By Catherine Austin Fitts
You need to stop, take a deep breath and appreciate the profound nature of the evolution in which you and I are participating.
Smart phones are recreating and reorganizing communication and trade and they are doing it rapidly.
This was the primary thrust of our Annual Wrap Up in January as well as our discussion of the reorganization of retail distribution in the 1st Quarter Wrap Up. If you have not reviewed these reports, I strongly recommend them to you.
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Here are recent statistics from Business Week.
“This year, 1.75 billion people will own smartphones, according to EMarketer. There are 4.5 billion mobile phone users overall and 7 billion people in the world.”
One of the most fascinating windows into this process is the Alibaba filing with the SEC for its upcoming IPO.
Alibaba is the world’s largest on line market. It operates as an an ecosystem and does not sell merchandise directly.
Alibaba has three online marketplaces serving both wholesale and retail markets and helping Chinese exporters market to global buyers. These three marketplaces engaged with 279 million active buyers and generated $296 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) for the 12 months ending June 30, 2014. Their market participants have a total payment volume through the now independent Alipay system of $778 billion.
To put this into perspective, this means that a website started by Chinese school teacher Jack Ma in 1998 that became a company founded in his living room in 1999 now has an active customer base larger than the US adult (over 18) population.
OK, now focus on this statistic.
Alibaba reports that mobile volume is 32.8% of their GMV, up from 27.4% in the preceding three months and from 12% in the same period in the prior year.
Every person, every business, every organization is on a journey to invent what can happen when everyone globally can talk and transact with everyone globally.
Businesses throughout the world are focused on how they reinvent design so they can squeeze onto the mobile platform and then lower transactions costs so they can become relevant to people who are just now engaging with the financial system.
One of the reasons that quantitative easing has not resulted in runaway inflation is that the asset side of the balance sheet is expanding with the liabilities side. The amount of people entering the global financial system through mobile and smart phones is growing. This means a much wider base for both currency and financial markets.
A review of charts at the World Exchange association shows that global equity markets managed by the exchanges have grown from less than $10 trillion in 1990 to $68+ trillion today.
The monetary and equity base of the planet is moving out of the G-7 and is on it’s way to securitizing a much greater portion of retail and wholesale flows and assets on the planet.
If you think the global economy is about to collapse, think again. Something else is happening.
