Where will Sibos 2025 be held? Nanjing? Ouagadougou? Anchorage? Perhaps not Anchorageit is unlikely Sarah Palin will be asked to give the plenary. Wherever it will be held, the Long Finance, established by Z/Yen Group in 2007 in conjunction with Gresham College, discussed a number of potential themes that may become future financial paradigms during an interactive workshop at Sibos 2010.
The Long Finance is an offshoot of the Long Now, a project started in the US by a group of people who philanthropically feel this planet is endangered, according to Chris Skinner, CEO of the Financial Services Club. These are a group of people why want to look at the long now of our planet, rather than the short now of our markets.
The Long Now has even purchased a tract of desert in Nevada in order to build a clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years, chiming every 1,000 years.
In parallel to the enduring view of The Long Now, The Long Finance is based on the foundations of future stability, principally, When would we know our financial system is working?
This is a heavy question, and highlights the shift in topics discussed at Sibos. At an earlier Monday session on cloud computing, the speakers seemed hungry to talk about the possibilities social networking and cloud computing could bring to securities services, so much so that the entire language being used to describe back and middle office problems has transformed. During the infamous Sibos 2008 in Vienna, as Lehman Brothers crumbled to the dust, the key words were credit, leverage, STP and What time is my flight? Today, phrases such as quantum finance, practical implementation of the cloud and hybrid cloud models trip of the delegates tongues.
But all this change is for the better. The Long Finance, although focusing on 100 years rather than 10,000, examines how to build markets that are robust and resilient for the next century. We do not need much reminding about the problems a myopic market can wreak on the unsuspecting (or the uninsured), but Michael Mainelli, CEO and Founder of Z/Yen, highlighted that we are still asking the wrong questions: You have heard a lot of talk about the need for counter-cyclical measures, but that implies that there is a cycle, that implies that you know the length of the cycle, that implies you can price a negative cycle. Now, I am not trying to claim that any of these things are true, but they are fundamental questions you have to ask before you glibly say we need countercyclical measures.
You knew old paradigms were being ground into the dust when Mainelli began quoting Marshall McLuhan, a pithy destroyer of contemporary views: In a word, money is not a closed system, and does not have meaning alone. As a translator and amplifier, money has the exceptional powers of substituting one kind of thing for another.
When you hear the concept of money being debated in sessions, you wonder whether the delegates of Sibos are beginning to have an existential crisis: questioning what they do, rather than how they do it.
The Long Now will be discussed all week at 12:30 @ the Interactive Workshop Sibos 2010