Spring offers a time time of hope. The metaphor of winter cold easing to the warmth of spring is powerful, with leafless branches returning to bud break and darker days becoming brighter. It is a time when vast numbers of people around the world celebrate some of the most important religious holidays. Inspiring themes of resilience and renewal surround Easter, Passover, and Ramadan. It should be a time of joy, a stage for diverse perspectives that open our minds to new goals we can share.
In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, it would seem that sense of possibility could be real. While good fortune has transpired for some, we know too well there are shadows on our highest hopes. We long for justice that too often remains elusive. Where is the rainbow breaking through our current clouds?
Here are four aspirational wishes I hold this spring, that I hope can unite us, that seem tangible if we put our differences aside for the greater good, but clearly are a long way from our reach:
May we soon achieve a peaceful resolution in Gaza, with all of the hostages released, an end to the violence, and a new beginning for Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.
May we soon achieve a peaceful resolution in Ukraine, with self-determination of the Ukrainian nation supported by the global community, and an end to the invasion brought on by an autocratic despot.
May the U.S. Congress set aside petty bickering and short-term political volleying to establish a reasonable, sustainable, practical, empathetic, and humane policy for immigration.
May the U.S. Presidential election not deteriorate into chaos, hyperbole, manipulated falsehoods, dishonest rhetoric, and instead show the world that representative democracy can be conducted with integrity and is still possible as a respectable form of government.
Those lofty wishes have consumed my consciousness all through this troubling winter. May that heartfelt meditation now turn to collective imagination, with spring in the air and visions of hope always worth our dedication and service. I wish to be writing with increasing hope as spring turns to summer and we discover the best in ourselves and always each other.
It’s a strange time, stranger than any I can remember in the second half of my life.
If you try to summarize the number of global issues our nation faces, it begins to feel unprecedented. There is violence on three fronts in Israel arising from the horrific terrorist attacks of Hamas. There is the question of how Iran and Hezbollah will accelerate that conflict. Putin is still waging a brutal war on Ukraine. No one is quite sure what Xi will do in Taiwan. Kim Jong Un remains a force of chaos in North Korea. That’s a lot of global conflict without much epicenter.
Then there is the building lack of faith in our government. The divisiveness between and within the parties is all but unbridgeable. Maybe we’ll fund the government, maybe we won’t. What happens if we have to make a really big decision, like going to war as a nation? Do we have the wherewithal to come together on anything that is consequential?
Inflation drags on family budgets. Healthcare costs continue to soar, while faith in modern medicine is frayed. Gun violence takes lives every day. The education gap widens and so does income inequality.
When we aren’t angry or fighting with each other with uncontained words, we often take on a cold silence of passive aggression, too exhausted to argue, knowing we can’t change each other’s minds. The internet should have been a gift of doors opening to each other, but we know it is anything but that.
In the midst of all that, we go to work. We try to focus on our goals. We try to do right by our customers, partners, and employees. We look for a path to salvation in our tangible achievements, but those are increasingly less tangible.
Two to three times each day people come into my office “just to talk” or call me on the phone with a long pause often preceding the inevitable opening remarks, “Hey, Ken, how are you doing with all this?”
I guess the flattering part is people think I might have something worthwhile to say. It feels like the days after 9-11. I had little worthwhile to say then. I have less now. It is impossible to make sense of the senseless.
I’m a trailing-edge baby boomer born many years after the last world war, but I wonder if this is how it might have felt then, when parts of Europe were being overrun and Asia was in equal turmoil. The US waited for its leadership to guide us toward the good. Then we were attacked, which made the response largely unanimous. Can we respond to anything unanimously today? Is there an FDR we have yet to meet waiting to show us what leadership means?
Back to the idea of trying to work steadily through all this. I often suggest to people that compartmentalizing can be an effective strategy for getting things done in a day despite the overwhelming distractions. I’m doing it increasingly, but I am finding it more challenging. Remember, we are making sense of the senseless. That’s hard to do and tackle your monthly sales quota without fail.
Few of us have the option of letting world events be an excuse for missing business goals. We all have inescapable responsibilities. We have to do what we have to do.
First of all, we have to be human. I am hopeful we can also be humane.
I write this as I am wrapping up project reviews for the past year, building a budget and a work plan for the new year with our team, and trying to listen closely to the smartest people around me offer wisdom on how to navigate the shaky ground we share. I read the Wall Street Journal for clues on where the economy is headed, but it is like a giant treasure hunt where no one knows if the treasure has actually been hidden let alone where. How do you find firm ground when the elephants won’t stop jumping on it, not even to take a breath?
Here’s what I know: Wherever we are, whatever we are doing, we don’t have to be in this alone. If you think it’s hard to make sense of the senseless, you might have retained enough of your good senses to share that concern with another caring soul who can help you by listening. Yes, you are still sane if you think we are dancing aimlessly in a circle of senselessness, but there is strength in numbers and even greater strength in diversity.
When people come to me and open their hearts with questions I am always listening. Sometimes they share perspectives I never expected. Sometimes they find a way to make me chuckle. I find that keeping some semblance of humor is a gut check on reason. The bonds between us that let us continue to be successful no matter the noise around us can only be severed if we let them.
I have no good answers. Senseless means senseless. Let today be a day of strength, tomorrow be a day of hope, and the next be one of empathy. We advance in infinitely small increments, sometimes so tiny they seem invisible. Yet the bonds between us were formed in better times, and the goals we share give us an abstract common purpose that brings with it the dawn of a future we can never fully imagine.
Bend toward justice. Don’t let the bad guys win. Don’t give up. It’s called a dream for a reason. Dreams of peace and healing are not senseless.
The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is enormously troubling. Call it an isolated circumstance all you want, but it has further stressed our nation’s dialogue. An echo of other bank failures has followed SVB down the drain. Long lines of anxious customers waiting outside banks are never something we want to see. This was unnecessary. This was bad form.
As dependability in our institutions continues to fray, I worry increasingly about where we’re headed. As divided as we are in this nation, can we withstand a true crisis of faith in our banking system? What understandable assurances are in evidence that wider contagion is not possible, that limits can be maintained on the ramifications of remarkably poor judgment?
Where does resilience meet its match and cause us to lose faith in the basics of our grand experiment in economic expansion?
Our economy works on a number of elusive factors in concert with tangible reporting. One of those is faith. If we lose faith in our banking system, the notion of ongoing growth and innovation at scale seems to go out the window. The economic miracle we have created together freezes solid and then melts into the ordinary.
Ample credit fuels dreams. Intelligently borrowed capital brings to market hopeful new companies and bolsters the expansion of existing businesses. Financial institutions, mostly banks, have to lend money for ideas to become enterprises.
Lending money as its own business only works if there is leverage in lending. We understand the rules of engagement: a bank keeps some cash on reserve and lends more than it has at any given time. This works fine as long as there are no unaddressable runs on banks.
Should redemptions exceed liquidity, banks are forced to liquidate assets at any price to return cash to depositors. Trust in the banking system and the FDIC is required of depositors to prevent runs from melting down banks. Trust is a reflection of faith. Lose all faith, lose all trust, we all lose.
Here’s ground zero: If we lose faith that banks can get our money for us whenever we ask for it, deposits cease. If there are no deposits, there can be no lending. That’s the endgame you are teasing when you fail to do your job and cautiously manage risk. Kill deposits, kill lending — that’s a death spiral in the making.
Faith is increasingly becoming a conflicted proposition. Reckless financial engineers test us every decade. The savings and loan crisis. Long-Term Capital Management. Sub-prime mortgages. Washington Mutual. Collateralized debt obligations. Lehman Brothers. One day the combined impact of these attacks on faith may succeed in fully undermining the little faith we have left.
Then the thinning ice cracks for good.
Don’t tell me this time it’s about rising interest rates that weakened your balance sheet. You’re smarter than that. You know history. You knew interest rates had to rise. Nearly free money is never forever. You’ve been making loans as long as you’ve existed. You understand liquidity. You understand it so well that you spend millions lobbying against the very regulations you need to stay in business.
There are no excuses. You take bonuses for being clever. When you’re too clever, the damage has the potential to become systemic. When faith in the system evaporates, apologies are meaningless.
A brand is a promise. When a bank’s brand fails that promise, the entire concept of for-profit banking is soiled. We are only human. Serial violations of trust reveal fragile faults in what we’re repeatedly told is a robust system. We can only experience so many failures before trust is gone.
If we come to believe that U.S. Treasuries are the only safe place to park our money, what happens to commercial lending? If commercial lending retreats, how do the entrepreneurial efforts of the next hundred years replicate the last hundred years?
Do we really want to depend on government to keep righting the wrongs of irresponsible, conniving executives? Government’s role is to referee where self-regulation has proven farcical. Regulate, yes. Adjudicate, yes. Underwrite exponential losses, unsustainable.
If government must guarantee every deposit regardless of the amount in order to maintain faith in those deposits, how can bank executives ever be trusted to take risk seriously?
There’s a lot at stake, more than many of us may yet realize. We’re shell-shocked, but we’re supposed to maintain faith. Each day it’s harder. Each day we put our own historical investment paradigm at risk.
In simplest terms: Please stop putting our nation’s future at risk and punting your unnecessary failures to manufacture compensation you haven’t earned and don’t deserve.
Seek to restore our faith. You need deposits. We need loans. Keep our money safe to put it to work properly. We’ll pay our installments. That’s the contract. It’s a virtuous circle. We all have to abide by the rules, not wait to get caught if enough oversight is available.
Please make the rules work to all our advantage and believe in something more than your own benefit. Prosperity hangs in the balance. You’re toying with breaking everything. Let’s look to another hundred years of wise lending and liquidity to continue investing in positive outcomes we can’t even yet imagine.
I spend a lot of time in airports. If you look around the airport, endless dramas are playing out. People coming, going, hugging, saying goodbye sometimes forever, welcoming home friends and family gone who knows how long. When I look at so many strangers, I often wonder about the ideas that bond and separate us as co-inhabitants of cities, states, and our nation. That often leads me to think about our common ideas of trust.
Why trust at the airport? If you get on as many planes as I do, trust is implicit in the experience. I don’t know the pilots. I don’t know the state of the equipment I’m boarding. I don’t know who else is going to populate that airborne metal tube for the next several hours at 30,000 or more feet above sea level.
A few weeks ago my flight was delayed more than ten hours in a reasonably bad storm. It happened to be Election Day. When they finally let us board, I walked onto the plane and took my seat as quickly as I could. I looked out the window and saw a wet runway and dark sky hurling rain and wind. I didn’t ask to exit. I didn’t ask for reassurance that the crew was rested. I trusted everyone involved in the decision that it was safe to fly.
Since you’re reading this blog post, you can presume that wasn’t a fateful choice on my part. It surely could have been, but somehow trust in people I didn’t know, a company that employs them, and a government division assigned to oversee the activity carried the day. Other than thinking I wanted to write about it, I didn’t think much about it at all.
Is trust a form of absurdity or is some form of it necessary for us to share common spaces?
Perhaps it is both.
It isn’t a coincidence that I write this immediately following an election. Somehow over the past few elections, it has become vogue in certain circles to simply dismiss the reported, monitored, and validated results of an election as fraudulent. If one’s candidate loses an election, especially by a narrow margin, there is no easier way to declare victory than to declare a lack of trust in the voting process. It doesn’t even require evidence to attack the fairness of the vote count. We all can say what we want, and if we want to say our candidate lost because the election was compromised by fraud, we have the freedom to say that.
To summarize: I can trust the strangers controlling the jet airliner I’m going to fly with four hundred other strangers through a storm, but I can’t trust the civil servants whose job it is to count votes accurately. That one seems tough to reconcile.
Some say that democracy itself was on the last ballot, with the outstanding question of whether the tallied results would result in the winning candidates being lawfully seated. Again, just typing that sentence makes my fingers tremble. Democracy has been at the core of my personal values for as long as I can remember. I presume as a citizen of this nation I get to vote along with everyone else and the counted votes will direct an outcome. I don’t think about it any more than getting on the plane in the storm.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want expert monitors overseeing the transportation industry or our voting booths. If I can’t trust either one of those, I can’t fly and I can’t agree to follow laws passed by legislators. When we throw in the towel on trust, our ability to function in shared spaces is dramatically curtailed. Without some presumed notion of trust, I am not sure we can function at all.
Before you write to let me know what a mark I am likely to be for targeted scams, let me assure you my trust is not easily won. If you’ve worked with me, you know this emphatically. If you’ve ever sold me something of substance and been paid cash money for it, you know it even more. Even then I am wildly understating the difficulty to win my personal trust, but it can be won. If it can’t, we can’t do great things together. We can’t do anything at all.
Do I worry trust is abused? More than you can imagine. Baby boomers know a thing or two about trust. We were raised with the Vietnam War. We were raised with Kent State. We were raised with Richard Nixon. One of our most memorable anthems declared, “We won’t get fooled again.”
It sickens me when trust is blatantly abused.
It sickens me that people trusted FTX and its once-celebrated CEO to help them navigate the already shaky world of cryptocurrency. If you trusted FTX as an investment, you likely lost all your money.
It sickens me that people trusted a night out with friends at an LGBTQ dance club in Colorado Springs and five of them didn’t return home, with as many as 25 others injured in the semiautomatic weapon assault. If you were someone who put trust in diversity and acceptance that night, your trust was forever violated.
It sickens me that the federal government offered much-needed financial aid to individuals and small businesses through the CARES act, and billions of these dollars were diverted to fraudulent claims. If you needed Paycheck Protection Program dollars and didn’t get any when they ran out, there’s a good chance you trusted the custodians of these funds to be ahead of con artists, and they weren’t.
Does that mean we going to stop investing, going to clubs, or filing applications for government programs? It can’t, any more than we should consider not flying or accepting the results of certified elections.
Trust in some shape or form is always going to be violated, which is why we must continue to insist on as many reasonable safeguards against these violations as technical and process engineering can muster. I don’t know anyone in the FAA, but if I don’t trust that agency to do its job, or I don’t support proper legal action to correct its performance should it fail, my time at the airport is done.
If I don’t trust the vast majority of fellow citizens to behave civilly in public, I can no longer go out and presume I am coming home as healthy as I left.
If I don’t trust my doctor to perform a procedure when I am under anesthesia, I can’t have the procedure.
And if we can’t trust the certified results of a routine election, then we can’t have a democracy. We didn’t protest against all the attacks on civil liberties this past half century to give up our democracy. We did it to enhance and preserve this incomparable gift of sharing spaces, agreeing to disagree, and believing that if we didn’t get our choice in the last election, the next one will be coming soon. That next election has to be a certainty or the experiment is over. I’m calling the experiment alive if not perfectly well, but necessary and enduring.
There might be an absurdity underlying the notion of trust. If that kind of trust is what it takes to get me on the next scheduled flight, call me absurd. I’ll see you at the airport and at the ballot box.
CorporateIntel 