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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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 More “Current Scholarship
Written Testimony before the U.S. House of Representative Committee on on Financial Services Task Force on Financial Technology”
Giorgos Gouzoulis, University of Bristol, UK
This paper argues that household indebtedness is a missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to explaining why aggregate industrial action rates have been on the decline over the last five decades. More “Current Scholarship
What do indebted employees do? Financialisation and the decline of industrial action”
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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, More “Current Scholarship
Central Bank Activism”
Nathan Tankus & Luke Herrine
This chapter provides an alternative basis for the economic analysis of competition law from conventional neoclassical theory. More “Current Scholarship
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 More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
Commodifying Marginalization”
Dan Awrey
For centuries, our systems of banking, money, and payments have been legally and institutionally intertwined. More “Current Scholarship
Unbundling Banking, Money, and Payments”
David M.P. Freund
A welfare state doesn’t distort the market; it just makes government aid fairer. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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”. More “Current Scholarship
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 More “Current Scholarship
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? More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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” More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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 More “Current Scholarship
Money on the Left Podcast: Money as a Constitutional Project with Christine Desan”
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. More “Current Scholarship
A Route to Commons-Based Democratic Monies? Embedding the Governance of Money in Traditional Communal Institutions”
Dan Awry & Kathryn Judge
This article argues that there is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of finance and current approaches to financial regulation. More “Current Scholarship
Why Financial Regulation Keeps Falling Short”
Einar Lie, University of Oslo
In the mid‐twentieth century a number of central banks around the western world lost their operational autonomy and were placed under government control. More “Current Scholarship
Losing Autonomy: The Norwegian Central Bank During the Second World War”
Robert Hockett, Cornell Law School
All societies must address two questions where the organization of productive activity is concerned. The first is whether production will be mainly publicly managed, privately managed, or 'mixed.' More “Current Scholarship
The Capital Commons: Digital Money and Citizens’ Finance in a Productive Commercial Republic”
Governor Lael Brainard, Federal Reserve
Speech by Governor Lael Brainard of the Federal Reserve at The Future of Money in the Digital Age, Sponsored by the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Princeton University’s Bendheim Center for Finance, Washington, D.C. More “Current Scholarship
Digital Currencies, Stablecoins, and the Evolving Payments Landscape”
Bruno Meyerhof Salama, University of California, Berkeley - School of Law
In spite of its name, economic analysis of law is mostly unconcerned with money and markets. In a recently published book. More “Current Scholarship
Book Review: Law and Macroeconomics as Mainstream”
Saule T. Omarova, Cornell Law School
The COVID-19 crisis forcefully underscored the urgency of digitizing sovereign money and ensuring broad access to affordable banking services. More “Current Scholarship
The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy”
Roger Svensson, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Andreas Westermark,Sveriges Riksbank
A monetary system called periodic re-coinage was used during almost 200 years in large part of medieval Europe. More “Current Scholarship
Seigniorage through Periodic Recoinage: When the Validity of Money Was Restricted in Time”
Jamee Moudud, Sarah Lawrence College
This paper contributes to the literature on racial capitalism by deploying a key insight of the Law and Political Economy tradition, which is that politics acting through the law plays a constitutive role in the monetary hardwiring of economies and their property rights. More “Current Scholarship
The Janus Faces of Money, Property, and Governance: Fiscal Finance, Empire, and Race”
Christine Desan, Harvard Law School
Neoclassical and credit approaches to money represent dramatically different theories of value. More “Current Scholarship
The Key to Value: The Debate over Commensurability in Neoclassical and Credit Approaches to Money”