Our aim is to encourage discussion, debate, and scholarship on money’s design and its reform towards a world that is as just as it is (economically) productive. (read more)
Category: Featured-Post
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.
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.
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.
Current Scholarship
Losing Autonomy: The Norwegian Central Bank During the Second World War
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.
Current Scholarship
The Capital Commons: Digital Money and Citizens’ Finance in a Productive Commercial Republic
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.'
Current Scholarship
Digital Currencies, Stablecoins, and the Evolving Payments Landscape
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.
Current Scholarship
Book Review: Law and Macroeconomics as Mainstream
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.
Winter 2020
Banking: Intermediation or Money Creation
Contributors: Morgan Ricks, Marc Lavoie, Robert Hockett, Saule Omarova, Michael Kumhof, Zoltan Jakab, Paul Tucker, Charles Kahn, Daniel Tarullo, Stephen Marglin, Howell Jackson and Christine Desan, Sannoy Das
Current Scholarship
The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy
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.
Current Scholarship
Seigniorage through Periodic Recoinage: When the Validity of Money Was Restricted in Time
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.
Current Scholarship
The Janus Faces of Money, Property, and Governance: Fiscal Finance, Empire, and Race
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.
Current Scholarship
The Key to Value: The Debate over Commensurability in Neoclassical and Credit Approaches to Money
Christine Desan, Harvard Law School
Neoclassical and credit approaches to money represent dramatically different theories of value.
Current Scholarship
Just Published: Finance and Society, Vol. 6, No. 1
Editors, Finance and Society
The editors of Finance and Society are pleased to announce the publication of vol. 6, no. 1 (2020).
Current Scholarship
Colonialism’s Currency: Money, State and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950
Brian Gettler, University of Toronto
Money, often portrayed as a straightforward representation of market value, is also a political force, a technology for
Current Scholarship
Inside the Black Box: Credibility and Situational Power of Central Banks
Ayca Zayim, Mount Holyoke College
Despite the consensus that the power of finance constraints central banks under financial globalization, the variation in their autonomy from market forces at the micro level of monetary policymaking remains underexplored.
Current Scholarship
The Money Doctors of Seventeenth Century Naples
Francois R. Velde, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
A collection of texts printed in early seventeenth-century Naples exemplifies the intersection between economic history and the history of thought.
Current Scholarship
The ECB and € E-Banknotes
Corinne Zellweger-Gutknecht, University of Basel, Benjamin Geva, Osgoode Hall Law School, Seraina N. Gruenewald, Radbound University Nijmegen
The modern monetary system is controlled by the state and yet linked to private deposit banking. Monetary value held in deposits with commercial banks is known as ‘commercial bank money’ (CoBM).
Current Scholarship
The ‘Kansas City’ Approach to Modern Money Theory
L. Randall Wray, Bard College
Modern money theory (MMT) synthesizes several traditions from heterodox economics.
Current Scholarship
‘Funk Money’: The End of Empires, The Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event
Vanessa Ogle, UC Berkeley
This article explores the question of what happened to European assets in the process of decolonization.
Current Scholarship
Technology v Technocracy: Fintech as a Regulatory Challenge
Saule Omarova, Cornell Law School
This article examines fintech as a systemic force disrupting the currently dominant technocratic paradigm of financial regulation.
Current Scholarship
Corona Crisis: Lessons of the Stress Test
Perry G Mehrling, Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University
Perry Mehrling talks to Boston Economic Club June 3, 2020 about the Coronavirus Crisis.
Current Scholarship
Jim Crow Credit
Mehrsa Baradaran, University of California Irvine
The New Deal created a separate and unequal credit market—high-interest, non-bank, installment lenders in black ghettos
Current Scholarship
Private Markets, Public Options, and the Payment System
Peter Conti-Brown and David A. Wishnick
The speed at which money moves between people and businesses in the United States lags well behind international standards.
Current Scholarship
The evolution of the Offshore US-Dollar System: past, present and four possible futures
Steffan Murau, Joe Rini & Armin Haas
Little has contributed more to the emergence of today's world of financial globalization than the setup of the international monetary system.
Money in the Time of Coronavirus
G. Epstein, Human Capital Bonds and Federal Reserve Support for Public Education: The Public Education Emergency Finance Facility (PEEFF)
May 21, 2020
Gerald Epstein, University of Massachusetts Amherts
Public education - K-12 and public higher education - have been hit hard financially by the Covid-19 Crisis.
Roundtable 3: Race and Money
M. Baradaran, How the Right Used Free Market Capitalism against the Civil Rights Movement
May 19, 2020
Mehrsa Baradaran, University of California Irvine
In order to achieve racial justice in America, we must confront and then thoroughly reject simplistic and ahistorical myths about markets and capitalism.
Current Scholarship
The Federal Reserve Public Education Emergency Finance Facility (PEEFF): A Proposal
Gerald Epstein, University of Massachusetts Amherst
State and local finances, including for public education, have been hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis, leaving more than a $500 billion hole in their budgets.
Money in the Time of Coronavirus
D. Kennedy, The Fed Should Bail Out Low-Income Tenants and Not Just Banks and Landlords
May 12, 2020
Duncan Kennedy, Harvard Law School
In the last financial crisis millions of American home owners lost their homes while low-income renters were evicted en masse.
Current Scholarship
Why is this Happening? with Chris Hayes: Saving the Economy with Saule Omarova
Why is this Happening?: Saving the Economy with Saule Omarova
Why is this Happening? Podcast Talks with Saule Omarova
Money in the Time of Coronavirus
O.P. Abello, Getting to Know a Brave New Fed
April 29, 2020
Oscar Perry Abello
For me, as a journalist covering the economies of cities across the United States, this journey started maybe four years ago.
Virtual Currencies and the State
F. Brunton, Virtual Money at the Edge-of-State
April 28, 2020
Finn Brunton, NYU Steinhardt School
Virtual Currencies and the State
B. Geva, Payment in Virtual Currency
April 22, 2020
Benjamin Geva, Osgoode Hall Law School of York University
Virtual Currencies and the State
M. de Castro Cunha Filho & S. Silbey, What lies behind the apparent trust in cryptocurrencies?
April 15, 2020
Marcelo de Castro Filho & Susan Silbey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
At the core of Lev Menand’s and Bill Maurer’s contributions to this roundtable lie one important conclusion
Money in the Time of Coronavirus
C. Sissoko, The Problem with Shareholder Bailouts isn’t Moral Hazard, but Undermining State Capacity
April 10, 2020
Carolyn Sissoko, University of the West of England
Coronavirus and the immense economic costs associated with repressing its growth has provoked a debate over how to distribute those costs.
Virtual Currencies and the State
J. Haskell & N. Tankus, Virtual Currency (in the Shadows of the Money Markets)
April 9, 2020
John Haskell, The University of Manchester
Nathan Tankus, The Modern Money Network
Off the radar in academic, professional and public experience until the early to mid-2000s, virtual currencies are a hot topic
Virtual Currencies and the State
J.S. Nelson, The Case for Cryptocurrencies as a New Category of Regulated Non-Sovereign Fiat Currency
March 31, 2020
J.S. Nelson, Villanova University
What are cryptocurrencies: securities, commodities, or another form of established currency – a non-sovereign fiat currency?
Money in the Time of Coronavirus
S. Omarova, Crises, Bailouts, and the Case for a National Investment Authority
April 1, 2020
Saule T. Omarova, Cornell Law School
The COVID-19 crisis is unlike any other we’ve seen so far.