Financial institution that is work in the interest of progressive investors. Hello, everybody, welcome to little city books, the best bookstore in the world as we measure it. Thank you all for coming tonight, we know its drizzly. This is a very important and interesting book. Mark was the he directed, i always get it wrong, Financial Institution industry for many years which basically what they did was funnel money to people who were marginalized, im sure he could tell you more about that if you want to ask him. And we also have here tonight adam moss who is a magazine guy, esquire, many other things, he and mark were roommates at college and have always known each other for a very long time, thank you for coming out here, adam. So im going let them go on from here, thanks for coming. [applause] hi, everybody, is this registering. Lift it up. All right. Is that better . Anyway, welcome, thank you for coming, its really great to be here with mark who i have known for 41 years, 3, 4, 44 years. Sorry. [laughter] my freshman roommate and sophomore roommate and senior roommate. Where youve been all these years . I met him before school when he wrote me in this highly bizarre letter i got addressed to moss, my name is adam moss and that was the college imprint thing that she read through, straight through, dear moss, i want to come meet you before college, man, im so excited about going to college, i made up an entire social life to impress mark when he came and he very good heartedly played along with that. I got there, hes the most popular person, hes going to be a terrible roommate. [laughter] i paid all of the people to pretend they were my friends, it was very effective. Anyway, that was really a lot of years ago and mark has had just an absolutely stunning career since then, i guess i want to start before he talks, asking the most openended question, how did you get from overland, ohio in 1979 to little city bookstore . [laughter] how much time . Its great to be here with you, thank you little city books for having us, thank you all for coming out. The part of the story that i really want to tell is about the frustration thats build up over 40 years and the frustration is the frustration of progressive change through my work, college in 1979n october of 1980i went to work on capitol hill i worked with a guy left of Bernie Sanders, and a month later Ronald Reagan got elected. It was a what just happened moment, a lot of things that have happened then and can look back at them now and put them in context, why is it that we live in a world thats gotten in so many ways more progressive, more inclusive, more concerned about the environment, all those things but policy and the world we live in many many ways have gotten more conservative, when you read of Voting Rights act, roll back, its stunningly frustrating, kind of what i realize was over time and worked on the hill, i worked for advocacy groups, labor groups and found myself in Community Finance which is providing financing all across the country to help them participate in economic mainstream and the folks on economic mainstream understand where the opportunities were in the market s, bottom line what i realized was the world where the left organizeed people and the red organized people and the right organized money and the left didnt. There was fundamental problem that the left was was, you know, disempowering itself, making hard to succeed. What i realized was there is tens of millions of progressive people just like me and maybe they want to read a book. And do more. Mission statement for a whole movement. Thats right. Thats right. I thought i would read a little bit. So, yeah, please do. Just to get us started and then we will get into conversation here. A piece together in the beginning of the book. The u. S. Financial sector is dominant Economic Policy political social and cultural force in the worse, it largely determines who in the private and Public Sector get to do what with the extraordinary amount of money in play and it is deeply and profoundly conservative. Youre skipping around . Im skipping. My inclination is wanting to read the whole book. You have 12 hours. My answer before wasnt long enough . Lasting systematic progressive change in American Society requires strategy that targets the core of the conservative world view, the Financial System. It needs a central organizing idea, that idea is organized money, organized money is a strategy to disrupt the conservative influence of a Financial Sector, to disrupt corresponding bias facing conservative outcome and to disrupt the unrival Public Policy might of the financial lobby. Many ideas in this book and in this conversation might seem unfamiliar because they contradict the market fundamentalism, the interlocking belief that inclusive finance doesnt work, that greed is good, that mainstream Financial Institutions are apolitical and unbiased, that wealth is and should be controlled only by conservatives and that government has no business asking social responsibility of Financial Institutions. , in fact, our nation has prospered because inclusive finance works, because we have to some degree rejected greed in favor of a moral contracted care for one another and because Public Opinion has offset the billions of dollars of political giving by the Financial Sector, now, perhaps for the first time progressive wealth rivals conservative wealth while new Financial Networks are channeling capital and increasing amounts to progressive goals to businesses that balance public good with private gain. We envision a network of progressive Financial Intermediaries of all types, Insurance Companies as well as banks, as well as Credit Unions that are consequential enough individually and together to wheel power in Financial Markets in business and in policy. By working together in a network they would be able to overcome their current overreliance on conservative business partners, by providing a full range of products and services they will grow and gain market share and increase progressive power over time. By taking control of even a modest but material slice of the Financial System, progressives will exert a gravitational poll on finance, policy, culture and so the world we live in, thats it, its great. So basically the book, it explains a lot, also code of arms. I guess one of the toward the end of the book you have several platforms of what youre going to do and the first one i think was to be on a mission to increase literacy, Financial System literacy, so, you know, here you have an audience and there you have more audience and i wonder if you can just give us a little in what we ought to know in terms of Financial System literacy because im financially system illiterate, help me. You and as far as my coauthor can tell too. People dont think of the financial, people think to think Financial System like water, air, its everywhere, take it for granted. And what we are interested in doing is making people aware of what the Financial System is actually doing, so just to give you one example, i like to point out that when you use your credit card to buy green product or organic food, the fee you pay for the Payment System is probably going to finance possible fuels somewhere along the way, right. We can understand and stop the Little Things that happen, complicated system but if we can start by just finding and identifying in our lives and in the world around us, all the way to the Financial System is doing things that may not align with our value, i think thats the start. What the reality is, i would love to be able to say lets go and lets do all of these things, people dont see the problem in my mind, so that conversation is about understanding, being aware of the Financial System in a way that people will begin to see the problem because they can do something. Are you asking people people to do anything differently, should they invest differently, what are you asking of the individual . Right. So there are a lot of things individuals can do and should do to the extent it works for them. So theres this feel of social responsible investing thats a 15 trilliondollar asset group thats significant, thats roughly 15 of the Financial Marketplace, there are ways to do philanthropy thats targeting progressive outcomes and ways to work with my coauthor keith who couldnt be here tonight runs a bank, theres one in new york, in dc as well, its a labor on bank and you can bank which is, you know, fossil free and has a number of products that are intended, so there are a number of banks around the country, you can bank at all of those and do all of those things to the extent that they are not making your life too difficult, right . But i think that the key to this will come when we by doing those things get the social responsible investors to think differently about what they are doing, right, so its a longterm goal, i dont have any quick fixes for this, i dont think theres a quick fix, its a complicated system. In the world that you envision, who wins in that world and and who loses . So because i think in long stretches, like 10 years, 1 trillion, ultimate strategy, the folks trying oh achieve progressive change, whether thats around the environment, whether thats around, you know, equity, whether thats around include, all of the various things, there are a lot of people doing out there doing good work and trying hard and they are the experts and what we want to do have Financial System that doesnt make it harder for them to do what theyre doing, access finance and do their Financial Plan to go be able to raise money, all those things, and so, you know, the big picture goal for me is that 10 years from now its easier to achieve progressive gains and whatever it may be and whatever may be trying to achieve them. Had a conversation about the Healthcare System but a lot of people doing interesting things, working around health and, you know, different ways of improving the Health System but what we really want to do create Financial System thats not, not a friction for them but is really helping them move forward. Lets go who loses part . Who loses . The folks that the Financial System is it operates on the idea that more of the same is better than something new for the most part, right, because when youre in the Financial System generally you want to take risks out and the easiest way to take risks out is do something that you already did before, its easier for the Financial System to think about doing certain kinds of lending and not other kinds of lending, its why Financial System is notoriously bad at diversity and at the board level and Senior Management level and its a little bit out of those habits or worse of how they operate, so what you what we really want to do is demonstrate that you can, you can lend in new ways, you can structure loans in more creative ways that work for people that you are trying to help, you know, if youre lending to a nonprofit in a community, you recognize that the way they are bringing in cash flow is uneven, some seasons are better than others. Are you asking investors to take less profit in order to help the common good . We are asking investors not always to put greed first and there are two ways to think about that, the first is that you can think about profit in the shortterm versus longterm which is a problem we have in this country, you know, the now nowism as we call it, and now theres been a lot of analysis that shows the tortoise wins the race. The system when i talk about creating network, we fully expect it to be profitable in a competitive way with anything else, theres no reason it shouldnt be and there may be times when the the that the return that Financial Institution is getting is a little bit less but that should even out over time and thats true today, Financial Institutions today do that too but the investors should be made whole. When you say in the part that you just read that we have to understand that greed isnt good, stipulate that, my understanding always was that greed was, was the grease of capitalism. So is that true, is the actual kind of motivation to make more money the thing that makes that system work . It is a factor in what drives people but i think that the sort of blind obidience, it goes back to adam smith who was the one who talked about selfinterest being a motivating factor and, you know, the other thing that adam smith said at the same time human as moral characters cant survive if they act just on greed alone and theres another what he viewed as the moral side of the human being that is motivated by carrying for other people even though he or she is not getting anything in return for it, right . There needs to be attention in it and i think that in fact, we are now, people like to talk about latestage capitalism and we talked about that, but i think we are latestage market fundamentalism i think we are, theres a model 60, 70 years ago, that said, read, read, me first, me always, right, and thats played out and hasnt played out well and i think we are seeing, i think when people, i think, most of the people who are form of capitalism, capitalism before then, before sort of say 1950 or 1960 had a very different bent or much more sense of public purpose and responsibility and it will go forward. Why did it change . Why did it change then . Yeah. Because coming out of Second World War there were influential economist who is were promoting in a really effective way who i think were trying to warn about the dangers of, you know, fascism and collectivism and high act is one and melton freedman was the other. Those really emerged from this idea that it call cost we need to avoid anything thats collected and so, you know, theres something to that, but it was also a product to have time, what happened really was that, you know, the economists of that school were brilliant and influential and the other thing that happened was we used to call political economists until that time and we took the politics out of it and if you took textbook, he was part of the school, lets make clean, we dont want to be messing with politics, its just a science, a lot of folks now sort of realized that didnt work out so well. So there was this shift, its not inconsistent with the culture that grew up in the 50s and into the 60s, it was a good time and people sort of bought into this, the rise of Ronald Reagan was a product of that and a big boost for that and, you know, so my particular history became at Pivotal Moment when the scales tipped and it became very popular and one in my mind the outcome of that is donald trump. One outcome of that is, you know, some crazy policies and crazy things that we do in the country that create incentives that are just plainly selfdestructive, shortterm selfdestructive and at the same time a lot of the book is about the things that are rising, the things that are happening whether its Impact Investing or my world of cdfis commercial development Financial Institutions, whether its Corporate Social Responsibility, all of the things are mixed back, they are not pure, whether its benefit corporations, all those things are happening and we think theres really convergence of of events and of trends that create an opportunity that we havent really had along with the fact that theres a tremendous amount of progressive wealth in the country, if you look as i did, the forbes for 100 or whatever those are called for 20, what year is it . 2018, the amount of money that is held in the top 10 thats held by progressives, its vastly greater than the amount vastly held greater than the amount of conservatives and in tend it equals out but thats never been a thing before, the money has been conservative wealth. Are you asking something in the mission of the book, are you asking something of the billionaires who have that, you have some staggering statistics in there about how much wealth they have and how much of the Financial System thats in their control, whats their role in this and what do you think how do you get them to do what you think they ought to . Setting aside for a second the income inequalities which are important, we need to focus on not who has the wealth but where its going, 5 billiondollar bank, you cant manage, pick a wealthy, you know, cant manage big account like that so we need to create the capacity to be able to do that but i think that there are folks who are some steyer has invested personally in creating a Community Development bank thats trended a lot of good stuff and i think that what we need them to do is work with us, be patient, work towards that solution instead of automatically handing their money over to whoever their banker is and thinking about that and providing leadership in that but i also hope that theyll help invest in some of the new tools and instructs to get us there and the answer is, yes, we will ask them, we are not ready for yet. I dont want to get out of my skis when we havent done the ground work. This book is for us to organize and organizing you have to be willing to be patients and put things in place so that youre ready. Are any of the president ial candidates, obviously Bernie Sanders especially, you know, advocating anything of the sort that fits into your program or is this a whole side matter . Id like to say not yet, i think that they tend to think of solution, they tend to think of the future as a forward shadow of the past and they are doing things in the models they know. This is a different model, i think everybody, everybody all president ial candidates on the democratic side are friends to impacting and friends to see cfi, they have familiarity but they havent built platforms or Economic Strategies on this approach although they can and should and you referenced some of the suggestions, we put 4, 5 policy changes that a new president can do with a signature of a pen, doesnt take congressional action in order for it to be turn this around, 10year strategy can become a 2year strategy. Oneone of the interesting ths in the book i thought, almost a throw away sentence at some point which says that democrats usually look to government as the solution and and then you say and donned on me that it was true that your entire program really doesnt depend on government. You talk a little bit about that. Thats in the section where i critique, i think thats right where i got into that. I think as i said democrats tend to overrely on government and think government can solve problems, i dont know. [laughter] but my critique, let me use new green deal as an example. The structure of it, the approach of it, it doesnt consider, it doesnt address, it doesnt mention, doesnt think about how the private Financial System could be an ally in that, right, and its not that anybody who is designing would think that they naturally would be, we also point out, Rain Forest Alliance did a really good analysis and found that the biggest banks, might have been the 20 biggest banks are doing 300 billion in Green Financing or they did in 2017 and close to 2 trillion in fossil fuel financing, so, its not like you think thats going to be the solution but for reasons, well, i think there are a lot of folks in this Financial System, in the biggest institutions and middlesize institutions that are really motivated to want to try to do more sustainable work, right . So its not like you should turn it over to them but to not even consider it seems to be a major sort of misstep in some ways and so i dont think, you know, i think the Republican Party has been taken over market fundamentalism to extreme, great extreme and i think that the democrats, you know, i think that there is in Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Great Potential to pair some of their ideas up with Market Strategy and figure out how to make great things happen for all the reasons we say in the book because of convergence of things that are happening that really gives momentum and power to them and i think we have a moment, i think we have a moment the next couple of years and if we can take advantage of it we can make things happen faster and if not we will be back in 40 more years talking about whats next. I hope so. I hope not but i hope so. So Bernie Sanders defines himself as not a capitalist and Elizabeth Warren defines herself as capitalist, you seem to be a capitalist. Absolutely. What is that argument amount . What is that argument about . I think most people frame it as, you know, that the idea that markets alone will solve problems, which is market fundamentalist ideas therefore the markets wont do it because you need big powerful entity to be able to do it, to me as i said early, i think capitalism has been hijacked for the last 50 or 60 years, more and more people are talking about that and aware of that and i treat them with caution, the business round table, 181 global companies, what month is this, 3 months ago announced that they were going to reject the Milton Freedman corporation that shareholders to a stakeholder model which is to say employees matter and customers matter and sound pretty basic, right, and, you know, and thats really significant that they did that, will it turn into anything, i dont know, part of the conversation im involved with now how do you create accountability and what does it really mean, but when they are doing that theres a reason for that, my theory, i have two theories, the most cynical one that someone brought up, trying to change the rules for shareholders can file proxy statements and challenge governance and management and they are trying to slip that in under this, right . I dont doubt it. That seems absolutely true. Its a more complex game than that. Yeah. The other thing there was remarkable study that came early this year thats called the trust barometer and they do a survey, 33,000 employees, all operate in the United States not surprisingly but what was interested about the findings was that for the First Time Ever the social responsibilities and the social impact of the corporations was the top issue for employees and overwhelmingly 60, 70 employees put that at the top and thats new, thats a significant thing and if youre a corporate ceo you may not pay a lot of attention what they wrote in opeds and you pay a lot of attention on what your employees say. Generational shift on who is taking management, who is the managers are, right . Earth day was 50 years ago, 49 years ago, people have been raised in a way that we werent with environmental consciousness and environmental awareness and those folks are now, you know, they may not be at the top, some of them are, big corporations but one level down and two levels down and they wouldnt think of working in a company that doesnt have that, even in companies that you think are cold hearted. And theres change happening and thats good force. I dont remember what it is. Millennials who do not define themselves as capitalists and who have in a way given up on capitalism, do you think theyve given up too fast, do you think thats just posturing or do you think theres actually a different way that young people are seeing the world in the market system that will have some kind of impact . Well, first i gave up on a lot of things. You know, its a Quick Reaction but its a totally reasonable and understandable response to the world theyve come up with and the world thats happening around them. I totally thats reasonable. Again, i think that i would differentiate between the, you know, sort of market fundallism fundament fundamentalism and if you think about millennials, my kids, might be 20 to 35, lets say, right, first of all, that was in the last day or so. They grew up after berlin wall came up. So theres that. , the second thing is the crisis of 2008, the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and the things that perceived and the crisis of 2008 the murder on the orient express, nobody did it or everybody did it and i think everybody did it. No one apologized. People didnt go to person, i know one person that went to prison, people didnt go to prison, people werent punished on that, there was a moment when they, you know, when president new president obama gave them get out of jail free card, you know, it was it was, you know, its just a thing but disrupted everything about their lives, right, it affected what the jobs paid, you know, the flat wage or first ten years, that takes a long time if ever to recover and so they will carry that for a long time, student debt, more likely to have a student debt because of the crisis,less trust in Financial Institutions so i think that michelle wrote a great column in the New York Times about a year ago who just sort of said who can blame them for asking the questions and i think thats right, so i totally understand it. I dont know where it ends, my hope is that that ads to this argument if we will keep capitalism we will keep it better. You talk about 2008 just now and you talk about in first chunk of the book. If barack obama had not given that get out of jail card, if he had, if some, you know, some of the sort of bad actors were prosecuted, what does the world look like now . So just for assuming most people havent read the book, the preface about the book that was a moment, the future of finance and i somehow got invited to it, i have no idea, ive gotten an invitation and i applied and they let me in, when i got there they called it the 100 smartest minds on wall street and i didnt work on wall street but 100 smartest minds and a lot of brilliant people there and they were there because the Obama Administration was going to go out and what it was going to do a lot of talk in the room, and came out because secretary of treasury showed up and made a speech that was astonishingly, i was in disbelief, you know, and so the question is what if he hadnt taken that approach, first to defend the Obama Administration a little bit by way of counterfactual, would we have an economy, although the worries have died down, and, you know, somewhere in the white house and, you know, people get hurt, homeowners arent compensated just to keep the economy going. I have other things i want to do like the Affordable Care act, i want to get reelected in 3 and a half years at that point so, you know, theres always things that a president , ive never been president , has to think about, so the the number one thing that was on the table that everybody expect today give up in the industry was a little background, most of the Financial System is derivative products and without explaining a lot of what it is, its bets on Financial Products and bets on Financial Products and bets and bets and its massive, one of the biggest problems they had, one of the biggest problems in 2008 crisis beside the fact that there were bad actors doing bad loans was nobody knew what the exposure actually was in the derivative market because there was no requirement, if i were buying a product you, derivative product from you, you had to know it, theres no recording of it, no one could look at it and say, jeez, if we dont back this, if we try and call this, we will bring down half of the Financial System, maybe, maybe not. In the Financial Sector people said they were. One of the things that they were prepared to do and they were trying to convince themselves i was in the room that night was that was that, well, that would be good because we know a little better what we are doing, when it didnt happen we were thrilled because they could play with rules and one of the things that would have happened i think would have been that, they would have given up quickly, the good news about this we would know a lot more of whats going in the economy now and whats going on in the Financial Market and credit markets but the reality is, essentially the same system we did leading up to the crisis before and we will have the same result. I guess sooner rather than later, i dont know what that means exactly, that would have been a big thing, i think that you also would have had some version of what became legislation, im completely blank in whats what its called. Doddfrank. Doddfrank. What happened to the rules that the Financial Sector and i sat in a lot of meeting with Financial Sector people after that they didnt care, does it take 200 lawyers or 400 lawyers because we will just do that, they didnt care about that, you would have gotten some version of that, Consumer Protection approach but also happened to be the launch of Elizabeth Warren in some ways, that dynamic might have been different and i think you would have gotten some people prosecuted, some of them probably forced out of their jobs but not necessarily sent to jail and there would have been a chase in market, the Financial Market knew what it had done, i can remember in 2005 and 2006 people saying this could be 6 to 10 billion. Im sure it was a lot more money than that. Yeah. And its some level that would have happened. Politically . Sorry. No, go. So i think i think if obama had chosen that fight it was a really interesting dynamic because the the outrage that the folks, the Financial Sector folks had at the meeting, they were outraged that somebody would actually challenge them and the comments were just astonishing in their indignation, right, they knew they had done wrong but they were them, so i think it would have been a big confrontation and i think a few things would have happened, the Financial Sector which stayed moderate from a political action, stayed moderate to the republican side would have gotten more solidly republican, i think probably that fight would have dominated everything, i think there probably wouldnt have been an Affordable Care act because one big fight and there werent room for that, that might not have happened and mitt romney would have been elected president in 4 years later. You can look at political speculation and we would have ended with donald trump. I think romney would have come in and there would have been a moderation, i think you would have gotten a louder tea party but a less effective tea party because thats my yeah. Cant prove me wrong, cant i . Yeah, good moment to open up to audience, questions, one many the back. We are going mic you. My name is not mike but andy. [laughter] when you were talking and when you were talking about dropping the phrase what was it political economics or policy. Went from political economics to economics. So we are seeing a lot more Companies Either sort of embrace a social responsibility that employers are seek to go them and customers as well as to people who are outright rejecting them, i dont know if you heard about dead spin but this blog that was mostly framed but had taken and most popular content was more about social issues in regards to lens and all the staff left. What do you think is a way to start conversation about social accountability with a diehard economic community. What do you think is the way to sort of breach, well, its political economics. What does that mean . Right. Part of my point is all economic is political economics. When you say economic world, youre saying how do you get the hard core economists to think about corporate responsibility, Corporate Social Responsibility as a are you saying as a positive economic factor for them. Yeah, as a positive or just starting the conversation without immediately getting, well, its not political. Its a good sign. So just by point of reference, probably the leading research, Economic Research and theres a lot of it that goes on, theres a lot that goes on in the social investment world but the leaders in that, in a productive but selfserving way is bank of america which actually does funds tremendous amount of research around that right now, its not Just Economics its political economics because bank of america is funding it. I think theres a lot of interest and there has been for a long time a lot of interest in what are the economic ramifications of social or political decisionmaking from corporations and and, you know, and everybody tries, no one has the answer to it and everybody tries to sort of make up their own equation of why its good, the reality for most opportunities is situational or opportunistic in some way where they want to try and, you know, create some brand, shining particular light on the brand. People dont know it and we talk about it in the book, the ten largest Financial Institutions in this country give out more money than largest foundation, forbes, occasional huge amount, but even then probably, they do it and it is selfserving, it is brand polishing for sure, sometimes green washing but overwhelmingly that money is donated to progressive causes, right, and so some of that and, you know, in my former life i received some of that money and some of that is great because there are people who really believe it and some of it is to make sure that im accountable to that institution in a way that i probably wish i werent in some ways. Its a strategic thing, very strategic about how the companies are, how they manage that and even for bank of america which sees what youre saying, people need to see the science of it, Economic Science of it so they want to become the lead funder. For folks, for better or worse, when freelancing becomes more of a, whats it called precarious and current economic climate, what are some steps they can take to help the organized money movement, steps they can take despite or in spite of being precarious position . Great question. Im really interested in the gig economy, theres a certain way which the gig economy is no different than the paper piece economy of 100 years ago, right, and except that we have technology now which makes her makes it more pervasive, started before reagan and took off in reagan that was really about shifting risks from institutions to individuals, right, and so moving from, you know, in a pension world its from a defined benefit pension to a defined contribution product where youre managing your own money, really, from a financial perspective and the gig economy is ultimate expression of what happens when we are not going to hold institutions on our society accountable and responsible for certain social goods and we will put it all on the individual, and so the great example of that is the individual retirement account which i love to talk about. Anybody in here have individual retirement account. Great invention, Milton Freedman at its best n in 1971 they passed a law, instantly became, someone realized it was a great product for Companies Like fidelity, in particular, more than anybody to sell and it was this idea that they could sell it, you dont want to have your money managed by somebody else, this is your money, you can do your individual retirement account and you can be, it was a statement of personal freedom in the freedman sort of vocabulary. So it was phenomenally successful. It was for highnet worth individuals which we have many more now than we did then. It became a popular instrument and its really a shift we now have, you know, not only do we have a system in the Financial Sector that is making the individual, putting the individual at risk and responsible for managing their own risk, but its also, its also finding a way to get individuals to pay investment managers, fidelity to help them advise them on what they should be doing without any liability so its not really information you can use and some of the things that i came across, finishing a book was incredible presentation from fidelity that it was presentation about what words to use to convince individuals that they be safer in these products which just by the way happened to pay a higher fee to the company, right, and i saw once it was in a lot of places, so anyway, im going on too long about this, gig economy is a great example on what we have come in a financial world. Yeah. How optimistic are you about the technology and specifically provide positive force by disrupting Financial Institution that is havent really been disrupted like lending on a credit in 1920s. Afterwards we can talk about the biggest disruption in 1976. People know the term fintecs, Financial Technology companies, personal capital is one, folks, you can probably give me more, there are a lot of them, Payment Systems that use technology in new ways, basically new technology could technology fundamentally restructure how the Financial System works in a way that can be advantageous. How optimistic am i, im no more optimistic than i am in my strategy, i am optimistic in my strategy but i dont think, the Financial System has already demonstrated, large Financial Institutions have demonstrated without government have demonstrated the ability to coopt the fintec industry and they do it by buying in a little bit, obstructionist lobbying, trying to get regulators and big decision about that and so they will make it very, very hard again because what happens is in government theyre worried that they will break the Financial System and they will all go down which would be a bad thing, but so there isnt a lot i dont think its going to fundamentally change it, i think its a managed change, having said that, there was a concern that verge i was involved about 5 years ago whether big banks were really just competing to be the Processing Center for Facebook Bank because facebook was so big and powerful, i think those days are over and, you know, the world has turned against big technology, so i dont think thats going to happen but i think technology will change things, one, just one policy idea that we have in there is how many people here bank online on their phones or online, pay their bills, pretty much everybody, so that is the stickiest product that any Financial Institution has, right, and they know it, it is the thing that keeps you at that Financial Institution, right, because its really hard, you are introduced it for first of all, decades of data which you may want, you may not want, you could recreate it but it would be incredible by difficult, for a while there was this, in new york there were a bunch of students who said we will do that for you because we can download and put it up in spreadsheets and people realized they didnt want strangers in their accounts, so theres no solution to that so in the eu theres a rule that says that the data some of the data in your banking is not enough is portable, some people remember when we headphone numbers portables, if you changed carriers you could take the number with you, great for phone companies and great for customers, one to have biggest things we could do quickly for my world, for my strategy would be to allow that, allow those accounts to be portable because then it makes it easier for my my coauthors, 5 billion bank to get people to move their money, moving your money now is just virtually impossible, just a little comment on that. Yeah, second row. Yeah. So thanks. In your strategy is there room for marginalized communities that you talk about, for instance, i grew up about 5 miles from college and my thank you. So my hometown has been hollowed out as you probably know, it was a rural Farming Community, probably still is. Whats it called . Oberlin. Yeah. Driving around in pickup trucks. So my hometown has been hollowed out by a number of things, mostly a small Farming Community but a lot of people worked in the industry around there ford plant, general motors, the steel mill, all of the places have closed down now and its also ground zero for the Opioid Epidemic right now, so these communities, the hollowed out communities and the legislatures that that they vote for have brought us to our current political point right now and in your strategy how do you get communities like that on board with a progressive system, progressive ideas because without being, without having sort of the, under the guides of sort of progressive saviorism which is a negative connotation among communities like that . So the question that youre asking which is how do you does our strategy find a way to bring marginalized community to the mainstream, thats what i lost for 30 years, intentionally choosing to work in communities that other Financial Institutions cant or wont, right, and to do it in a way thats beneficial to those communities, so lower interest rate, lending, more flexible terms and conditions on and on and on, right . However, how do you get them to embrace progressive thinking because so let me, so you dont start out that way, its not the organizing strategy, you go and say lets talk, maybe we can provide them and maybe we cant. We dont do deals that dont make sense because we have investors too, our investors happened to be nuns or something, little bit different, you go in and make things happen, right, and then you begin to tell the story of what this stuff does, we dont care whether they think its progressive or not, we care whether its benefiting them, whether its benefiting the community, whether its creating Economic Opportunity but we do care about the progressive policies that make it possible, right, and so what we had to do as a political thing was go in and tell the stories of what we did, where we call one transaction at a time, we didnt go in and say we think the Financial System is evil and doesnt care about these people and we went in and said, let us tell you about this the point we financed or the equipment or and guess what, people come around, we have i dont do this anymore, but when i used to go to washington i would have folks at the highest group of Republican Party and folks at the highest level in the Democratic Party say to me there are 2 or 3 things that have r in the town that have genuine bipartisan support and youre one of them, dont give it up, not just by talking through rhetoric or ideology and transactions and why they work. The short answer is, we are doing it, we have done it in tune 150 million. You feel that youre educating the community through your work . Educating with the value of restoring credit, theres a great, one of my favorite quotes of all time, credit, financial transaction with a moral lineage and the meaning of the quote is you dont extent credit to anyone unless you believe in their future, thats a fundamental thing. In most of our experiences, many of our experiences thats what matters to people, someone believed in them and someone willing to take the risk, yeah, absolutely part of that and people get involved and they may still vote for donald trump and not for Elizabeth Warren or whoever, right, but but we are building a progressive Financial System because Financial System thats inclusive and gives people the opportunity to be part of change and by in large people do tend to get more progressive, but thats not a condition for us. Any other questions . Okay. Well, mark, thank you so much for this. Thank you, adam. Great book and [applause] okay. Its more than a book, its a movement and its a movement and youre there to begin it. Very exciting movement. Buy books from little city books and i will sign them for you. I do. [inaudible] [laughter] thank you. Thank you all very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] yeah, more or less, sure. Defeating jihad, why we fight and most recently the war for americas soul. Sebastian gorka, in your 2018 book why we fight you write the most significant threats we face today do not emanate from the world o
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