May 29, 2021
Christina Parajon Skinner, University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School
It’s now fashionable in some quarters to view central bank independence as quaint and out-of-date.
Author: Dan Rohde
Current Scholarship
Assets need audiences: How venture capitalists boost valuations by recruiting investors to asset circles
Dave Elder-Vass
Narratives and conventions have received considerable attention in recent discussions of the valuation of financial assets.
Current Scholarship
The Wild Card: Colonial Paper Money in French North America, 1685 to 1719
Bryan Cutsinger, Vincent Geloso and Mathieu Bédard
During the colonial era, the French colonial government in Canada experimented with paper money printed on the back of playing cards.
Current Scholarship
When Kuznets Went to Rome: Roman Economic Well-Being and the Reframing of Roman History
Kim Bowes
This essay offers a critique of, and a set of alternative approaches to, the study of Roman economic well-being.
Announcement
Black Economic Council of Mass. makes forming a public bank a top legislative priority
Business group backs setting aside $50 million a year to fund a state-owned lender
Current Scholarship
Some Thoughts on Central Bank Digital Currency
David Andolfatto
All the money we use today consists of bank liabilities, either private or central.
Current Scholarship
Central Bank Activism
Christina Parajon Skinner
Today, the Federal Reserve is at a critical juncture in its evolution. Unlike any prior period in U.S. history,
Current Scholarship
Competition Law as Collective Bargaining Law
Nathan Tankus & Luke Herrine
This chapter provides an alternative basis for the economic analysis of competition law from conventional neoclassical theory.
Current Scholarship
World Maps for the Debt Paradigm: Risk Ranking the Poorer Nations in the 1970s
Quinn Slobodian
This article offers a new account of the rise of the ranked nation-state through a genealogy of the category of country risk, which emerged in the 1970s as part of a response to the explosion of sovereign borrowing of petrodollars
Current Scholarship
Regional Monetary Standards and Medieval Bracteates
Roger Svensson
In the Middle Ages, tens of thousands types of uni-faced bracteate coins were struck in the period 1140−1520.
Announcement
RAMICS Workshop – Who rules the money: the legal challenge of complementary currencies as a social innovation
RAMICS Workshop - Who rules the money: the legal challenge of complementary currencies as a social innovation
Current Scholarship
Cannabis Banking: What Marijuana Can Learn from Hemp
Julie Andersen Hill
Marijuana-related businesses have banking problems. Many banks explain that because marijuana is illegal under federal law, they will not serve the industry.
Current Scholarship
A Proposition for the Redefinition of the Bank from a Historical Sociolegal Perspective
Reda Mokhtar El Ftouh
Throughout history, banking has been key to the development of fundamental institutions and structures of capitalism, while also having been instrumental in its recurrent crises.
Current Scholarship
Banks, Marijuana, and Federalism
Julie Andersen Hill
Although marijuana is illegal under federal law, twenty-three states have legalized some marijuana use. The state-legal marijuana industry is flourishing, but marijuana-related businesses report difficulty accessing banking services.
Current Scholarship
Commodifying Marginalization
Abbye Atkinson
Once pillars of American social provision, public pension funds now rely significantly on private investment to meet their chronically underfunded promises to America’s workers.
Current Scholarship
Solvency as a Fundamental Constraint on LOLR Policy for Independent Central Banks: Principles, History, Law
Sir Paul M. W. Tucker
This paper follows up earlier work advocating a principled modernization of doctrines for central bank lender-of-last-resort policies and operations.
Announcement
LPE Blog is Hiring a New Managing Editor!
LPE Blog is Hiring a New Managing Editor!
Current Scholarship
Unbundling Banking, Money, and Payments
Dan Awrey
For centuries, our systems of banking, money, and payments have been legally and institutionally intertwined.
Current Scholarship
Government has always picked winners and losers
David M.P. Freund
A welfare state doesn’t distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.
Current Scholarship
The Cambridge economic tradition and the distribution of the social surplus
Nuno Ornelas Martins
Various research projects in economics developed at Cambridge share common philosophical presuppositions, within what can be termed as the Cambridge economic tradition.
Current Scholarship
Histories of Bank Supervision
Sean Vanatta
In this essay, I make the case for the historical study of bank supervision—both that historical methods are necessary to understanding the shape and structure of supervision in the present and that the study of supervision will contribute to active and important historiographical debates.
Current Scholarship
Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty
Luke Herrine
This article argues for a fundamental rethinking of the function of consumer protection. It is time to abandon welfare economics and adopt what this article refers to as “moral economy”.
Current Scholarship
The aporetic financialisation of insurance liabilities: Reserving under Solvency II.
Charalampos Fytros
The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features
Current Scholarship
The emergence of systemic risk: The Federal Reserve, bailouts, and monetary government at the limits
Onur Özgöde
Why does the Federal Reserve bail banks out in violation of a core principle of free-market capitalism: private gain–private loss?
Current Scholarship
The New Bailments
Danielle D'Onfro
The rise of cloud computing has dramatically changed how consumers and firms store their belongings. Property that owners once managed directly now exists primarily on infrastructure maintained by intermediaries.
Announcement
CUHK LAW Greater China Legal History Seminar Series- ‘The History of Central Banking in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Singapore’ by Ms. Lillian Cheung, Prof. Chao Xi & Prof. Christian Hofmann (Online)
CUHK LAW Greater China Legal History Seminar Series- ‘The History of Central Banking in Hong Kong, Mainland China and Singapore’ by Ms. Lillian Cheung, Prof. Chao Xi & Prof. Christian Hofmann (Online)
Announcement
Harvard LPE Association Call for Submissions — Law and Political Economy Writing Prize
Call for Submissions — Law and Political Economy Writing Prize
Current Scholarship
The Intellectual Origins of Sudan’s “Decades of Solitude,” 1989–2019
Alden Young
The three decades between 1989 and 2019, when the National Salvation regime of Islamists and the military ruled Sudan, are now frequently remembered by international and Sudanese policymakers, politicians, intellectuals, and business elites as “lost decades” or “decades of solitude”
Current Scholarship
Technocratic Pragmatism, Bureaucratic Expertise, and the Federal Reserve
Peter Conti-Brown & David A. Wishnick
The Federal Reserve (Fed) regularly faces novel challenges to its broad statutory mandates. Often, these challenges—from financial crises to pandemics to climate change—raise a critical question.
Current Scholarship
Borrowing Equality
Abbye Atkinson
For the last fifty years, Congress has valorized the act of borrowing money as a catalyst for equality, embracing the proposition that equality can be bought with a loan.
Current Scholarship
Does the national debt matter?
L. Randall Wray & Yeva Nersisyan
In this paper, we use the Modern Money Theory framework to analyze whether government debt (and deficits) in a country with its own sovereign currency presents a problem.
Current Scholarship
Banking on Democracy
Mehrsa Baradaran
The financial system is unequal and exclusionary even as it is supported, funded, and subsidized by public institutions.
Announcement
The Modern Money Network Humanities Division (MMNHD) Launches Moneyontheleft.org
The Modern Money Network Humanities Division (MMNHD) is thrilled to launch Moneyontheleft.org, a new space for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multimedia engagement with progressive political economy.
Current Scholarship
Money on the Left Podcast: Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan
Money on the Left Podcast: Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan
The Money on the Left Editorial Collective presents a classic episode from our archives along with a previously unavailable transcript & graphic art. In this episode, we are joined by Christine Desan
Current Scholarship
A Route to Commons-Based Democratic Monies? Embedding the Governance of Money in Traditional Communal Institutions
Ester Barinaga
The financial crisis of 2008 resulted, among other, on a popular awareness that the monetary system was not working for the interest of the many.
Current Scholarship
Why Financial Regulation Keeps Falling Short
Dan Awry & Kathryn Judge
This article argues that there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of finance and current approaches to financial regulation.
Announcement
2021-22 postdoc at the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies – Currency and Empire: Monetary Policy, Race, and Power
2021-22 postdoc at the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies
Announcement
Cambridge University | Center for the Study of Global Human Movement Webinar (11 December): In Conversation: Book talk with Albena Azmanova
Cambridge University | Center for the Study of Global Human Movement Webinar (11 December): In Conversation: Book talk with Albena Azmanova
Summer 2020
Public Money: Digital Dollars? Fed Acccounts? Postal Banking?
Contributors: John Crawford, Morgan Ricks, Lev Menand, Aaron Klein, Robert Hockett, Abbye Atkinson, Leonidas Zelmanovitz, Bruno Meyerhof Salama, Sheila Bair, James McAndrews, Yesha Yadav, Sarah Bloom Raskin, Mehrsa Baradaran, Christopher Giancarlo, Saule T. Omarova, and Nakita Q. Cuttino.
Roundtable: Public Money
S. Omarova, The Other Half of the FedAccounts Plan: What Happens on the Asset Side of the Fed’s Ledger?
November 19, 2020
Saule T. Omarova, Cornell Law School
The COVID pandemic gave a renewed sense of urgency to the idea of offering every American household and business a free digital-dollar deposit account
Announcement
Taming Capitalism before its Triumph: Author meets critics online – Nov 17
Taming Capitalism before its Triumph: Author meets critics online - Nov 17
Announcement
Searching for panelists for a panel on the political economy of commodity money (March 11-14, 2021)
Searching for panelists for a panel on the political economy of commodity money (March 11-14, 2021)
Announcement
Nov 9 | “Capitalism on Edge: on Radical Change without Crisis, Revolution, or Utopia” (book talk)
Nov 9 | “Capitalism on Edge: on Radical Change without Crisis, Revolution, or Utopia" (book talk)
Announcement
Nov 9 | Online | Aaron Jakes – Egypt’s Occupation | Book Launch & Roundtable
Nov 9 | Online | Aaron Jakes - Egypt's Occupation | Book Launch & Roundtable
Announcement
Happening Tomorrow — Third Conference on Law and Macroeconomics
The Third Conference on Law and Macroeconomics is taking place tomorrow!
Announcement
The CMS Colloquium Series Livestreamed, Thursday @ 5pm – “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media”, Lana Swartz
The CMS Colloquium Series Livestreamed, Thursday @ 5pm - “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media”, Lana Swartz
Roundtable: Public Money
A. Atkinson, On Equity within Public-Sector Banking Initiatives
October 6, 2020
Abbye Atkinson, Berkeley Law
To the extent that “banking [is] the business model of money creation,”[1] it is difficult to conceive of it in truly humanistic terms.
Roundtable: Public Money
L. Zelmanovitz and B. Meyerhof Salama, Central Bank Digital Currency: the Hidden Agenda
October 16, 2020
Leonidas Zelmanovitz and Bruno Meyerhof Salama
Calls for the Federal Reserve (Fed) to consider a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) gained steam after the release last year of a white paper by Facebook and associates
Roundtable: Public Money
R. Hockett, The Inclusive Value Ledger: A Public Platform for Digital Dollars, Digital Payments, and Digital Public Banking
September 28, 2020
Robert Hockett, Cornell Law School
One fruitful way of thinking about money is simply as ‘that which pays’ in a payments system or ‘that which counts’ in a system of transaction-associated value accounting.
Roundtable 3: Race and Money
K-Sue Park, How Did Redlining Make Money?
September 25, 2020
K-Sue Park, Georgetown Law
One of the principal insights and analytical charges presented by scholars of racial capitalism is that racism makes money.