John B. Fullerton

The millennium divides my adult life neatly in two: one part career and one part search.

After investing nearly two decades in the iconic House of Morgan building “career success,” JPMorgan was sold to the highest bidder (Chase Manhattan Bank) on January 1, 2001. A chapter closed, and the dawn of a new millennium.

Soon thereafter, with no plans in my head but clarity in my gut, I walked away. Like Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivner: A Story of Wall Street a century and a half earlier, my feelings about continuing another day were clear: “I’d prefer not to.”

Of the six sailors crossing the vast Atlantic together that summer—smashed and disabled by a Humpback whale—just one of us was reading Moby-Dick. Can’t make it up. The meaning continues to ripen with age.

On my very first day back in Manhattan to explore a new chapter, I emerged from the subway, coincidentally near Wall Street, to witness the second plane explode into the World Trade Center. A ringing of the bell.

I founded the Capital Institute in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis to explore the big questions about the economic system, the water we all swim in that is too important to be left to the economists.

My purpose has become to discern and profess the truth of the fatal flaw of economics and finance that transcends political ideology and is wreaking havoc on the world, and to offer a credible response adequate to the challenge.

The search is ongoing, guided by synchronicities. Layers upon layers. And layers to go.