Who Owns the Soup -- A Tense Conversation About How Banks Really Work

Medium-2026-092.png

If you bring the ingredients and do the work, shouldn’t you get a share too

Introduction

Let’s leave the garden behind and step into a kitchen instead. The stove is hot, the pot is boiling, and the air smells like onions and argument. Matt stands near the stove with the calm confidence of a mainstream banker. Viktor stands across from him, sleeves rolled up, chopping onions and pushing back. They are not debating recipes. They are arguing about banking, ownership, and who deserves the meal when the cooking is done.

The Stove Argument

Matt begins with the oldest claim in banking. He says he owns the stove, and nothing cooks without it. In his mind, that stove is the bank’s core system, the part that keeps everything stable, secure, and running. It holds the heat. It carries the weight. It makes the whole operation possible. So, to Matt, the conclusion feels obvious. If the stove is his, then the soup is his too.

Viktor does not let that pass. He points out that owning the stove is not the same as making the meal. He brought the onions. He did the chopping. He is standing there stirring the pot. So how does it make sense that he gets nothing back? Matt shrugs and says that is simply how banking works. The bank provides the structure, the system, and the platform, so the bank takes the return. Viktor fires back that this sounds less like a natural law and more like a rule written by the people who benefit from it.

The Real Work

Viktor presses the point. Without people using the bank, he says, there is no value to speak of. No deposits. No loans. No payments. No movement. The bank does not create activity out of thin air. It depends on people showing up with money, trust, labor, and need. Matt pushes back by reminding him that without the system, there would only be confusion. No records. No safety. No order. He is not wrong.

That is what makes the argument interesting. Both men are right, at least partly. Matt keeps the fire going. Viktor helps make the food. The structure matters, but so does the effort. The question that starts to irritate Viktor is simple. If both sides are necessary, why does one side get treated as if it alone created the meal?

The Part Everyone Ignores

Matt says someone has to own the structure. To him, that settles the matter. Viktor says that answer is exactly the problem. Most people, he argues, accept this arrangement without really noticing what it means. They bring ingredients into the kitchen. They do the work that turns those ingredients into something useful. Then they walk away hungry while the owner of the stove keeps the whole pot.

Matt thinks Viktor is making the system sound harsher than it really is. Viktor is not convinced. He points to fees, to interest, and to the way value often gets gathered upward. The people who create the activity keep the system alive, yet the rewards pile up elsewhere. That is the part many people never stop to question. They are so used to the kitchen rules that they forget rules can be changed.

A Different Kitchen

When Matt asks for an alternative, Viktor does not say the stove should disappear. He is not arguing against structure, safety, or systems. The stove still matters. The kitchen still needs order. His point is that the rule for sharing the meal should change. If you cook, you should eat. If you bring ingredients, you should share the meal that those ingredients helped create.

This is where Viktor brings in ideas close to Kevin Cox. Ownership, he argues, should not belong to just one group. A healthier system would recognize that users, workers, and investors all contribute something real. Each group plays a part in making the soup possible. So each group should receive a fair share of the result. That is not fantasy to Viktor. It is design.

The Tension Point

Matt raises the hardest challenge. Who takes the risk, then? The stove costs money. The system must be secure. Someone has to build, maintain, and protect it. Viktor agrees. Investors still matter, and they should still earn something for taking that risk. His objection is not that investors should get nothing. His objection is that they should not get everything.

Right now, he says, the owner of the stove often claims the whole pot. A fairer arrangement would still reward investment, but it would stop treating the investor as the only person who counts. Investors deserve a bowl. They do not deserve the entire kitchen.

What Happens Next

Matt asks what happens if nothing changes. Viktor says the answer is already visible. People keep cooking, and banks keep collecting. The system still functions, but the imbalance slowly wears down trust. When people feel that they are always contributing and rarely sharing, they begin to see the kitchen less as a place of cooperation and more as a place of extraction.

Then Matt asks the better question. What happens if the rules do change? Viktor says more people would want to join in. More people would bring ingredients, skill, and care. The kitchen would become more alive because the rewards would no longer flow in only one direction. A fairer system would not weaken the meal. It would make more people want to help cook it.

Closing

The soup is ready. Matt looks at the pot. Viktor holds the ladle. The stove is still there, doing its job. The ingredients are still there too, transformed by work into something useful. Nothing in the kitchen has changed physically, yet the whole argument has changed what the room means.

That is the real point. A bank is not only a machine for holding money safely. It is also a set of rules about who creates value and who gets rewarded for it. So the question hanging over the pot is not really about soup at all. It is about fairness. Who gets to eat?

The New Rules of the Kitchen

  • Rule 1: If you help cook, you get to eat.
  • Rule 2: Owning the stove matters, but it is not the whole meal.
  • Rule 3: The people who bring the ingredients create real value.
  • Rule 4: A fair kitchen shares the soup with cooks, helpers, and backers.
  • Rule 5: Better rules build trust, and trust brings more people to the table.
  • Rule 6: A bank should not just protect money. It should reward contribution fairly.

Credit

This article is a rewrite inspired by One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Why Banks Need Both Core Banking and Specialised Systems by Pennant Technologies. It also draws on the ideas of Kevin Cox, whose work on FairShares and ethical banking informs the perspective represented by Viktor. Full credit to the original authors for the core ideas.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why the Economy Grows the Wrong Thing

Image
What Polanyi, Ostrom, and Pagel Help Us See Clearly The Problem We Feel but Struggle to Explain Most people can feel that something is off. The economy is growing. Numbers go up. Buildings rise. Technology improves. Yet everyday life does not feel easier. Homes are harder to afford. Energy feels expensive. Communities feel weaker. It creates a strange question: how can a system grow so much, yet deliver so little where it matters? The answer is simple, but not obvious. The economy is growing the wrong thing. Karl Polanyi: Markets Should Serve Society Karl Polanyi helps us see the first mistake. He argued that markets were never meant to run society. They were tools, not masters. But over time, we flipped the relationship. We started shaping society to serve markets instead. When that happens, things that should never be treated like products—land, labor, and even human relationships—get pulled into the market machine. Think of it like using a measuring tape as a hammer. It ...
Read more

Fixing the Leak: How We Can Actually Own What We Pay For (Part 1 of 2)

Image
** Modern Monetary Theory proved that government money isn't scarce. Now we need a system to ensure that money serves the people who use it. The Unanswered Question of Created Money For years, Modern Monetary Theory has offered a radical but simple idea about how our economy works. It explains that a sovereign government does not need to collect taxes before it can spend, because the government actually creates the money itself. This changes everything, because it means we are not held back by a lack of funds for important goals like full employment, public housing, or climate action. However, accepting this idea immediately leads to a massive, unanswered question. If the government can simply create money, what happens to that money after it flows into the real economy? Modern Monetary Theory argues that the only real limit to creating money is inflation. But inflation is not just about how much money is printed; it is about whether that money keeps circulating as useful purc...
Read more

The Hidden Engine of Community Wealth: How Credit Unions Actually Work

Image
tags : - Credit_Unions - Cooperative_Finance - Community_Wealth - Financial_Literacy - Economic_Empowerment Beyond the Bank: Understanding the Simple Physics of Cooperative Finance When you walk into a traditional bank, you are essentially entering a shop owned by someone else. You are the customer, and the bank’s primary job—its fundamental physical law—is to generate a profit for its shareholders. This isn’t a bad thing, but it creates a specific kind of gravity: the money tends to flow upward and outward, toward investors who might live thousands of miles away. But there is another way to organize the movement of money, one that feels more like a local ecosystem than a distant factory. This is the world of the credit union, and to understand it, we have to look at the "first principles" of how a financial cooperative functions. The Power of the Shared Pool Imagine a group of neighbors who all have buckets of water. Some neighbors have extra water they...
Read more