About

The idea behind Meta-Commerce is to use our community to develop the set of core questions in economics, finance and society that need solving in order to have a working financial system.

Meta-Commerce was inspired by the Millennium Maths awards of the Clay Institute and thus, in turn, David Hilbert's 23 questions project of 1900. If the Long Finance community did develop a set of core questions, along with a presumed priority in resolution, these questions should be of use to researchers in finance and economics. Some examples of questions might be:

• We talk about counter-cyclical measures to safeguard financial systems but how do we know there is a cycle?
• How do we know how long the cycle is?
• How do we price counter-cyclicality?
• When we use historic data to assert a financial trend, how far back is that data valid?
• When is an institution too connected to fail, or too big to fail?

Ideally, we would like to create a network of such questions in a structured way. However, it has long been clear that such questions easily stray into some moral and ethical fields (such as what is an appropriate level of taxation?); or too easily return to the traditional research areas (highly quantitative data sets) that may well be of use in short-term finance, but not long.

Meta-Commerce is thus an on-going project that is being developed within the Long Finance framework and we are looking to develop it further throughout 2011.