Robert Paterson's Weblog

The jobs are still going away - what to do? I offer you a survival manual

Source Zero Hedge

90 Million Americans are no longer looking for a job

This chart shows labour participation. There is no sign of any change. The job is not coming back.

We are starting to understand why this is not just a "normal" recession. It is structural. A global workforce pushes labour costs down. The shoe maker in Maine competes with the labour pool in China. The lawyer in New York competes with the  lawyer in Mumbai. It is also about technology. The lawyer in Mumbai competes with software that offers you and I the simple contract. IBM are developing software that will give you a better diagnosis than your doctor. No one in the job world is safe.

So what to do? My advice is to stop making getting a job or keeping yours the only focus. Don't over invest in getting the credential for the job.

 There is another mindset and another world of work out there that is not at risk the way that the job is. It is a world that offers you great freedom and health too.

It is the world of the network and skilled person doing something personal in this network.

You Don't Need a Job is a survival manual for our time.

It is the first of a series that explores the real new economy that is based on the network. You Don't Need a Banker to Get Credit explores crowd sourcing and the new credit system that relies on your social world too. My latest book, You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy - shows how to take charge of your health. One of the most powerful forces of illness is the loss of control that we get from having a job!

I am just starting on You Don't Need a School to get and Education - I hope you can see the pattern. The network will replace the institution. The job is at the centre of the institution. 

I hope that I can help you.

Related articles

Even Doctors will be replaced by computers - The end of jobs as we know them

What will replace the Job? The Networked Artisan!

What is an education for in a "Post Job" world?

Practical steps to get and to stay healthy - You can live like your ancestors

The Monetary Zombie Apocalypse - Why we need to bring money back to life

Image Credit 

In this interview, Jordan MacLeod talks about the Zombie Monetary Apocalypse. A Zombie can move but has no life. It feeds on the living. Jordan tells us why our monetary system has become this and what we have to do. We have to reinvent money again - we have done this many times before - so that it reflects what we need our economy to be.

 A Zombie Bank is a bank that has to be propped up by government. It does not support a real economy but plays with money. The price of supporting Zombie Banks is to suck the life out of people and the world.

The core of the problem is the current design of money itself. It cannot die. It is eternal. When 75% of the economy was social, this was not a major problem. But now we all pay cash for every service. Not a single thing is free or can be found in the social economy. You don't have an extended family, so you pay for daycare. You don't know how to build anything so you buy everything. You don't grow food, you buy it all. 100 years ago, we did not need a lot of money. But today, money drives you and all that we do. 

So, money is no longer only a means for exchange for a few services. It has become an end in itself. Because it has no expiry date or life cycle, it violates the principles of life. It is a zombie!

This is why we are destroying our society and our world. It is a design problem.

But Jordan is not a pessimist. Because money is now digitized, the pioneers of the digital world have the knowledge and the power to design a new system. People are working on this now. Soon money will be created by an open and wide system rather than by a few banks. Soon money will reflect who we are and what we really need. We think it is only a matter of time. More on this here

Here is Jordan talking about this:

Related articles

Banks are being Disrupted by the Process of the Innovator's Dilemma - Part 1

Does your bank know you? It doesn't matter anymore

Can Crowd Funding replace a lot of government funding?

This week Jordan MacLeod (author of Natural Money) and I discuss how community financing might replace a lot of direct government finance. Small governments are over borrowed anyway. And who needs a bureaucrat to decide what we all want?

We talk about Justus Coffee that used a new type of community fund in Nova Scotia to raise $500,000 from residents. PEI has passed legislation to allow this approach too. (link here)

The opportunity is for residents to set up important projects that benefit all as a business with strong support in tax incentives that go to the resident investors. It is 35% from the province and 35% from the feds. I can see local energy and food projects fitting in well here.

In this context we close by talking about the new kind of banker that will be needed. For these are still complex projects that need local expertise. Here we can see the capital markets return to home.

Next podcast we will talk about micro finance - how to pull off a successful Indiegogo or Kickstarter project.

More on these ideas in my book - You Don't Need a Banker to get Credit. 

Banks are being Disrupted by the Process of the Innovator's Dilemma - Part 1

This podcast is all about why we think that the major banks will fade away in the next 15 years. It will not be a nice time. But a better system will replace it. Jordan and I are struggling to understand this ourselves and want to offer you our conversation so that we can all get a better sense of what is to come and so what can we each do to get ready. 

The Banks seem essential and inviolate. But then, 30 years ago, so did "Big Steel". But a new small company came in to the bottom of the steel market and began to take away business that Big Steel did not want. Big Steel gave up the Rebar market without a fight because they could not make money there. So Nucor grew, as did other mini mills, and took on Big Steel step by step until there was nothing left.

This is the classic story of how disruption works as told by Clay Christensen in his classic books - The Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's solution. 

In this post today, I interview Jordan MacLeod, author of Natural Money . Jordan is one of the leading thinks about the future of money today.  We see signs that this process of disruption is well under way. We think that the big banks will be challenged as Big Steel was and that this will take place in the next 5 years. 

In this segment, the first of 3, we identify the pressures that the banks have put themselves under that are exposing them to new disruptive entrants. Mainly driven by the fact that the banks treat the small person and the small business very badly. 

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that roughly 10 million households in the United States do not use a bank, up from nine million three years ago. And the agency says 24 million more households have a bank account but still use nonbank financial services, like prepaid cards.(link)

Now that Visa is a for profit organization, it is aggressively raising fees for small business - maybe thinking that they cannot do anything about it.

Millions of people now wire money internationally. This has been a gold mine for banks who charge a fortune for this.

The large banks have proved that they cannot be trusted.

All this combines to empower new small competitors that are eating in to the bottom of the market that the banks don't like anyway - their Rebar market.

Walmart is banking the bottom end. Dwolla will do a money transfer for 25 cents. Square is targetting the small business . Dwolla and others are eating into the bank clearing system itself.

All this is happening very quickly and is being aided by banks that are small and who also resent being used by the majors.

What this implies is, that at some point, Money itself will be questioned. For today money is created by bank lending. With a Fractional reserve system, each dollar that a bank lends to you only requires a reserve of 10 cents. The other 90 cents is magic. 

In parts 2 and 3 of this series we will talk about what may happen as the major banks are eaten up from the base and a confidence in them continues to fall. Where will we put our money then? What will money be then? These are huge issues. We take money for granted now. But history reminds us to be cautious when a large system is under threat. 

Not an easy topic.

In the meantime, I have a lot more about the new system that is to come in my second book You Don't Need a Banker

Bank Regulation - Time to stop looking at it bank by bank - Time to Regulate the system

No system can be seen properly by looking at its parts. This is why modern medicine fails to make any headway in helping us cope with chronic illness (The Theme of book 3 - You Dont Need Medicine to be Healthy).

Recent research makes this case for Banking regulation as well.

"Banking systems now need similar scrutiny, May explained, because regulations have since the late 1980s typically focused on minimizing risk for individual banks at the expense of the wider financial world.

Large institutions have been free to expand their activities, May said. At the same time, those big institutions were permitted before the crisis to maintain financial reserves proportionately less than those held by small banks on the reasoning that the sheer size of a larger bank's holdings would be more resilient to economic tumult.

"The need to analyze financial systems -- as distinct from the operation of individual banks, one-by-one -- is making itself increasingly obvious," May said. "Individual banks have tended to become more diverse in their activities, but the system as a whole has become less diverse. In short, there is a tension between what might be best for each individual bank and what might be best for the system as a whole."

If the financial world were an ecosystem, large banks would be like a "keystone species," Arinaminpathy said. These species' importance extends beyond their biomass, or the collective weight of resident individuals, he said. For instance, a typical elephant herd can weigh several hundred tons, but the effect it has on the grasslands on which the animals graze has a cascading impact on other species that exceeds their physical presence.

"For large banks, we're not just looking at their individual size but the role they play in the financial network as a whole," Arinaminpathy said.

When it comes to the spread of financial disease, large banks can act as a "super spreader," a sick individual that can spread a contagion widely, Arinaminpathy said. An example is the contagious person whose infection spreads easily in the tight confines of a long flight. Likewise, multinational banks have numerous close financial ties that speed transmission. But while isolation can stem a biological virus, financial "contagions" feed on anxiety.

"An important distinction from biological disease is that financial contagions become more virulent and transmissible the more anxious people become," Arinaminpathy said. "We capture the well-observed phenomenon that a loss of confidence creates a cycle of financial and psychological insecurity. The worse confidence gets, the more severe those financial shocks get."

Now this is systems thinking at its best! Book 2 You Don't Need a Banker - To Get Credit goes deeper and shows you the new system that will emerge to replace the one we have. 

Why do so many no longer use bank accounts - because they get screwed & there are alternatives

Not long ago, you had to have a bank account but no longer.

A reason for this is that banks treat people so badly and that there are alternatives now to a bank account. This is a classic Innovators Solution to an underserved population where new alternatives are emerging. We are in the chaotic phase of what will be a revolution in banking. The banks are no longer the only game in time. Soon better alternative will appear for more and more of us. 

Here is the NYT on this topic today:

"Part of the lure is the so-called underbanked population — people who use few, if any, bank services. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that roughly 10 million households in the United States do not use a bank, up from nine million three years ago. And the agency says 24 million more households have a bank account but still use nonbank financial services, like prepaid cards.

Mr. Holley said that 20 to 25 percent of Walmart customers were unbanked.

“The more kinds of services we can offer our core customer like that, the better for them,” he said.

Last month, Walmart unveiled a prepaid card with American Express. The card operates much like a debit card except that it is not attached to a bank account. It comes with free customer-service telephone support, and fees are relatively low, but the account is not backed by the F.D.I.C."

The foundations of banking are being chipped away. You can find out more about this and what you can do in my new book - You Don't Need a Banker - To get Credit

 

Banking should be Boring - Elizabeth Warren

 

My new Book - You Don't Need a Banker - To get Credit goes behind this idea.

 

Now Obama is Re-Elected - Time to deal with the banks - What will replace them

Obama was not able to confront the banks in his first term. They were too powerful. Now he can. There is no third term. What can he do?  What Roosevelt did was to sever the connection between investment banking and deposit banking. This is the key step in the regulation that will help.

But we all know that one man cannot do it all. We too have our part to play. We too can act and help create a better banking system. A system that serves us and not "them". A system that gets behind the betterment of our  communities and our ability to make a living. 

For - just as the web's social power is eating away at the machine media - did you enjoy Twitter last night! -  Just as it is now eating away at Universities - So new tools and new ways of getting credit are emerging that give us back the power over our own destiny. If we use this new system, as millions did when Craigslist appeared, we will accelerate the shift that we all need. This is not a liberal idea. This is a liberty idea. This is about freedom and it is about the core of how business has always been run, until the last 50 years. 

We have all had glimpses of Crowd Funding. But this movement is bigger than that. Just as Craigslist was only one of the vectors that weakened media or the Khan Academ is only a vector for schools. The new banking system is based on rules that are very different from the ones we think are normal. It is based on a much older culture of community. 

The more we understand this new banking system - which is based on the very ancient rules of reputation and covenant rather than the new rules of alogrithm and contract (McBanking) - the more quickly we can get out from under the power of the banks as they are today.

This is why I have written a guide to help us understand what went wrong and what is happening to make credit very different and more human again.

You can Buy You Don't Need a Banker - To get Credit - here on Kindle. It is only $2.99 and is less than 75 pages.

I have an admission to make. For 25 years I was a banker - and was a big advocate of the gross error that we made which was to re-connect investment banking to deposit banking. Worse in those days I applied my skills as a strategic planner to this shift. So I am sorry for that BUT my past also means that I know a lot about the topic and I hope that part of my redemption can be that I helped take what I was part of building down.

This is the 2nd book in the series Trusted Space Books that are guides to the shift in society from a machine culture to a network culture. The first book - You Don't Need a Job - is the broad guide to the shift. The book that will follow Banker is You Don't Need Medicine - To be Healthy. The one that folows that will be You Don't Need a School - To get an Education.

I hope that this small book will help you find more freedom. 

 

Does your bank know you? It doesn't matter anymore

Yesterday the BMO's system went down. Not only could you not access cash at an ATM BUT if you went into the branch, they could not give you any money because it is no longer enough for the staff to know you!

Of course in real banking, the entire issue was being known.

I publish my new Book - You Don't Need a Banker to get Credit - next week. The good news is that the Old fashioned, personal banking is coming back.

You Don't Need a Banker - Book 2 in series of the shift to Networks coming next week

With a bit of luck - Keeping on the right side of Murphys' Law - I will publish next week Book 2 in my series describing  the shift from a machine to a network world will affect us.

Just as many of us have found that we Don't Need a Job to earn a decent living and to have a good life, many of us are also learning that just because the banks won't or cannot lend to you does not mean that you cannot get credit.

The barrier to accessing this new world of community based credit is Mindset. Just as it is Mindset that makes us so fearful of not having a Job. Many try and use the new tools in the old way - just like this with the same results:

It's 1940 - what do you see here and what did the French General Staff see?

 

A Tank right? This is a Char B. It was much better than nearly all the German tanks of the time.

But in reality this is what the French General Staff saw. They saw this as a mobile pill box that could be deployed as moving strong points with the infantry.

Now let's look at the Germans at the same time.

Here they are about to launch the first Blitzkrieg in Poland. These are Mk II's a vastly inferior tank to the Char B. 

This is how the German General Staff really saw them and how they were used.

A raging but narrowly confined Torrent that would destroy and disrupt all in its path - it is an idea all about controlled chaos. Only the German Army with their highly devolved culture that pushed command down could cope with such an idea.

This idea was truly "disruptive". The actual tools were inferior to the opposition. Their context was superior.

THIS is what my new book is all about.

It is a contextual guide that will, I hope, help you see the context and so the mindset issues that can either trap you or empower you.

Watch this space.