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 do