💸 The Fiduciary's Confession

Hi 👋

This week, I want to tell you about a woman I've never met, working in an industry I don't much trust, who wrote something very brave.

Her name is Noel Pacarro Brown. She's a wealth adviser at Morgan Stanley. And this year, she published an argument that the growth economy is ending, and that pretending otherwise may now be a breach of fiduciary duty.

What was incredible was that it was published in a professional trade journal, specifically, the one financial advisers read to keep their licences.

Just let that sink in for a second.

Why the placement matters

For fifty years, a 1972 MIT study called The Limits to Growth was mocked as 'doomerism'. It modelled resources, pollution, population, and industrial output out to the end of this century. Unsurprisingly, none of its scenarios indicated that growth could continue forever. The softest scenario showed us choosing, deliberately, to stop chasing industrial output and put our resources into health, education, and nature instead (again, unsurprisingly).

Researchers have checked the model against fifty years of real data. It's tracking closely, and neither of the business-as-usual paths supports continued economic growth. One shows a managed slowdown. The other shows collapse, driven mostly by pollution, which includes the gases warming our planet, our home.

But Noel takes that evidence and does something I can't: she skips the softer morality argument entirely and goes straight to the core of fiduciary duty. If the financial adviser's models assume growth never stops, and the data is indicating the slowdown has already begun, then dismissing a client's fears about the climate misses a risk they're being paid to see.

What she builds instead

I have great respect for her. She goes beyond the diagnosis, and then the warning, to provide something valuable. She puts her money where her mouth is: she builds a portfolio.

It is built with resilience in mind. The portfolio starts with a cash buffer, enough set aside to absorb a shock. Think back to 2008. During the crash some people had to sell what they owned to pay their bills. Others had a reserve to absorb the shock. It was the same crash but two very different realities.

Around that, she prioritises land, and the things people need whatever the economy is doing: water, power, medicine, food. Additionally, there's a small amount set aside for ideas that might surprise us, and small enough that if she were wrong about them, it would cost very little.

In 1952 the economist Harry Markowitz asked how a portfolio could get you the most return for a given risk. Noel asks a different question: how can a portfolio enable a person to keep eating, keep warm, keep functioning, across the widest range of potential futures?

A noble question for our times.

The lesson underneath the lesson

I've spent a long time working directly with people and in marketing to notice that ideas don't spread because they get shouted loudly. If anything, that shuts them down. They spread when someone knows how to translate them into the other person's language and needs.

Noel's argument for planetary limits is being discussed inside the very industry built on the promise that there are none. We can hope for change when the people running the machine start sounding like the ones who've been warning about it.

What this means for the rest of us

You don't need a Morgan Stanley account for any of this to be useful. Most of it is regular old wisdom scaled down to ordinary life, plus some simple financial literacy.

And maybe redefine what winning even means. It's okay just knowing that whatever comes, your money still buys food, shelter, healing, and warmth. Our healthy individual boundaries create our healthy planetary boundaries.

Talk soon,

Rob

PS. You can read Noel's article in the Investments and Wealth Review

PPS. Thank you Kasper for your original LinkedIn post and the references for this edition.