Four Ghosts of Capital: What the Old Thinkers Would Say About IBA’s New Strategy

The new Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) corporate strategy is an extraordinary document. For the first time, IBA will raise and deploy capital on the open market — borrowing, co-investing, and shaping financial systems in pursuit of First Nations economic self-sufficiency.

It is, in its own quiet way, revolutionary.
But revolutions are rarely simple. To understand what IBA is attempting, it helps to hear the voices of those who shaped our understanding of capital itself — four thinkers whose philosophies still haunt modern economics: Rockefeller, Keynes, Ford, and Rand.

Each would see something to admire, and something to fear.

1️⃣ Rockefeller: Risk as the Price of Ownership

John D. Rockefeller would recognise ambition when he saw it.
An institution built to lend is now preparing to leverage — to borrow and invest on behalf of the people it serves. He would call this a sign of maturity: capital finally acting like capital.

But Rockefeller’s question would be blunt:

“Are you creating Indigenous owners of capital, or simply a more sophisticated custodian of it?”

For him, the moral danger lies in safety.
He believed risk was the interest one pays for the right to own something. Without risk, there is no genuine control — only administration.

IBA’s new strategy promises to raise private capital, pursue co-investment, and build a “substantial capital asset.” It is a step away from paternalism and towards sovereignty. Yet Rockefeller would warn that capital which never leaves the institution remains a kind of charity — tidy, well-meaning, but static.

His verdict:
IBA must prove that it can transfer risk to the communities it serves — not to burden them, but to teach ownership through risk itself. Without that, it will have built another bank, not a new form of wealth.

2️⃣ Keynes: Repair Through Design

John Maynard Keynes would welcome IBA’s decision to borrow.
To him, the refusal to use public credit for social repair was a moral failure. The State, he believed, exists to turn collective confidence into productive investment.

He would see in IBA’s new powers a chance to correct the structural under-investment that has long defined Indigenous economies — a form of productive deficit spending.

But Keynes would also raise an eyebrow.

“Borrowing is the easy part,” he would say. “Confidence is the hard part.”

Capital is psychological before it is mathematical. The danger, in his eyes, is that IBA could imitate the machinery of finance without reproducing the architecture of belief that allows capital to circulate.

He would urge design: transparent governance, data, rules, and institutions that give markets faith that Indigenous capital is real, credible, and enduring.
In Keynes’s terms, IBA must not only manage liquidity — it must manufacture trust.

His verdict:
The borrowing power is a start. But unless it becomes a confidence machine — blending public support with private expectation — the new strategy will remain policy, not capital.

3️⃣ Ford: Enterprise Before Ideology

Henry Ford would be impatient.
He’d look at the elegant diagrams and the talk of “deploying, raising, patient, and shaping capital,” and ask:

“Where’s the product?”

Ford believed in the dignity of production — the transformation of labour into tangible value. He’d admire IBA’s focus on sectors like housing, renewables, agriculture, and mining, but he’d want to know who’s actually making things, fixing things, and selling things.

For him, capital only becomes real when it moves through enterprise — when it spins the gears of manufacturing, logistics, and local business.

He’d worry that a focus on financial engineering — capital raising, co-investment, asset management — could drift into abstraction.
Ford’s warning would be practical:

“A system that makes money from moving money will forget how to build.”

His verdict:
IBA must ensure that its new capital model feeds production, not bureaucracy. Without factories, workshops, farms, and enterprises, wealth remains arithmetic — elegant but inert.

4️⃣ Rand: The Morality of Creation

Ayn Rand would be the fiercest critic.
She would dismiss the plan as collectivism disguised as enterprise — government capital pretending to be freedom.

“You cannot borrow virtue,” she would say.

To her, wealth is only moral when it is the product of individual vision and effort. Any form of collective ownership — especially one backed by government — offends the principle of self-determination she held sacred.

And yet, if she looked closely, she might find something she respects: a First Nations institution daring to borrow on its own balance sheet, to compete for capital, and to measure itself by performance rather than entitlement.

Rand’s question would cut to the heart:

“Who owns the risk, and who owns the reward?”

If IBA’s success is measured by market performance — returns, yield, reinvestment — she might grudgingly acknowledge it as moral action.
If it relies on perpetual government underwriting, she would call it dependency by another name.

Her verdict:
Freedom without risk is illusion; risk without ownership is servitude. The only real sovereignty is to stand in the market as a creator, not a ward.

5️⃣ The Pattern Beneath the Critique

Together, the four ghosts of capital trace a single pattern of challenge:

ThinkerWhat they’d admireWhat they’d questionRockefellerAmbition and scaleWhether risk is genuinely transferred and ownedKeynesProductive borrowingWhether trust and confidence will followFordFocus on sectors and enterpriseWhether capital will reach the workshop floorRandIndependence of actionWhether true ownership accompanies support

Their combined warning is subtle but powerful:
capital must circulate through labour, belief, production, and freedom — not remain trapped in administration.

6️⃣ The Challenge Ahead

IBA’s new corporate strategy marks a profound evolution — from delivering finance to designing the financial ecosystem itself. It introduces risk into a system built on caution and imagines prosperity as a shared, cumulative act of creation.

But the strategy will only meet its promise if it passes the test these ghosts set:

• Rockefeller’s risk — wealth through exposure, not protection.

• Keynes’s design — confidence through architecture, not slogans.

• Ford’s production — capital that builds, not just balances.

• Rand’s ownership — freedom through earned control, not inherited virtue.

If IBA can weave those principles together, it won’t just borrow money.
It will manufacture a new kind of capital — one built from generations of crystallised labour, finally compounding on its own terms.