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The dynamic process of capitalism in providing for human needs and wants relies on pricing that which has value. Pricing facilitates exchange. It internalizes the multiple values meaningful to buyers and sellers.

The internet, like markets, provides for the needs and wants of its users. It creates goods which have value. Who, then, gets to price these goods and who gets to buy them?

Should internet platforms be regulated as markets often are to protect consumers from exploitation?

On the one hand, the goods provided by internet platforms to its users are price-less – they are free. The users of such platforms are free riders. Use of platforms is undisciplined, not subject to the usual market rationality of price elasticity with an opportunity cost to the user only of how the time spent in consumption could be alternatively spent. Consumption of what internet platforms offer is a pure intangible value play; there is no cash nexus between provider and consumer.

So what is the business model at work?

As with television and radio, the internet takes advantage of electromagnetic waves. It uses electromagnetic technologies to provide convenient “entertainment,” “infotainment” and social connectivity with which to attract an audience. Platforms sell attractions to pay for the time spent absorbing their content in order to obtain suppliers of consumer preferences and personal data. Access to those preferences and data can then be priced and sold by the platforms as a “good” desired by certain specially interested purchasers.

Those who consume the free goods provided by the platforms are actually suppliers of what the platforms sell in order to make profits. The value which users of platform services provide is 1) the potential to purchase goods and services for cash and 2) the data they provide to the platform about their likely purchases and other actions they are disposed to take. The platform sells this value to their real customers – advertisers and others seeking to exploit collected user data. The cash proceeds received by the platforms from their customers is not shared with the suppliers of the potential spending preferences and other data which the platforms sell.

The data provided to the platforms by those who use them is a new form of wealth which can benefit many companies and others, such as political actors and issue advocates.

In a recent speech, Microsoft CEO Tim Cook took pains to point out features of this new wealth which raise ethical issues of responsible conduct on the part of platform companies.

His full remarks can be found here.

Yesterday, Wall Street was entering bear pricing levels of low expectations for the future. Why?

Yes, there are worries about new reputational and regulatory difficulties facing some FANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet, et al) and other idiosyncratic corporate ups and downs which allegedly drive investors to buy or sell the stocks of various companies. And the uncertainty over global trade wars, Chinese debt and Brexit has raised the generic risk level of world markets. When risk of return rises, prices must compensate by going lower. A bird not in the hand is worth much less than one already caught.

But there is a bigger, systemic story here which should center our attention on the workings of global capitalism.

In short, money has been cheap since the 2008 collapse of credit markets (caused by Wall Street if memory serves). Money has been cheap not because of private market decisions but because of political decisions, because of state power applied to the economy. Money is fiat currency these days, created by governments, mostly by central banks. The supply of money – liquidity – can be controlled independently of market demand. The supply of money, and therefore its price, can be intentionally manipulated on a grand scale.

Starting 10 years ago, governments and central banks did all that they could to prevent a global depression. What they did was flood financial markets with new money, driving interest rates way, way down to entice everyone to buy and spend and so keep up demand for goods and services.

With the supply of liquidity high and its price low for 10 years now, we may rightly ask the old question about public policies: “Qui bono?”: who benefits.

Cicero in his speech Pro Sexto Roscio Amerino, said “The famous Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to consider the most truthful and wisest judge, often used to say in evaluating cases “Who stood to profit” [cui bono fuisset]. This is the human way: no one pursues a crime without the hope of some profit.”

While we are not evaluating potential criminality here, we are facing the “human way” when we consider the mores of Wall Street: people take action with the hope of gaining some advantage.

A low price of money (low interest rate) benefits those who want to buy money. Now such buyers of money can include firms which want to invest in expansion, creating new goods, services and jobs but they can also include those who want to buy houses and others assets, including those who want to borrow money to buy and sell securities.

The lower the price of money, the cheaper it is to speculate on Wall Street. And speculation is the fat king living very well off financial market activity.

Another thing is certain, the poor and the middle class benefit less from cheap money than do the rich. Trading in securities is not for the many but for the few, the top 10% really. And they have done very well since 2008.

Yes, with lower interest rates, credit cards have placed less onerous repayment obligations on their middle class users than otherwise would have been the case. But while asset prices in all classes have risen, income for the middle class has not. The middle class lives off income, not capital assets. And the poor have been completely locked out of economic advancement.

We must also ask “cui bono” from higher interest rates: is it not those who save? And how can the poor and the middle class ever build wealth if they do not save? The low price of money favors borrowing and spending, not saving. Which, over the long run, does what to social justice in a society?

What is the transcendent good, as Christmas gift giving approaches, for many families of having a $1,000 iPhone when you have no retirement savings to speak of?

It was once said that habits of thrift build good character which has very positive externalities in all aspects of life – from being good parents to serving as admirable citizens being sensible in their politics.

For 10 years, those who benefitted from the low cost of money have kept Wall Street prices on the rise. Pricing of securities has internalized for today projections about the future, that the price of money will stay low.

Now that the Federal Reserve is raising the price of money, Wall Street prices must readjust. With higher prices for money, we can accurately predict that speculation will fall off. The human way is to seek gain and not loss, to empower the self and protect one’s dignity. As prices rise, demand falls in order to not deplete one’s wealth. As the price of money rises, the marginal utility of the next dollar earned or spent goes up, forcing more thoughtful consideration of market decisions. We need higher or more certain returns in order to spend willingly when the cost of spending goes up.

Wall Street over the past few months has only acted very sensibly – it has re-priced the value of securities for today to take into account coming higher prices for money and lower demand for trading in securities. And for most of us, that may be a good thing in the long run when we think about social justice for our children and grandchildren.

Goldman Sachs has just given us a demonstration of an article of faith for the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism – reputation is a capital asset.

With public disclosure that Goldman was negotiating with the U.S. government over its role in selling bonds for the 1MDB investment fund in Malaysia, the price of its stock dropped.

In the minds of investors – either speculators or real equity investors – something was now less valuable about the Goldman franchise.

One market commentator wrote last week:

“Shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. extended their selloff Monday, to fall 7.3% in afternoon trade to put it on track for the lowest close since Nov. 16, 2016. The stock was also headed for the biggest one-day decline since it fell 7.4% on Nov. 9, 2011. The selloff comes after the shares shed 3.9% on Friday, after Bloomberg reported that former Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was the unidentified high-ranking executive referenced in U.S. court documents who attended a 2009 meeting with former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak involved in the 1MDB scandal. The stock’s two-day plunge of 10.9% would be the worst since it plummeted 11.4% over the two-sessions ending April 19, 2010. The stock has now shed 10.1% over the past three sessions while the SPDR Financial Select Sector ETF has lost 4.6% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained 0.7%.”

On Monday, Goldman was criminally charged in Malaysia for its engagement on behalf of 1MDB.

Goldman’s involvement in servicing 1MDB began after the 2008 collapse of credit markets when the firm’s revenue fell by a third.

As ancient wisdom has it: the love of money is the root of all evil.

Or from the same text: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, yet lose or forfeit his very self?”

For Goldman, its stock price is a handy measure of its reputation. The market puts a price on the reality of an intangible.

I wanted to provide you with a set of essays titled “Grasping and Reducing Poverty in Minnesota” that the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism (CRT) and three other Minnesota-based, local think tanks recently released.

From my point of view, the important fact about these essays is the demonstration that collaboration and constructive discourse is both still possible in America and effective.

When one steps back from the infantilism of our current politics and the limited intellectual resources brought to bear on our challenges, the thought easily emerges that maturity of judgment implies ethics and ethics demands consideration of others.

Our powers, to be used ethically, must be under self-restraint and certainly never egregiously dismissive of others.

Thus, our project to engage with the Center of the American Experiment, Growth & Justice and the Citizens League is ethics in action.

We hope this precedent in collaboration can be a model for politics in Minnesota going forward.

I have just given a paper at a conference in Bangkok cosponsored with the World Fellowship of Buddhists and the World Buddhist University.

My paper attempted to apply some early teachings of the Buddha as best practices in this world for individual moral self-government and then, progressively, governance of communities and institutions, including nation states and multinational organizations.

I was given a copy of an old lecture by a famous Thai Buddhist monk, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. On Nirvana, which I had largely understood as the ultimate goal of Buddhist thought and practice coming at the end of our possible reincarnations as a sort of heavenly existence.

To a different way of thinking, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu reminds us that the root meaning of “Nirvana” is only “coolness.” In other words, we can achieve “coolness” of mind, heart and personality in this life before any rebirth into a new incarnation. The word most simply understood indicates the cooling of the fires of upset and distraction, the feelings, anxieties, desires, passions, motivations and thoughts which unsettle us and give us unease instead of ease in this life.

I find this an important reminder that there are ways of living which are under our control in this temporal span between birth and death and in this physical space subject to what we know as natural laws of causation and which can prepare us for service of ends larger than our own ego-centricities.

In the sense of achieving “coolness” of heart, mind and spirit, Buddhism might take on new constructive importance for all of us no matter our traditions and our ambitions.

As I was flying over the Pacific to attend a conference in Bangkok on sustainability and the first teachings of the Buddha, I read St. Theresa of Avila’s story of her life.

The book was sent to me by my cousin Lynn in Taos, New Mexico, who makes painted retablos of saints as her vocation.

On where we can find the moral insight and courage to stand against the dark sides of life and capitalism, St. Theresa advised that we should not let the “mirror of our soul” become so clouded that we cannot see the good that is there.

This practice “teaches [us] that the Lord resides very deep inside [our] souls. This notion is much more attractive and fruitful than the idea that God is outside us.”

“Absolutely, the best place to look for God is inside ourselves. We don’t need to ascend to Heaven or reach any further than our own beings. Trying to go beyond our own center only wears the soul out and distracts her. Such efforts do not bear fruit.”

This insight that a vision of the good is already inside us, somewhere, resonates with Buddhism and Chinese Taoism and with Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic. It is an insight which leads to the conclusion that a moral capitalism is possible.