Four priorities that need to be tackled to restore a sound governance and regulation system for business, via Umair Haque:

The Currency Fix. The invisible hand doesn’t mean that profiteers get to reach into your pocket with every trade. Yet, that’s the economy we’ve built: one where you bear a collective responsibility for the decisions of bankers, beancounters, and other borrowers. Why? Because you have to invest, consume, and earn in a national currency, which can whipsaw up, down, or sideways, leaving you and your savings at the mercy of the state and the crony capitalists that control it.

It’s time for this con game to end. Tomorrow’s radical innovators will reconceive currency itself: they will design next-generation currencies that are globally accessible, ubiquitously liquid, and that are inherently, permanently hedged and insured — so instead of getting inflated, deflated, disinflated, and eviscerated, currencies can do what, well, they were meant to do: serve as a durable store of authentic value.

The Governance Graft. Hey, look — it’s another megacorporation melting down…yawn. The real question is: why are institutional shareholders asleep at the wheel? There’s only one economic answer: because they cannot bear increasingly steep costs of corporate governance. When shareholders meet a handful of times a year, when corporations report thin, bogus info — and hedge funds barely have to report anything at all — when CEOs wield power over boards, when boards are composed of golfing buddies, governance, in the simplest sense of the word, is simply uneconomical — and shareholders tune out and turn off.

Think about it for a second. It’s a con game of gigantic proportions: we’ve built an economy where everyone invests more and more in securities, yet governing economic institutions is growing more and more costly. Only a sucker would buy into such an economy — because as it grows, the black hole at its core gets larger, and so it must inevitably implode. Tomorrow’s radical innovators will reinvent governance by fixing all of the problems above: the size and composition of boards, the timing and density of reporting, and the relationships between management, boards, and shareholders.

The Speculation Racket. Speculation is healthy, right? Not so fast. Every dollar dumped into speculation also has an opportunity cost: though it might offset risk, or reveal better info, it’s not employed directly in productive economic activity. For example, when I buy a share from you, that capital doesn’t flow to the firm to fund new projects, but to you. The corporation in question benefits only (very) indirectly — and so bad management is punished, but good management isn’t fully rewarded.

Just as the benefits of speculation are questionable, so the costs are steeper than we previously thought. Speculation fuels bubbles at an ever-faster rate, and so it makes it increasingly costly for firms to allocate their own time, energy, and capital efficiently.

Firms shouldn’t want every kind of investor: some are like the tantrum-prone psycho ex-girlfriend (or boyfriend). What tomorrow’s radical innovators are going to do is to reconceive and reimagine equity itself — so the toxic value equation of speculation can be redefined. To power global growth in the 21st century, what we really need is next-generation equity that lets us separate and partition economically autistic day-traders and hedgies from authentic investors engaged with management for the long-run.

The Management Shakedown. Talented managers are what make the difference between the great corporations and the also-rans, right? Maybe not. Managers extract a heavier and heavier toll regardless: you know the score, 7- or 8-figure packages — for running a company into the ground (hi, AIG, Detroit, and Wall St). The economic truth is this: managers profit by surviving the rat race — not by creating value.

There’s nothing more radical tomorrow’s revolutionaries can do than reversing that shakedown, and reconceiving a zero-management corporation: one where shareholders, stakeholders, and society alike don’t have to pay the increasingly heavy deadweight loss of management for managers’ sake. How? If Threadless can produce T-shirts without layers of managers dumbing down great designs (bye, Gap), why can’t we make cars, books, and snacks the same way? Let’s liberate the managers of the world — and gently encourage them do more interesting things with their lives than shuffle budgets, anyways.”