The partnership, the cooperative, the trust, are common enough business models in consultancy, accounting, law, advertising, marketing and especially in the entertainment industry. It is hard indeed to find a modern law firm in the UK that is NOT an LLP now. Hollywood has long used some of the collaborative, risk taking, lien and forward purchase elements of LLPs to put together movies.
In the creative and content industries, the LLP is perfect. There is no real capital investment involved. What do you need? An office, some mobiles, some work stations - everything can be leased. What you need is people/minds working together - and preferably not employees. These kind of loose groupings have been around for a long time in these industries. But they require a stack of bilateral contracts that are only brought out when there is a dispute - otherwise people work on trust, as long as there is transparency.
The LLP provides a much simpler way of assembling these groupings, with a much smaller overhead because the overhead is distributed away from what is essentially not a company but a networked agreement that can join together many disparate 'assets'. You can't be me, I'm taken
The LLP (and LLC) enables an enabling "framework" for self organisation - rather than a self serving "organisation" - which is easier to apply to people aka "Human" Capital and to intangible "Intellectual" Capital than to tangible assets - particularly land where "ownership" and "use" are pretty complex subjects.
It's no coincidence that the "peer to peer" disintermediation phenomenon began with intangible "Intellectual Property" ie Napster.
But the process of "Napsterisation" has only just got started and credit intermediaries are - now that banking is almost entirely electronic - just as redundant as the Titans of music who are now looking back and commenting on their own demise...
It wouldn't be as difficult as you think to introduce a different financial structure to the one you are used to.
Particularly when the outcomes of the model I advocate are so compelling for end users, who are currently being fucked thrice over:
However, the world is changing, and on the one hand the balance of market power has irreversibly swung back to state owned oil and gas companies, and on the other I think we are seeing a new militancy generally on the part of energy consumers (in the US, a renewed government effort by Democrats eg Levin on their behalf) and in particular an antipathy to perceived "gouging" by intermediaries.
The oil trading middlemen are, as you imply, symbiotic with banks - eg BP and Goldman Sachs have IMHO been in unholy alliance for at least the last ten years - and like banks will have to come up with a new and disintermediated "service provider" model.
Simple solutions, like the partnership-based mechanisms I observe emerging, are not in the interests of either intermediaries - who thrive on complexity and opacity - or professionals, paid by the hour, rather than the outcome, who support them.
It's interesting that you should point out that a BTU is a BTU, because that is exactly why I have suggested that an energy based "Carbon Dollar" (ie a "dollar's worth" of BTU's at launch date) - backed by a pool of production - makes sense as a quasi "Bancor" Energy Value Unit on an International Energy Clearing Union platform.
So maybe rather than gas being priced off oil, who knows, in due course oil - in all its multiplicity of qualities - may be priced by reference to gas. Plus electricity has a fairly straightforward relationship with gas in many markets.
It is the homogeneity of gas, and the fact that very few sovereign suppliers who control the market that attracts me. I really do not think that they would find it too difficult to accept the logic of the case for a neutral partnership-based market platform.
Let's face it, Brent has long passed it's "sell-by" date as an oil benchmark, and it continues in use purely for lack of a credible alternative.
Moreover, because Norway, Russia, Qatar etc are not in hock to the financial system (rather the reverse) - and because Russia still has a nuclear deterrent -there would not be a great deal the US/Big Money could do about it.
