Settling Down: The New InsideMoney

You have to admit, these have been strange times for money. Writing about money and our relationships with it has been challenging from the get go, of course, but who knew we would be entering a period of unprecedented crisis? When we initially launched the blog in the fall of 2007, we thought we understood what InsideMoney should look like. Things have changed a bit since then. Unfortunately, we did not know what was unfolding either in its particulars or its implications. As Tom Friedman observes in his New York Times column of March 11, 2009, "This is the big one."

The money forces have been manifesting urgently. To what end? Our crystal ball is still cloudy, but it is all fascinating. And befuddling. And terrifying.

Issues engaging money in one form or another have never been so volatile. One day's decisions are eclipsed by the next day's pronouncements, while ripples spread further and further into people's lives. Everybody is an expert, but we all know that nobody is. We have never been here before. Emotions flow and undulate as we have watched personal fortunes, made slowly over time by folks trying to do the right thing, collapse in short order. We are reminded of sand castles as the tide comes.

While there are some great articles being written, we are in uncharted territory. There is nobody in charge-so we are all in charge. We need to understand and appreciate money as well as fear it. If we allow emotions to govern, i.e., the emotions of envy, it will make emergence from this crisis more difficult. Understanding money means understanding its good parts as well as its harmful ones. Its "good parts" include its self-organizing capacities together with its powers to promote good ideas of all sorts.

We need to get our metaphors right. We need to grasp that money as machine has failed, but money as the lifeblood of the body social has never been more powerful or important.

Indeed, the fundamental premises of InsideMoney have been abridged. It is not so much that money itself has changed - although it has, of course. It has just been difficult to pick an editorial course that makes sense. In so many respects, the point of InsideMoney was to serve as something of a Paul Revere early warning function to the effect that we needed to understand money better if we wanted it to maintain its utilities. It was to suggest that the money forces were personally and publicly powerful and could become more so. This meant that we should try to better understand what is happening to money and our relationships with it. Now we know. It is all of that and more. Now what?

These issues are not behind us, but they have changed in nature and in kind. They are going to the literal sustainability of our societies and our world. The realities and their implications are stunning. Along with many of my financial planning colleagues, the ferociousness of the assaults on clients, friends, and fellow citizens and, of course, me and mine, was more than I had anticipated. While I am not surprised, I was not prepared for the urgencies that our times seem to require.

I am getting there, though, and feeling a renewed dedication to our needs to understand matters of money. Most especially, I am starting to grasp the roles of both concerned citizens, in general, and the financial planning profession in particular.

InsideMoney is going to focus on understanding modern money and on our relationships with it. While it will be continue to feature the thoughts of financial planners, it is also going to give particular attention to public observers of money and its roles in our cultures. Although it will be premised on an underlying appreciation for money's role for self-organizing business and family, while enabling freedom and prosperity, it will not be ideological. It is time to move our money conversations beyond the tired dialectics of communism/socialism v. capitalism. Likewise, we will try to avoid the politics of either greed or envy, while focusing on sustainability and fundamental health. Money, as we have known it, continues to morph and mutate. Some aspects of it are likely to be passing. Others are waiting to be born.

We will be looking at several new articles a week as well as some podcasts and interviews.

In the meantime, please comment and provide feedback. Thanks for your patience.

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