits and markets have been overloaded by political directives, "quantitative easing," subsidies, carbon trading, etc., instead of direct, transparent legislative approaches. Furthermore, it is now clear that we don't need Wall Street, the City or any other "financial centers" that have now imploded anyway. The Great Disintermediation away from money circuits is underway.  The 20th century "too big to fail" monsters came to believe that they were "providers of capital" rather than mere intermediaries connecting savers with borrowers and manipulating money issued by banks out of thin air. 
 
This money-creation and credit-allocation system is so far removed from the real world of human production and exchange, as well as ecosystem functioning, as to be delusional. Following the founding of the Federal Reserve System in the USA in 1913, the money-creation function given to the US Congress in the Constitution was turned over to the twelve private banks of the Federal Reserve System. Only the Federal Reserve Board is appointed by the US President and Congress.   Since then, private banks using the fractional reserve system create 95% of our currency as accounting entries of the loans they make, i.e., as debt. The interest charged on their loans is not created, causing increased indebtedness. This system, which unfortunately spread around the world, was aided and abetted by the Nobel Committee's acceptance of the Bank of Sweden's prize to legitimize the profession of economics in memory of Alfred Nobel. Since this Bank of Sweden Prize was given to Prescott and Kydland in 2004, who used specious mathematics to "prove" that central banks should be independent, many real Nobel Prize winners as well as mathematicians Nassim Taleb, Paolo Triana, Ralph Abraham, physicists Hans Peter Durr and Fritjof Capra, and historian of science Robert Nadeau, joined me and Peter Nobel in calling for its de-linking from the real Nobels.[45]
 
These deeper issues of design, human purpose and hidden assumptions must be examined for their roots in power dynamics and how such initial conditions in complex systems lead to deviation amplifications, e.g., money systems came to dominate political systems and disorder local social systems and ecosystems. Elegant abstractions and use of analogies obfuscates these basic power dynamics which allowed financial networks to explode worldwide during the 1980s, fostered by the prevailing market ideologies promoted by the University of Chicago School and Ronald Reagan in the USA and by Margaret Thatcher in Britain.[46] 
 
Many reforms of finance are being debated in the G-20 and the US Congress. These include a clearing house and exchange for credit default swaps (CDSs) and other derivatives; more information on financial network pathways and agents; correcting the errors of Basel II and re-regulation, including an updated version of Glass-Steagall (see my 2009 articles at EthicalMarkets.com). ;Other systemic reforms are also widely debated: reforming financial compensation and incentives; credit rating agencies; re-introducing financial transactions taxes; creating a new Systemic Financial Crisis Insurance Fund (SFCIF) to assess premiums from all financial firms not covered by the FDIC in the USA; setting up systemic risk oversight bodies; creating a new global reserve currency (based on a basket of robust national currencies: the dollar, euro, yen, yuan, sterling, real) and issuing of more SDRs by the IMF.[47] Reforms already in the public debate include auditing and reforming the US Federal Reserve System (in a bill offered by Republican Congressman Ron Paul with over 250 co-sponsors) and the Monetary and Financial Reform Act of 2009 offered by Democrat Congressman Dennis Kucinich and the American Monetary Institute (monetary.org).
 
This new understanding that money is simply one form of information is helping people realize that, of course, there is enough money to invest in our common future. Hundreds of towns around the world have issued local currencies to link unemployed workers with needed jobs.[48] Lawyer Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of The Web of Debt (2008), explored the Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank that has kept North Dakota's budget in surplus.[49] The real constraint has never been money, but rather limited vision and faulty economics. Human societies' ten-year window to install a post-carbon, global economy led to the global network, the Climate Prosperity Alliance, which I am honored to serve as a vice-chair. The Climate Prosperity approach is rooted in ESG accounting and the new Green GDP approaches in Europe, China and here in the USA. The Climate Prosperity Alliance is promoting a rapid ramp-up of private investments in solar, wind, renewables and energy-efficient infrastructure in developing countries.   
 
Joining the Climate Prosperity movement are many socially responsible investors, charitable endowments, "green" bankers, many unions and NGOs, including WWF, which help fund many climate investment studies. Tomorrow's Company, CERES and the UN Principles of Responsible Investing all have issued reports on investing in green companies. All of this and daily news is reported at ethicalmarkets.com from sources, including New Energy News, Responsible Investor, New Energy World Network, Cleantech, CleanEdge, GreenBiz, Greener Computing, Energy & Capital, Environmental Finance, Green Chip Review, Alt Assets, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), Green Budget News, Germany, China's Syntao, Brazil's Mercado Etico and Instituto Ethos and others from India, Japan and Australia.   
 
The last piece of the puzzle to achieve Climate Prosperity within the ten-year window limiting temperature rise to below 2˚ centigrade are the climate prosperity bonds (see ethicalmarkets.com Climate Prosperity Funds). Socially responsible retail investors are now joining forces with the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, the Green Economy Initiative of UNDP, UNEP and the ILO and the eighteen other UN departments and many government agencies.  We welcome greater leadership from institutional investors as they shrug off the old EMH and Modern Portfolio Theory nonsense.
 
The new global effort to fund Climate Prosperity, would invest $10 trillion over the next ten years and plans to double installed renewable energy and efficiency savings each year.[50] This $10 trillion is less that the $14 trillion spent in the US on Wall Street and other bailouts so far (actual liability is now estimated at $23.7 trillion by the TARP Special Inspector at www.sigtarp.gov). The proposed $10 trillion investment in Climate Prosperity is less than 10% of the $120 trillion of assets in pension funds for beneficiaries' future security. Today, climate change is a threat to them and all humanity's future security.  The British government now estimates the "green" market at £3 trillion worldwide.[51]  What better plan is there than to invest these pensions' assets now in securing their future in a safe, sustainable green economy? Climate Prosperity bonds with governments' guarantees and laddered maturities are geared to the payouts from energy efficiency (the quickest payback) and to expanded efficiencies-of-scale in wind, geothermal and solar. Most developing countries can never afford nuclear energy and are unlikely to be able to afford much coal or oil-fired electricity. Solar, wind, geothermal and small-scale hydro and biomass are their most realistic options, together with new natural gas finds, making it cost-effective for coal plants to switch to natural gas for base load and peaking power – reducing carbon emissions by 50%.[52] 
 
Such bonds will be attractive to pension fund asset managers as outlined  by Climate Risk, Pty of Sydney, Australia, and the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets.  The Breaking the Climate Deadlock Plan of The Climate Group calls for $1 trillion to achieve a 70% reduction in emissions by 2020 – largely through energy efficiency. The DESERTEC group of 12 European companies led by Munich Re and ABB plans to invest €450 billion in solar-thermal power plants across North Africa to provide 15% of Europe's electricity via DC transmission lines under the Mediterranean.[53]  Surprising support for larger foreign direct investments (FDI) into emerging and developing countries comes from The Economist in their special report on the world economy, October 3, 2009, p. 25-6. Such a larger role for FDI is seen as an optimal way of re-balancing the imbalances that helped cause the economic crises.
 
During this ten-year rollout of the new low-carbon economy globally, coal and oil, as well as nuclear, will become even more costly and less competitive (even without accounting for their external costs or the price of carbon).[54] The faulty logic of economism which sees the problem as a "shortage of money" is exposed by the Climate Prosperity movement which sees the payback on that $10 trillion after 10 years as approximately $30 trillion. This illustrates that the real constraint is time, not money. After wasting decades, we humans must act now. Economists need to correct all the colossal taxonomic errors in all economic texts and models. Finance courses in all business schools also must overhaul their curricula, as many critics including Nassim Taleb, Paulo Triana and I have proposed. Today's financial networks are indeed houses of cards and multi-disciplinary approaches to valuation of all forms of wealth are now supplanting economics and its metrics, including The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity Services (TEEB) and the Green Economy Report forthcoming from the United Nations Environment Program (unep.org).
 
The Climate Prosperity movement, together with many groups leading in widening awareness, planetary citizenship and perennial wisdom from indigenous peoples and all faith traditions is succeeding in changing the paradigm   From the dismal economism, money-based scarcity and fear to a vision of abundance through sharing, caring, volunteerism and community revitalization, all built on using the energy freely available from sun, wind, oceans and respect for the Earth and all life. The 16 Principles of the Earth Charter are now endorsed by thousands of cities, companies and NGOs (www.earthcharter.org). Copenhagen can host the positive tipping point: the "greening" of finance and a worldwide critical mass of global citizens and their rising eco-aware culture in the emerging information-rich Solar Age.

[1]   Nick Robins , Cary Krozinsky and Stephen Viederman UN-PRI, Sept. 2009 and Matthew J Kiernan, Investing in a Sustainable World ,AMACOM.N.Y. 2009 
[2] Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2007) and Paulo Triana, Lecturing Birds on Flying (2009)
[3] Overcoming Short-Termism: A Call for a More Responsible Approach to Investment and Business Management. The Aspen Institute, September 9, 2009.
[4] Environmental Finance, London, September 17, 2009.
[5] Bloomberg.com, September 14, 2009
[6] Best's Review, "Risk, Uncertainty and Economic Futures," Hazel Henderson, May 1978 (invited paper, North American Risk Management Association).
[7] Andrew Haldane, "Rethinking the Financial Network," Speech delivered at the Financial Student Association, Amsterdam, April 2009.
[8] See for example Hazel Henderson, Politics of the Solar Age, Doubleday, NY, 1981.
[9] New Scientist, "Traders Raging Hormones Cause Stock Market Swings." April 16, 2009.
[10] Responsible Investor. "UK FSA chair slams City of London's 'socially useless' excesses, floats Tobin tax," August 27, 2009.
[11] James Tobin, 1978, "A Proposal for International Monetary Reform," in Eastern Economic Journal, Vol.4 (July, Oct)
[12] Summers, V. and Summers, L. "When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case for a Financial Transactions Tax." Journal of Financial Services no. 3, 1989.
[13] See for example The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives, eds. Harlan Cleveland, Hazel Henderson, Inge Kaul, Elsevier Scientific, UK, 1995.
[14] Asia Times. "Tax to the rescue," Hazel Henderson, March 24, 2009.
[15] Speech by President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, video and text at ethicalmarkets.com.
[17] New York Times, Hazel Henderson, "Economists versus Ecologist" 1971; Financial Analysts Journal, "The Limits of Traditional Economics: New Models for Managing Economies," 1973.
[18] Belem, Brazil 2009, ethicalmarkets.com Reforming Global Finance.
[19] UN General Assembly Meeting, June 24-26, 2009
[20] IPCC, UN 2009, and Pew Center, Science Brief, June 2009
[21] Christian Science Monitor, Hazel Henderson, "Introduce 'Green' Tax" 1990
[22] Carbon Positive, "US Carbon Bill a Boon for World Offsets Markets," July 8, 2009, www.carbonpositive.net
[23] The Economist, July 4, 2009, p. 24; Business Week, "How Banks Will Pounce on Carbon Trading," June 8, 2009, p. 51
[24] The Economist, "Cap and Trade with Handouts and Loopholes," May 23, 2009, pp 33-34
[25] Institutional Investor, "The Promise of Eco," July-August, 2009
[27] Journal of the Society of Charted Accountants of England and Wales, F. Capra and H. Henderson, "Qualitative Growth," forthcoming, November 2009
[28] BBC-Globescan World Public Opinion
[29] UN World Economic Survey, 2009 (overview posted at ethicalmarkets.com)
[30] UNCTAD Trade & Development Report, September 7, 2009, United Nations, Geneva and New York
[31] Center for American Progress and the UN Foundation. Meeting the Climate Challenge, October, 2009.
[32]Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the US Economy McKinsey Report, July 2009
[33] Hazel Henderson, Re-Designing Money Systems to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Accelerate the Growing Green Economy, presented to the Green Economy Initiative Conference, UNEP, Geneva, Dec. 1, 2008
[34] Hazel Henderson, "The Sustainability Sector," SeekingAlpha.com, Nov. 5, 2008.
[35]REN 21
[36] Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, www.recovery.gov
[40] Environmental Finance, September 17, 2009.
[42] The Economist, "Green Shoots," April 3, 2009
[43] Environmental News Service, July 28, 2009, www.ens-newswire.com
[44] Environmental Finance, September 17, 2009.
[45] "The Cuckoo's Egg in the Nobel Prize Nest." And other editorials by Hazel Henderson, IPS, 2004-2005.
[46] World Business Academy Perspectives, "Economic Lessons from the Asian Meltdown." Hazel Henderson, vol. 12, #3, 1998.
[47] Stiglitz Commission Report to the UN General Assembly, June 2009.
[48] Marusa Vasconcelos Freire. "Social Economy and Central Banks." International Journal of Community Currency Research, vol. 13(2009) pp. 76-94.
[49] Ellen Hodgson Brown. "How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars," ethicalmarkets.com, July 20, 2009.
[50] Sean Kidney's "Climate Solutions II" PowerPoint presentation from Climate Risk Pty in Sidney, Australia.
[51] The Economist, July 18, 2009, pp. 54-55
[52] UN World Development Overview, 2009.
]]> Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:23:08 -0500 Invited paper for "The World as We Want It to Be" SRI in the Rockies 20th Anniversary, October 25-28, 2009.
 
                                          
 
Marking the 20th Anniversary of SRI in the Rockies offers more than an opportunity to review the hard-won progress of investors to prove that socially responsible investing is viable and now clearly out-performs traditional mainstream investing. Since the credit crises of 2008-2009, we can now assert with confidence that investing for long-term sustainability and taking ESG factors as material to asset valuation could have actually helped avert these crises.[1] We investors are now winning the paradigm battle and cite the evidence to show that the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is bunk and by the same token show that the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and, yes, even the sacred tenets of the "rational investor" and the Black-Scholes Merton Options Pricing Model will soon be part of history.[2]
 
Thomas Kuhn, told us in 1963 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we often must wait until a generation passes from the scene. Today, we humans are out of time. Climate chaos is upon us and our limiting factor is not money – it never was, since money is simply one form of information. Time is now our limiting factor, as we have until 2020 to keep CO2 and other greenhouse gases, methane, as well as soot, ozone and other pollutants from raising global temperature more than 2˚C.  This means that the game of finance must change to address both its internally-generated global crises and the climate crises which finance has and continues to exacerbate with its blindness to ESG factors and its culture of greed, myopia and short-termism.[3] We were encouraged by our colleague Mindy Lubber's remarks at the introduction of the statement on September 17th of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change (IIGCC): "We are ready and willing to up the ante and finance the transition to a low-carbon economy.[4]
 
Some 15 years ago, I, Steve Schueth and Wayne Silby began creating the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators (calvert-henderson.com) in the belief that incorporating ESG factors into asset valuation and corporate accounting at the micro-economic level would be necessary but not sufficient. We and Calvert CEO Barbara Krumsiek knew that traditional micro-level accounting when aggregated into national accounts such as GDP would inhibit the needed corrections at this macro-economic level. We knew that GDP would also have to include ESG factors; otherwise, its faulty, narrow, short-term view of national "progress" would drive us closer to environmental collapse, social inequality, disease and conflicts. Economist Joseph Stiglitz agrees and warned of the dangers of "GDP-fetishism" in his report to France's President Nicholas Sarkozy.[5]
 
Today, UN-PRI, CERES and other groups of institutional investors continue to lead in promoting ESG and longer-term asset valuation and the need to address climate change. Yet too often, these worthy organizations and their institutional investor members are still captive to the discredited paradigms of finance I have mentioned. Until trustees and shareowners change incentives for their asset managers and consultants, they will still obsess over benchmarking each others' performance according to these now destructive criteria and models. Financial networks are complex, adaptive systems,[6] but reliance on this approach serves little more than to comfortably abstract the debate. Some critiques, such as that of Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England,[7] analogize financial networks to electrical grids. This overlooks the different purposes of these networks: an electrical grid is designed to deliver a useful service: electricity to human societies. Financial networks have expanded globally to increase and speed up the activity of trading which is linked to compensation of the actors and the financial returns of firms. That humans have a propensity to barter and trade is commonplace,[8] but trading for trading's sake has become pathological, an addiction similar to gambling, obsessions with pornography and sex.
 
Addiction to trading and internet-use are now studied by psychologists as is the elevated testosterone levels exhibited by traders in London's financial markets.[9] Thus, one cannot expect any human actors embedded in today's financial networks to think more deeply about their purpose, social utility or the systemic risk that finance now clearly poses to all societies and to ecosystems. At what point did financial markets metastasize to become a cancer on their host: human societies? To ask individual traders or companies would be analogous to expecting the patients and psychiatrists in a mental hospital to design a more optimal system to address dysfunctional aspects. Even less charitable criticism comes from Prof. Simon Johnson at MIT, former chief economist of the IMF who comments on Wall Street's capture of politicians of both parties in the US Congress as "mind control" (Baseline Scenario, October 8, 2009).
 
Britain's head of the Financial Services Authority Lord Adair Turner questioned the social usefulness of finance[10] and proposed to downsize financial sectors by imposing a financial transactions tax (originally proposed by James Tobin in 1978)[11] and by Lawrence Summers in 1989.[12] To re-think financial networks requires going outside the box of all current economic models and the financial "innovations" from which they are derived.[13] Current models derived from faulty economics include: the aforementioned EMH, MPT, CAPM, and VaR. The Black-Scholes-Merton Options Pricing Model is now challenged as plagiarized from options traders' practice by Nassim Taleb (Financial Times, October 12,2008). Human investors do not conform to economics' "rational actor" model, but are revealed by neuroscience (not neuro-economics) as being of two minds: the forebrain (logic, foresight ad higher analytic functions) and the amygdala (the primitive, reptilian brain that responds to emotional stimuli). Thus, financial markets, far from being "efficient," are typical examples of herd behavior (monkey see – monkey do!, see my editorials at HazelHenderson.com and ethicalmarkets.com).
 
The key issues in reforming financial networks are: human social purpose, design criteria and assumptions. Using analogies from architecture and engineering: a bridge, if well designed on physical principles, mapping the forces of nature correctly, will be robust; if badly-designed, as the famous Tacoma Narrows bridge, it will respond to natural forces of wind and oscillate with ever greater amplitude until it collapses. The same applies to buildings that are not designed to account for the laws of natural systems. My late friend Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen made similar observations about economists' love of abstraction in his The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) which I reviewed in the Harvard Business Review. 
 
Therefore, financial networks must be examined from these perspectives and we see their design flaws immediately: they were designed by individual actors and firms to maximize their self-interest and produce rewards in money terms. They were never designed to optimize at the societal level, let alone to function within natural system constraints. Furthermore, they optimized for trading as the primary means to money rewards (hence the growth of proprietary trading desks, day traders, high frequency trading and algorithmic program trading which now dominates market activity). This is why a financial transactions tax is urgent and why I and my partner, mathematician Alan F. Kay, designed a computer program which can be installed on all trading systems to collect such a small tax, the Foreign Exchange Transaction Reporting System (FXTRS) for which we were granted a US patent (see hazelhenderson.com FXTRS).[14]
 
Beyond the pathologies of trading with ever-faster computers, we must next examine the other huge design flaw underlying financial networks: money-creation and credit-allocation. These activities are designed not to create stable, healthy, equitable sustainable human societies. Here, again, money-creation and credit-allocation follow power laws and are designed by sub-system level actors and institutions (banks, central banks, local and national government agencies). Their design criteria are fitted to highly abstract goals: containing or targeting inflation, increasing or decreasing the money supply, NAIRU formulas for unemployment levels, fostering private investment – all vague generalities and measured with dubious statistics: the Consumer Price Index (CPI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP), M1, M2, M3 (now deleted as too revealing of monetary expansion).
 
The good news is that today's confluence of global crises in finance and climate are revealed as crises of human perception: a mirror our mother GAIA is holding up for us to see ourselves and our myopic value-systems. The Information Age, as I predicted at SRI in the Rockies in 2005 has morphed into the Age of Truth. Our native American nations and the world's indigenous peoples have been articulating these truths for centuries now echoed by the President of the UN General Assembly in New York, June 2009.[15]
 
The movement toward planetary awareness is now worldwide and goes by many names: One Planet, socially responsible investing, sustainability, the Global Green New Deal, the Green Economy Initiative, the Climate Prosperity Alliance, Transition Towns, Green Jobs, Green for All, "green stimulus," the Global Marshall Plan, the Post-Carbon Society, the State of the World Forum, the Phoenix Economy, Breaking the Climate Deadlock, Climate Bonds, as well as the hundreds of thousands of groups in over a hundred countries calling for new forms of sustainable livelihoods in their own languages. NGOs are leading and governments are devising responses to protect the most vulnerable populations: women, children, the poor and the least-developed countries from the crises' impacts.[16] Connecting all these groups working on these same interlinked crises can achieve their shared vision of "The World as We Want It to Be."
 
All our crises are closely related to the dying fossilized paradigm of "economism" and its deadly addiction to continuous economic growth measured in money, whatever the social and environmental costs.[17] The disparate social movements of the past 30 years began coming together over the internet and at the World Social Forums, launched in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1999.  Today, in their statement on reforming finance, they are coalescing over these ever-accumulating threats to life on earth, now culminating in global climate disruption.[18] The United Nations joined with civil society in calling the financial and climate crises an opportunity to transition to fairer, cleaner, more sustainable forms of human development.[19]
 
Ever since the UN's climate agreements in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, the evidence from the scientific community of this mega-threat to our collective survival has grown stronger and more ominous.[20] Still the biggest per capita polluter, the USA refused to sign the Kyoto protocols and, with some of its misguided environmental policy makers, forced their "market-based" cap and trade approaches on  successive UN climate conferences. Their idea of capping carbon emissions was sensible enough, using government targets and regulating continuous reductions. But instead of backing enforcement of carbon caps and shifting tax burdens from incomes and payrolls to taxes on carbon and all other pollution and waste,[21] the US "market fundamentalists" demanded that "allowances" to continue emitting carbon be given to polluters to trade with each other. The disgrace of Wall Street has now made trading carbon derivatives as suspect as the credit default swaps that caused such havoc in financial markets. Widespread public objections forced governments to agree to auction pollution allowances, but fossil fuel lobbies have kept their give-aways.[22] INTERPOL, the UN crime-fighting agency, warned of carbon fraud and that carbon-trading could become the white collar crime of the future (www.heatisonline.org).
 
Bankers, stock market traders and commodity brokers saw carbon as a new trillion dollar "asset class" and profit opportunity.[23]   Yet the "cap and trade" emissions schemes in Europe created proliferating bureaucracies with caps on emissions easily lifted by lobbyists.[24]  Ironically, the very financial players who caused the global financial crisis see carbon trading as their next big profit source.[25]  As carbon markets failed to reduce carbon emissions, this has shown the efficiency of simply taxing carbon. The Copenhagen conference in December 2009 can include a global price for carbon. 
 
This debate as well as on how to alleviate the impacts of the financial meltdown and meet the UN's Millennium Development Goals and the Monterrey Consensus of 2002 were forced into the narrow calculus of costs in money terms. Economic methods usually favor quantifying costs to incumbent sectors and existing institutions, rather than estimating savings, benefits and revenues from new ways of doing business, new technologies and social policies. For example, the climate debate focuses on GDP growth "losses." Critiques of GDP-measured growth, including my own over the past 30 years, are finally gaining traction, including the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, making headway with the accounting profession and at the European Parliament's Beyond GDP Conference in 2007 which the European Commission will begin implementing in 2010.[26], [27]  Yet the financial sector still dominates US politics: bailing out Wall Street firms was deemed necessary to "restore" the financial system. Investing in growing the green economy, our children's health and education for a prosperous future are deemed "too expensive," even as a BBC-Globescan poll in 20 countries found 72% of their public's support governments investing in renewable energy and green technology.[28]
 
At last, focusing on carbon emissions in the obsolete fossil-fueled sectors no longer trumps quantifying the uncounted savings, benefits and avoided costs of investing in a global transition to the green post-carbon economy based on energy efficiency, wind, solar, ocean and geothermal sources.[29], [30],[31]  Guy Dauncey, author of Stormy Weather adds up all the estimates of savings so far at $1.7 trillion annually in the USA alone.   McKinsey & Company finds that a $520 billion investment in energy efficiency would yield $1.2trillion by 2020 and reduce US demand by 23%.[32]  Meanwhile, some still view financing for meeting the UN Millennium Development Goals as a cost when in reality, such finance belongs in the investment category. The "rearview mirror" economism calculations must no longer dominate the financial and climate debates – spreading increasing gloom and fear while governments pour trillions into trying to restore the broken status quo.[33] Meanwhile, fossilized asset-allocation models still blind security analysts to the growing companies in the expanding sustainability sectors of the world economy.[34]
 
Meanwhile, the greener, sustainable sectors are still growing worldwide, as renewable energy investments by 2008 exceeded investments in coal power plants.[35] The grassroots movements for sustainability are growing as well. The Obama administration in the USA and the General Assembly of the United Nations grasped the potential of the shift to the green, sustainable sectors worldwide.[36] The rigid G-7 and G-20 summits gave ground to the G-192 as all the member countries of the UN came together in New York in June 2009, adopted the Stiglitz Commission Report[37] and declared their support for the new just, green, sustainable global economy led by UNEP, UNDP and the ILO.[38] Eighteen other UN agencies also support what is now called the Global Green New Deal.[39]  The European Union's president called on the USA to make bigger commitments to cut its carbon emissions and assert more leadership on climate.[40] All now see the meltdown of the global financial casino and the climate crisis as a chance to create a new, more just, green economy promoted for decades by civil society.[41] 
 
Finally, the world can put economism in its place and downsize finance to its limited role facilitating real production. An efficient financial sector should constitute less than 10% of a country's GDP.  Britain’s Financial Services Authority head, Lord Adair Turner shocked many insiders, but his proposals for a financial transactions tax are now supported by many academics and NGOs.  Financial firms not covered by FDIC should pay into a Systemic Financial Risk Insurance Fund (SFRIF) to protect the world’s taxpayers from future bailouts.  As our Chinese friends say, "Markets and money are good servants but bad masters."  Thirty-four percent of China's stimulus package and 81% of South Korea's are focused on investing in solar, wind and green economic growth.[42] UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon praised China's President Hu Jintao for these green economy initiatives.[43] China's "green technology sector" is expected to grow to 15% of its GDP by 2013.[44] As policies of John Maynard Keynes are back in vogue, many forget that his main insight was about the inherent uncertainties and instabilities of financial markets.
 
The spectacle of the US and other central banks printing money on TV helped raise public awareness that money is not real wealth but just a clever invention of humans to track our promises and intentions and keep score of our transactions and uses of natural resources. The many electronic trading exchanges are flourishing, such as Entrex, showcasing and steering capital to small companies; peer-to-peer lending sites, Prosper, Qifang and Zopa; barter sites  Craigslist, and Freecycle that facilitate sharing, recycling; microloan sites, Microplace and Kiva, and Global Giving, Global Greengrants for charitable donating, as well as local currencies and LETS systems. Today information-based trading has illustrated that money circuits and markets have been overloaded by political directives, "quantitative easing," subsidies, carbon trading, etc., instead of direct, transparent legislative approaches. Furthermore, it is now clear that we don't need Wall Street, the City or any other "financial centers" that have now imploded anyway. The Great Disintermediation away from money circuits is underway.  The 20th century "too big to fail" monsters came to believe that they were "providers of capital" rather than mere intermediaries connecting savers with borrowers and manipulating money issued by banks out of thin air. 
 
This money-creation and credit-allocation system is so far removed from the real world of human production and exchange, as well as ecosystem functioning, as to be delusional. Following the founding of the Federal Reserve System in the USA in 1913, the money-creation function given to the US Congress in the Constitution was turned over to the twelve private banks of the Federal Reserve System. Only the Federal Reserve Board is appointed by the US President and Congress.   Since then, private banks using the fractional reserve system create 95% of our currency as accounting entries of the loans they make, i.e., as debt. The interest charged on their loans is not created, causing increased indebtedness. This system, which unfortunately spread around the world, was aided and abetted by the Nobel Committee's acceptance of the Bank of Sweden's prize to legitimize the profession of economics in memory of Alfred Nobel. Since this Bank of Sweden Prize was given to Prescott and Kydland in 2004, who used specious mathematics to "prove" that central banks should be independent, many real Nobel Prize winners as well as mathematicians Nassim Taleb, Paolo Triana, Ralph Abraham, physicists Hans Peter Durr and Fritjof Capra, and historian of science Robert Nadeau, joined me and Peter Nobel in calling for its de-linking from the real Nobels.[45]
 
These deeper issues of design, human purpose and hidden assumptions must be examined for their roots in power dynamics and how such initial conditions in complex systems lead to deviation amplifications, e.g., money systems came to dominate political systems and disorder local social systems and ecosystems. Elegant abstractions and use of analogies obfuscates these basic power dynamics which allowed financial networks to explode worldwide during the 1980s, fostered by the prevailing market ideologies promoted by the University of Chicago School and Ronald Reagan in the USA and by Margaret Thatcher in Britain.[46] 
 
Many reforms of finance are being debated in the G-20 and the US Congress. These include a clearing house and exchange for credit default swaps (CDSs) and other derivatives; more information on financial network pathways and agents; correcting the errors of Basel II and re-regulation, including an updated version of Glass-Steagall (see my 2009 articles at EthicalMarkets.com). ;Other systemic reforms are also widely debated: reforming financial compensation and incentives; credit rating agencies; re-introducing financial transactions taxes; creating a new Systemic Financial Crisis Insurance Fund (SFCIF) to assess premiums from all financial firms not covered by the FDIC in the USA; setting up systemic risk oversight bodies; creating a new global reserve currency (based on a basket of robust national currencies: the dollar, euro, yen, yuan, sterling, real) and issuing of more SDRs by the IMF.[47] Reforms already in the public debate include auditing and reforming the US Federal Reserve System (in a bill offered by Republican Congressman Ron Paul with over 250 co-sponsors) and the Monetary and Financial Reform Act of 2009 offered by Democrat Congressman Dennis Kucinich and the American Monetary Institute (monetary.org).
 
This new understanding that money is simply one form of information is helping people realize that, of course, there is enough money to invest in our common future. Hundreds of towns around the world have issued local currencies to link unemployed workers with needed jobs.[48] Lawyer Ellen Hodgson Brown, author of The Web of Debt (2008), explored the Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank that has kept North Dakota's budget in surplus.[49] The real constraint has never been money, but rather limited vision and faulty economics. Human societies' ten-year window to install a post-carbon, global economy led to the global network, the Climate Prosperity Alliance, which I am honored to serve as a vice-chair. The Climate Prosperity approach is rooted in ESG accounting and the new Green GDP approaches in Europe, China and here in the USA. The Climate Prosperity Alliance is promoting a rapid ramp-up of private investments in solar, wind, renewables and energy-efficient infrastructure in developing countries.   
 
Joining the Climate Prosperity movement are many socially responsible investors, charitable endowments, "green" bankers, many unions and NGOs, including WWF, which help fund many climate investment studies. Tomorrow's Company, CERES and the UN Principles of Responsible Investing all have issued reports on investing in green companies. All of this and daily news is reported at ethicalmarkets.com from sources, including New Energy News, Responsible Investor, New Energy World Network, Cleantech, CleanEdge, GreenBiz, Greener Computing, Energy & Capital, Environmental Finance, Green Chip Review, Alt Assets, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE), Green Budget News, Germany, China's Syntao, Brazil's Mercado Etico and Instituto Ethos and others from India, Japan and Australia.   
 
The last piece of the puzzle to achieve Climate Prosperity within the ten-year window limiting temperature rise to below 2˚ centigrade are the climate prosperity bonds (see ethicalmarkets.com Climate Prosperity Funds). Socially responsible retail investors are now joining forces with the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, the Green Economy Initiative of UNDP, UNEP and the ILO and the eighteen other UN departments and many government agencies.  We welcome greater leadership from institutional investors as they shrug off the old EMH and Modern Portfolio Theory nonsense.
 
The new global effort to fund Climate Prosperity, would invest $10 trillion over the next ten years and plans to double installed renewable energy and efficiency savings each year.[50] This $10 trillion is less that the $14 trillion spent in the US on Wall Street and other bailouts so far (actual liability is now estimated at $23.7 trillion by the TARP Special Inspector at www.sigtarp.gov). The proposed $10 trillion investment in Climate Prosperity is less than 10% of the $120 trillion of assets in pension funds for beneficiaries' future security. Today, climate change is a threat to them and all humanity's future security.  The British government now estimates the "green" market at £3 trillion worldwide.[51]  What better plan is there than to invest these pensions' assets now in securing their future in a safe, sustainable green economy? Climate Prosperity bonds with governments' guarantees and laddered maturities are geared to the payouts from energy efficiency (the quickest payback) and to expanded efficiencies-of-scale in wind, geothermal and solar. Most developing countries can never afford nuclear energy and are unlikely to be able to afford much coal or oil-fired electricity. Solar, wind, geothermal and small-scale hydro and biomass are their most realistic options, together with new natural gas finds, making it cost-effective for coal plants to switch to natural gas for base load and peaking power – reducing carbon emissions by 50%.[52] 
 
Such bonds will be attractive to pension fund asset managers as outlined  by Climate Risk, Pty of Sydney, Australia, and the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets.  The Breaking the Climate Deadlock Plan of The Climate Group calls for $1 trillion to achieve a 70% reduction in emissions by 2020 – largely through energy efficiency. The DESERTEC group of 12 European companies led by Munich Re and ABB plans to invest €450 billion in solar-thermal power plants across North Africa to provide 15% of Europe's electricity via DC transmission lines under the Mediterranean.[53]  Surprising support for larger foreign direct investments (FDI) into emerging and developing countries comes from The Economist in their special report on the world economy, October 3, 2009, p. 25-6. Such a larger role for FDI is seen as an optimal way of re-balancing the imbalances that helped cause the economic crises.
 
During this ten-year rollout of the new low-carbon economy globally, coal and oil, as well as nuclear, will become even more costly and less competitive (even without accounting for their external costs or the price of carbon).[54] The faulty logic of economism which sees the problem as a "shortage of money" is exposed by the Climate Prosperity movement which sees the payback on that $10 trillion after 10 years as approximately $30 trillion. This illustrates that the real constraint is time, not money. After wasting decades, we humans must act now. Economists need to correct all the colossal taxonomic errors in all economic texts and models. Finance courses in all business schools also must overhaul their curricula, as many critics including Nassim Taleb, Paulo Triana and I have proposed. Today's financial networks are indeed houses of cards and multi-disciplinary approaches to valuation of all forms of wealth are now supplanting economics and its metrics, including The Economics of Ecosystem and Biodiversity Services (TEEB) and the Green Economy Report forthcoming from the United Nations Environment Program (unep.org).
 
The Climate Prosperity movement, together with many groups leading in widening awareness, planetary citizenship and perennial wisdom from indigenous peoples and all faith traditions is succeeding in changing the paradigm   From the dismal economism, money-based scarcity and fear to a vision of abundance through sharing, caring, volunteerism and community revitalization, all built on using the energy freely available from sun, wind, oceans and respect for the Earth and all life. The 16 Principles of the Earth Charter are now endorsed by thousands of cities, companies and NGOs (www.earthcharter.org). Copenhagen can host the positive tipping point: the "greening" of finance and a worldwide critical mass of global citizens and their rising eco-aware culture in the emerging information-rich Solar Age.

[1]   Nick Robins , Cary Krozinsky and Stephen Viederman UN-PRI, Sept. 2009 and Matthew J Kiernan, Investing in a Sustainable World ,AMACOM.N.Y. 2009 
[2] Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2007) and Paulo Triana, Lecturing Birds on Flying (2009)
[3] Overcoming Short-Termism: A Call for a More Responsible Approach to Investment and Business Management. The Aspen Institute, September 9, 2009.
[4] Environmental Finance, London, September 17, 2009.
[5] Bloomberg.com, September 14, 2009
[6] Best's Review, "Risk, Uncertainty and Economic Futures," Hazel Henderson, May 1978 (invited paper, North American Risk Management Association).
[7] Andrew Haldane, "Rethinking the Financial Network," Speech delivered at the Financial Student Association, Amsterdam, April 2009.
[8] See for example Hazel Henderson, Politics of the Solar Age, Doubleday, NY, 1981.
[9] New Scientist, "Traders Raging Hormones Cause Stock Market Swings." April 16, 2009.
[10] Responsible Investor. "UK FSA chair slams City of London's 'socially useless' excesses, floats Tobin tax," August 27, 2009.
[11] James Tobin, 1978, "A Proposal for International Monetary Reform," in Eastern Economic Journal, Vol.4 (July, Oct)
[12] Summers, V. and Summers, L. "When Financial Markets Work Too Well: A Cautious Case for a Financial Transactions Tax." Journal of Financial Services no. 3, 1989.
[13] See for example The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives, eds. Harlan Cleveland, Hazel Henderson, Inge Kaul, Elsevier Scientific, UK, 1995.
[14] Asia Times. "Tax to the rescue," Hazel Henderson, March 24, 2009.
[15] Speech by President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, video and text at ethicalmarkets.com.
[17] New York Times, Hazel Henderson, "Economists versus Ecologist" 1971; Financial Analysts Journal, "The Limits of Traditional Economics: New Models for Managing Economies," 1973.
[18] Belem, Brazil 2009, ethicalmarkets.com Reforming Global Finance.
[19] UN General Assembly Meeting, June 24-26, 2009
[20] IPCC, UN 2009, and Pew Center, Science Brief, June 2009
[21] Christian Science Monitor, Hazel Henderson, "Introduce 'Green' Tax" 1990
[22] Carbon Positive, "US Carbon Bill a Boon for World Offsets Markets," July 8, 2009, www.carbonpositive.net
[23] The Economist, July 4, 2009, p. 24; Business Week, "How Banks Will Pounce on Carbon Trading," June 8, 2009, p. 51
[24] The Economist, "Cap and Trade with Handouts and Loopholes," May 23, 2009, pp 33-34
[25] Institutional Investor, "The Promise of Eco," July-August, 2009
[27] Journal of the Society of Charted Accountants of England and Wales, F. Capra and H. Henderson, "Qualitative Growth," forthcoming, November 2009
[28] BBC-Globescan World Public Opinion
[29] UN World Economic Survey, 2009 (overview posted at ethicalmarkets.com)
[30] UNCTAD Trade & Development Report, September 7, 2009, United Nations, Geneva and New York
[31] Center for American Progress and the UN Foundation. Meeting the Climate Challenge, October, 2009.
[32]Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the US Economy McKinsey Report, July 2009
[33] Hazel Henderson, Re-Designing Money Systems to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Accelerate the Growing Green Economy, presented to the Green Economy Initiative Conference, UNEP, Geneva, Dec. 1, 2008
[34] Hazel Henderson, "The Sustainability Sector," SeekingAlpha.com, Nov. 5, 2008.
[35]REN 21
[36] Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, www.recovery.gov
[40] Environmental Finance, September 17, 2009.
[42] The Economist, "Green Shoots," April 3, 2009
[43] Environmental News Service, July 28, 2009, www.ens-newswire.com
[44] Environmental Finance, September 17, 2009.
[45] "The Cuckoo's Egg in the Nobel Prize Nest." And other editorials by Hazel Henderson, IPS, 2004-2005.
[46] World Business Academy Perspectives, "Economic Lessons from the Asian Meltdown." Hazel Henderson, vol. 12, #3, 1998.
[47] Stiglitz Commission Report to the UN General Assembly, June 2009.
[48] Marusa Vasconcelos Freire. "Social Economy and Central Banks." International Journal of Community Currency Research, vol. 13(2009) pp. 76-94.
[49] Ellen Hodgson Brown. "How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars," ethicalmarkets.com, July 20, 2009.
[50] Sean Kidney's "Climate Solutions II" PowerPoint presentation from Climate Risk Pty in Sidney, Australia.
[51] The Economist, July 18, 2009, pp. 54-55
[52] UN World Development Overview, 2009.
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