O-Conomy

Ray Podder
9 min readFeb 23, 2020

Our Fiat won’t make it through the 21st century!
Not the car, the money.

Those IOUs that we’ve been borrowing from our children’s future with no payback guarantees, cannot ever manage the future risks of our fiat based funds. Roll the dice on incubators and accelerators to create production efficiencies all we want, most of our money will still be wasted with the inefficient and unaccountable economic tools of the past.

Current complications of climate, capital and community crises, only compound this situation, and we desperately need simplicity and agility to adapt to these challenges in real time right now. New ways of managing systemic risks with clear accountability and cooperation between you and me, not more empty promises and projections.

Globally, there is approximately $68T of institutional capital sitting on the sidelines, not doing much besides providing portfolios so called “liquidity” without much accountability. Meanwhile, there is a $30T hole in global pension funds, a global debt crisis, and an increasingly urgent need for that liquidity to be reinvested into the real economy.

Existing “assets” may show performance, but this is propped up on speculation, unsustainable buybacks, and doesn’t hedge well against systemic risks. Big funds and portfolio managers may be talking impact assets now, though of the Trillions so earmarked, less than 5% of that capital has actually been allocated. Not to mention, that what we now call capital assets, are actually projected debts we have to pay back. Assets for managers, yes, though the whole idea of assets was something that puts money back in our pockets, not something we have to prop up to pay back with interest.

Meanwhile, many can see that…

Data = Money.

Yet now, most of our data is busy making big tech rich at the expense of our own time and contributions. Although when we think of what “rich” means in convincing ourselves into projecting debt as money, most of the value of our data is lost or wasted chasing an insecure future. While these problems may seem complicated, the solution may be easier than we…