Social Finance with Zopa: Invest in your neighbor
1/30/2008 - Minneapolis
The wave of "social finance" is coming like a crushing tsunami. There is simply no stopping it. The most recent comes by way of the credit unions who have partnered with Zopa.com - a website that describes itself as "Social networking meets money borrowing: Think of these companies as where money meets MySpace."
Except the difference is this social networking has what seems to be the equivalent of FDIC insurance on the investment you make in your neighbor.
- - -
This organization Zopa.com, in partnership with the non-profit finance world of credit unions, is now doing for us splintered western individualists what ethnic tribes have been doing in all corners of the world for most of history: Invest in your neighbor.
Many Hasidic Jews in New York were brilliant at this. The principal is to "enrich the tribe" by giving your brother business, in turn your brother gives his brother business. Eventually the money comes right back to you, two-fold.
It's not a complicated principal, but multi-national corporations in their current decentralized - cheap labor, cheap distribution, huge profit mode represent the opposite of this idea. Instead of keeping the money circulating "around the middle-class," the mutli-nationals have done a brilliant job of convincing us with well distributed convenience, the purchased intelligence of our best and brightest and lots'o'advertising to divert funds directly to their dead-end wealth repositories.
In this current economy, not much changed since Regan made it, so much wealth is funneled directly to the top you might call the pools of money 'wealth collections.'
As the middle class shrivels, the US economy is..."stagnating." It's not hard to figure out how that happened, thank you deregulation. So you 'give' the middle class some cash in an emergency congressional bill.
I think investing in the middle class is a better long term solution.
- - -
Zopa is what I describe as a 'circular economy' where wealth is accrued within a community because it is continuously passed in a circle around that community. Now that is strong economic activity - sustainable too as the interest generated (wealth) also stays in the community and with people who choose the path of the ethical economy.
The localization movement, about to get a major boost from the price of oil and the efforts of the entire world to turn the US into far less of a trade player (along with the 'efforts' of a White House incapable of successfully attending a single trade conference - witness the dollar dropping), is going to start breeding these kinds of economies all over the place. And Zopa is already here.
If Zopa is anything, it's innovative. Amy Jo Hanson of Affinity CU here in Minnesota calls it "social finance." I call it "the ethical economy." Whatever it is, it fulfills one of the primary goals Creditland has for its readers:
That we all find ways to stop investing against our own interests by finding and buying into economic entities that are not actively working to make our lives worse.
This is why a website about problems is also a website about solutions. Creditland describes the problems, so we can all see how they affect us together - how it's not unique.
And the solutions? Well, they simply evolve. Just like Zopa.
Your publisher,
-Tobin
The wave of "social finance" is coming like a crushing tsunami. There is simply no stopping it. The most recent comes by way of the credit unions who have partnered with Zopa.com - a website that describes itself as "Social networking meets money borrowing: Think of these companies as where money meets MySpace."
Except the difference is this social networking has what seems to be the equivalent of FDIC insurance on the investment you make in your neighbor.
- - -
This organization Zopa.com, in partnership with the non-profit finance world of credit unions, is now doing for us splintered western individualists what ethnic tribes have been doing in all corners of the world for most of history: Invest in your neighbor.
Many Hasidic Jews in New York were brilliant at this. The principal is to "enrich the tribe" by giving your brother business, in turn your brother gives his brother business. Eventually the money comes right back to you, two-fold.
It's not a complicated principal, but multi-national corporations in their current decentralized - cheap labor, cheap distribution, huge profit mode represent the opposite of this idea. Instead of keeping the money circulating "around the middle-class," the mutli-nationals have done a brilliant job of convincing us with well distributed convenience, the purchased intelligence of our best and brightest and lots'o'advertising to divert funds directly to their dead-end wealth repositories.
In this current economy, not much changed since Regan made it, so much wealth is funneled directly to the top you might call the pools of money 'wealth collections.'
As the middle class shrivels, the US economy is..."stagnating." It's not hard to figure out how that happened, thank you deregulation. So you 'give' the middle class some cash in an emergency congressional bill.
I think investing in the middle class is a better long term solution.
- - -
Zopa is what I describe as a 'circular economy' where wealth is accrued within a community because it is continuously passed in a circle around that community. Now that is strong economic activity - sustainable too as the interest generated (wealth) also stays in the community and with people who choose the path of the ethical economy.
The localization movement, about to get a major boost from the price of oil and the efforts of the entire world to turn the US into far less of a trade player (along with the 'efforts' of a White House incapable of successfully attending a single trade conference - witness the dollar dropping), is going to start breeding these kinds of economies all over the place. And Zopa is already here.
If Zopa is anything, it's innovative. Amy Jo Hanson of Affinity CU here in Minnesota calls it "social finance." I call it "the ethical economy." Whatever it is, it fulfills one of the primary goals Creditland has for its readers:
That we all find ways to stop investing against our own interests by finding and buying into economic entities that are not actively working to make our lives worse.
This is why a website about problems is also a website about solutions. Creditland describes the problems, so we can all see how they affect us together - how it's not unique.
And the solutions? Well, they simply evolve. Just like Zopa.
Your publisher,
-Tobin
posted by tobin at
6:35 AM
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