Mehrsa Baradaran
The financial crisis of 2008 made clear to the public, in a way that had not been apparent for some time, that banks depend for their existence and operation on a structural framework created by the federal government.
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Postal Banking’s Public Benefits”
Leon Wansleben
Capital evidently is not just a legal code, but also constitutes a financial accounting entity that emerges from processes of investment, which are embedded in (economic, social, political) structures that are facilitative of unequal distributions of rewards and risks.
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Capitalization and its Legal Friends”
Robert C. Hockett & Saule T. Omarova
Much American electoral and policy debate now centers on how best to reignite the nation's economic dynamism and rebuild its competitive strength.
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Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority”
Jacqueline Best, Colin Hay, Genevieve LeBaron & Daniel Mügge
Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. The aim of this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions.
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Seeing and Not-seeing Like a Political Economist: The Historicity of Contemporary Political Economy and its Blind Spots”
Chloë Kennedy
This article examines criminal law responses to counterfeit currency (notes and coins) in Scotland during a period of rapid commercialization.
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Counterfeit Currency and the Criminal Law in Commercialising Scotland”
Aaron Wistar
The $21-trillion market in U.S. government securities is the “deepest and most liquid fixed-income market in the world.” Except, of course, when it isn’t.
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Who Needs the Government Securities Market?”
Michael R. Glass & Sean H. Vanatta
Between 1940 and 1965, state-level officials changed the relationship between two pillars of the postwar social contract: secure retirement and modern public schools.
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The Frail Bonds of Liberalism: Pensions, Schools, and the Unraveling of Fiscal Mutualism in Postwar New York”
Jens van ‘t Klooster
This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art in constitutional theory with regard to the topic of central banks.
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Central Banks”
Oscar Lopez & Ephrat Livni
El Salvador on Tuesday became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, allowing the cryptocurrency to be used in any transaction, from buying a cup of coffee to paying taxes.
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In Global First, El Salvador Adopts Bitcoin as Currency”
Stephen Mayeaux
One of the first to catch my eye was a set of documents from the Cortes, the legislative body of Spain. Published in 1593, Acts of the “Cortes” held in the village of Madrid in the year 1588 gives us a look at matters the Cortes considered important enough to address. Among other interesting subjects, these documents show concern over the kingdom’s financial difficulties.
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Who’s to Blame for Lost Silver and Gold? Laments of Financial Troubles in Spain 1588”
Nina Perdomo
This document is a highlight of the Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents collection because it explores the case of Goyeneche, charged with counterfeiting Spanish coin, while allowing modern readers to gain insight into the economic status of Spain in the 1600s.
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Criminals and Coins: Understanding 17th Century Spanish Economy through Counterfeit Currency”
Ariel Ron and Sofia Valeonti
Both sides in the U.S. Civil War financed military spending by issuing new fiat currencies. The Union “greenback” underwent moderate inflation (by wartime standards), but the Confederate “grayback” suffered hyperinflation.
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The Money War: An Interpretation of Democracy, Depreciation, and Taxes in the U.S. Civil War”
Hubert Horan
The urban car service firm Uber is currently the most highly valued private startup company in the world, with a venture capital valuation of over $68 billion based on direct investment of over $13 billion from numerous prominent Silicon Valley investors. Uber’s investors are not merely seeking a share of a still-competitive urban car service industry, but are openly pursuing global industry dominance and its huge valuation is based on expectations that it will be successful.
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Will the Growth of Uber Increase Economic Welfare?”
Christine A. Desan
Like the law of payments, the legal design of money shapes the economy itself.
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Money’s Design Elements: Debt, Liquidity, and the Pledge of Value from Medieval Coin to Modern “Repo””
Quentin Ravelli
Though the social consequences of financialization are well-known, their influence on radical politics remains unclear.
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Debt struggles: How financial markets gave birth to a working-class movement”
Pınar E. Dönmez & Eva J. Zemandl
This article explores the changes in monetary policymaking in Hungary and Turkey in the context of the post-2008 global financial crisis and restructuring.
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Crisis of Capitalism and (De-)Politicisation of Monetary Policymaking: Reflections from Hungary and Turkey”
R. Bin Wong
Few have pondered the possible relevance of the ideologies and institutions of political economies in different world regions before the modern era and how the spread of modern capitalism has shaped their contemporary approaches to the future.
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Modern Capitalism’s Multiple Pasts and Its Possible Future: The Rise of China, Climate Change, and Economic Transformation”
Jeffrey Sklansky
For the first time since the Lincoln administration introduced a national paper currency during the Civil War, the Federal Reserve may soon create a new kind of federal money: a digital dollar. Now as then, what matters most is not the material form of money but who makes and manages it.
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A new public digital dollar could be a big boost to American democracy”
Prasad Krishnamurthy
Well into the 21st century, the federal government still lacks the capacity to deliver aid to the poorest and most vulnerable Americans in a crisis.
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Stimulus for all”
Emma Rothschild
The article engages recent literature on microeconomics and intermediate goods in order to outline new models of growth in economic history and the possibility of productive exchanges between economists and historians.
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Where is Capital?”
Marshall Steinbaum
Think of the student debt crisis as an overflowing bathtub. On the one hand, too much water is pouring in: more borrowers are taking on more debt. That is thanks to increased demand for higher education in the face of rising tuition, stagnant wages, diminishing job opportunities for those with less than a college degree, and the power of employers to dictate that would-be hires have the necessary training in advance. On the other hand, the drain is clogged and too little water is draining out: those who have taken on debt are increasingly unable to pay it off.
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The Student Debt Crisis is a Crisis of Non-Repayment”
Leander Bindewald
External shocks, like the climate catastrophe or the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as intrinsic fallacies like the securitization of bad debt leading up to the financial crisis in 2008, point to the need for updating our monetary and financial systems.
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Inconsistent Definitions of Money and Currency in Financial Legislation as a Threat to Innovation and Sustainability”
Rohan Grey
Written Testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Committee on on Financial Services Task Force on Financial Technology
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Written Testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Committee on on Financial Services Task Force on Financial Technology”
Lev Menand
Written Testimony of Lev Menand for the hearing entitled "Building a Stronger Financial System: Opportunities for a Central Bank Digital Currency" before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Subcommittee on Economic Policy.
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Written Testimony in a Senate Hearing on Building a Stronger Financial System: Opportunities of a Central Bank Digital Currency”
Dave Elder-Vass
Narratives and conventions have received considerable attention in recent discussions of the valuation of financial assets.
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Assets need audiences: How venture capitalists boost valuations by recruiting investors to asset circles”
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.
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The Wild Card: Colonial Paper Money in French North America, 1685 to 1719”
Kim Bowes
This essay offers a critique of, and a set of alternative approaches to, the study of Roman economic well-being.
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When Kuznets Went to Rome: Roman Economic Well-Being and the Reframing of Roman History”
David Andolfatto
All the money we use today consists of bank liabilities, either private or central.
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Some Thoughts on Central Bank Digital Currency”
Christina Parajon Skinner
Today, the Federal Reserve is at a critical juncture in its evolution. Unlike any prior period in U.S. history,
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Central Bank Activism”
Nathan Tankus & Luke Herrine
This chapter provides an alternative basis for the economic analysis of competition law from conventional neoclassical theory.
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Competition Law as Collective Bargaining Law”
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
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World Maps for the Debt Paradigm: Risk Ranking the Poorer Nations in the 1970s”
Roger Svensson
In the Middle Ages, tens of thousands types of uni-faced bracteate coins were struck in the period 1140−1520.
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Regional Monetary Standards and Medieval Bracteates”
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.
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Cannabis Banking: What Marijuana Can Learn from Hemp”
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.
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A Proposition for the Redefinition of the Bank from a Historical Sociolegal Perspective”
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.
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Banks, Marijuana, and Federalism”
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.
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Commodifying Marginalization”
Dan Awrey
For centuries, our systems of banking, money, and payments have been legally and institutionally intertwined.
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Unbundling Banking, Money, and Payments”
David M.P. Freund
A welfare state doesn’t distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer.
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Government has always picked winners and losers”
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.
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The Cambridge economic tradition and the distribution of the social surplus”
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.
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Histories of Bank Supervision”
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”.
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Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty”
Charalampos Fytros
The valuation of insurance liabilities has traditionally been dealt with by actuaries, who closely monitored underlying illiquid features
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The aporetic financialisation of insurance liabilities: Reserving under Solvency II.”
Onur Özgöde
Why does the Federal Reserve bail banks out in violation of a core principle of free-market capitalism: private gain–private loss?
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The emergence of systemic risk: The Federal Reserve, bailouts, and monetary government at the limits”
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.
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The New Bailments”
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”
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The Intellectual Origins of Sudan’s “Decades of Solitude,” 1989–2019”
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.
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Technocratic Pragmatism, Bureaucratic Expertise, and the Federal Reserve”
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.
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Borrowing Equality”
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.
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Does the national debt matter?”
Mehrsa Baradaran
The financial system is unequal and exclusionary even as it is supported, funded, and subsidized by public institutions.
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Banking on Democracy”
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
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Money on the Left Podcast: Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan”
