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About Us

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)
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Registration Open Soon
Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0

We are delighted to announce Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0. The Conference will be held at two sites in order to maximize participation while minimizing carbon impacts: Cambridge, MA (Harvard Law School, June 15-17, 2023) and Hamburg, Germany (the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and THE NEW INSTITUTE,  June 15-16, 2023).  The Conference is open to all students of money, credit, and finance, the monetary system, and the modern economy, including members of the public. We will offer robust online access and we encourage distant participants to join us virtually. 
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Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0”

Cambridge, MA Registration is Open!
Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0 Conference

Registration for the Cambridge, MA and Hamburg, Germany meetings of Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0 conference have begun. Registration and schedules for both locations are linked below.

Register for Cambridge, MA Meeting

Schedule of Cambridge, MA Meeting [PDF]

Register for Hamburg, Germany Meeting

Schedule of Hamburg, Germany Meeting [PDF]

Visit Conference Web Page 

The Conference will be held at two sites in order to maximize participation while minimizing carbon impacts: Cambridge, MA (Harvard Law School, June 15-17, 2023) and Hamburg, Germany (the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and THE NEW INSTITUTE,  June 15-16, 2023).
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Money as a Democratic Medium 2.0 Conference”

Current Scholarship
New York Times Podcast: A Radical Way of Thinking About Money with Morgan Ricks

We discuss what lessons banking regulators missed from the Great Recession; the need to panic-proof the entire financial system; the government’s role in insuring or backstopping deposits; what it would mean for the government to start treating money as a public good for us all; and more.
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New York Times Podcast: A Radical Way of Thinking About Money with Morgan Ricks”

Current Scholarship
Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?

Isabella M. Weber and Evan Wasner, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The US COVID-19 inflation is predominantly a sellers’ inflation that derives from the ability of firms with market power to hike prices. Policy should aim to contain price hikes at the impulse stage to prevent inflation from the onset.
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Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?”

Current Scholarship
From Cannabis to Crypto: Federal Reserve Discretion in Payments

Julie Andersen Hill, University of Alabama - School of Law

This article shows that while the Federal Reserve has some discretion over the payments it processes and terms under which it offers it payments services, the Fed’s discretion is not so broad as to allow it to reject access requests from legally eligible banks. If the Fed wants to exclude banks, it should ask Congress to change the law.
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From Cannabis to Crypto: Federal Reserve Discretion in Payments”

Current Scholarship
The ‘climate shift’ in central banks: how field arbitrageurs paved the way for climate stress testing

Stine Quorning, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

The article contributes to the study of the political economy of central banks, investigating how discussions of climate change entered central banks and highlighting an underexplored form of ‘infrastructural entanglement’ between finance, the state bureaucracy, and central banks.
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The ‘climate shift’ in central banks: how field arbitrageurs paved the way for climate stress testing”

Current Scholarship
Caught between Frontstage and Backstage: The Failure of the Federal Reserve to Halt Rule Evasion in the Financial Crisis of 1974

Pierre-Christian Fink, Harvard University and Hebrew University Jerusalem

Based on original archival evidence from the financial crisis of 1974, this article discusses regulators who publicly pretend to stay within their mandate, which renders re-regulation of rule evasion less likely. The finding contributes a new explanation for why periods of instability so rarely lead to change.
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Caught between Frontstage and Backstage: The Failure of the Federal Reserve to Halt Rule Evasion in the Financial Crisis of 1974”

Current Scholarship
Risk, Discretion, and Bank Supervision

Peter Conti-Brown (University of Pennsylvania) and Sean Vanatta (University of Glasgow)

Using the rich history of supervision in the United States from the antebellum period to the present, this article presents a theoretical conception of supervision as the space where bankers and the government engage each other in sometimes cooperative, sometimes contentious disputes with substantial influence on the direction of financial and economic policy.
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Risk, Discretion, and Bank Supervision”

Current Scholarship
New Symposium on “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities” by Ricks, Sitaraman, Welton, and Menand

Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand

Networks, Platforms, and Utilities (NPU) is the first entirely new casebook integrating NPU law in a quarter century—and the first with some temporal distance from the deregulatory movement of the late twentieth century. The book thus contributes to larger intellectual shifts in the academy and public policy.
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New Symposium on “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities” by Ricks, Sitaraman, Welton, and Menand”

Current Scholarship
Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics Volume 3, Number 2

Editorial Group, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics

One possible reading of the current issue is that we invite readers to ponder historical hauntings of modern political economies, including "austerity haunting 'noncapitalist' contexts," "the history of money haunting modern-day understandings of central bank digital currencies," "colonialism haunting African development," and more.
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Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics Volume 3, Number 2”

Current Scholarship
Paper Money of a ‘Peculiar Character’: The Notes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1820-1870

Michael Ryan, International Bank Note Society

The Hudson's Bay Company issued promissory notes from 1820 to 1870 that served as paper money in the Red River Colony. These notes are a fascinating artefact of the fur trade, which played an important role in the earliest phase of European engagement with Canada and the US.
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Paper Money of a ‘Peculiar Character’: The Notes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1820-1870”

Fall 2022 - Money, Sanctions and International Law
Sanctions and Decoupling After Neoliberalism

David Singh Grewal, UC Berkeley
We are once again in the awful position of testing the proposition that commercial integration among nations leads to peace. And, to the extent that it clearly does not, we are left wondering about how effective either monetary and economic sanctions can be—and, more broadly, what economic “decoupling” looks like in a post-neoliberal world.
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Sanctions and Decoupling After Neoliberalism”

Current Scholarship
The Financialization of U.S. Public Pensions, 1945-1974

Sean Vanatta, University of Glasgow

This article examines a major transformation in public employee pension investment in the United States. Ultimately, financialization was not the product of a radical break or crisis in the 1970s, but was a continuous process in the post-World War II era, one initially pursued by state and local government officials in service of welfare liberalism.
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The Financialization of U.S. Public Pensions, 1945-1974”

Fall 2022 - Money, Sanctions and International Law
International Law and 21st Century Financial Warfare

Suzanne Katzenstein, Duke University; Stephen Park, University of Connecticut
Financial sanctions of the current scope and magnitude can no longer be relied upon to enforce international law in a manner that complies with it. Relying on international law to constrain the impacts of warfare—here, financial warfare—may also risk legitimizing its expanding use.
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International Law and 21st Century Financial Warfare”

Current Scholarship
Special Issue from Journal of Cultural Economy: FinTech in Africa

Paul Langley, Durham University, and Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Boston University
By re-centering global social science research agendas and political debates on Africa, this special issue hopes to inspire further work and future political engagement with FinTech which doesn’t begin, by default, from developments and experiences in the Global West and East.
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Special Issue from Journal of Cultural Economy: FinTech in Africa”

Current Scholarship
Introduction: The Structural Power of Finance Meets Financialization

Natalya Naqvi et. al., London School of Economics

The contributions to this special issue engage with how decades of financialization have transformed the basis of structural power toward alternative functions that have gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These include household and real estate lending that fuels consumption-led growth, concentration and expansion of financial institutions as tools of geo-economic strategy, financing current account deficits that facilitate global imbalances, and wealth preservation that bolsters inequality.
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Introduction: The Structural Power of Finance Meets Financialization”

Current Scholarship
Financialization, Structural Power, and the Global Financial Crisis for Europe’s Core and Periphery

Nina Eichacker, University of Rhode Island

As Eurozone governments consider how to respond to crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic going forward, policies that more equitably support governments rescuing domestic financial actors should be considered in tandem with broader financial regulations of structurally important economic institutions.
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Financialization, Structural Power, and the Global Financial Crisis for Europe’s Core and Periphery”

Current Scholarship
Financial dominance: why the ‘market maker of last resort’ is a bad idea and what to do about it

Carolyn Sissoko, University of the West of England

This paper sets forth a framework modeling the traditional ‘banking approach’ to central bank liquidity provision and advocates a return to it. These reforms must be accompanied by a clear policy that in the event that any bank requires re-capitalization by the government, existing shareholder interests will be wiped out, and ownership will be transferred to the government.
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Financial dominance: why the ‘market maker of last resort’ is a bad idea and what to do about it”

Current Scholarship
Battling Institutional Debt at HBCUs

Andrew J. Douglas, Morehouse College

The article underscores an increasingly important point: all members of a campus community ought to be deeply concerned about institutional debt. A campaign against institutional debt at HBCUs could be a powerful initiative of the AAUP’s Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color, and it could help to draw more HBCU faculty into the push for a New Deal for Higher Education.
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Battling Institutional Debt at HBCUs”

Current Scholarship
The Key to Value (2.0): 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. According to the way money is created, individuals will not be equally situated in the process that generates prices. Decisions about value are made in the wake of that fact.
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The Key to Value (2.0): The Debate Over Commensurability in Neoclassical and Credit Approaches to Money”

Current Scholarship
Banking on a Curve: How to Restore the Community Reinvestment Act

Peter Conti-Brown, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Brookings Institution; and Brian D. Feinstein, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 has failed to meaningfully reduce the prevalence of “banking deserts” across lower-income communities or to reduce the racial wealth gap. As a corrective, banks should be graded on a curve, which would enable the CRA to fulfill its promise: to expand access to credit, spur investment in overlooked areas, and combat racial inequities through the financial system.
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Banking on a Curve: How to Restore the Community Reinvestment Act”

Current Scholarship
Towards a sociology of state investment funds? sovereign wealth funds and state-business relations in Saudi Arabia

Alexis Montambault Trudelle, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh

What kind of power relations are maintained or established in the process of sovereign wealth funds development? This article contributes to rentier state debates and broader political economy scholarship by showing how state investment funds hinge on ancillary networks of social institutions, often generated from ingrained formal and informal interactions between states and society.
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Towards a sociology of state investment funds? sovereign wealth funds and state-business relations in Saudi Arabia”

Current Scholarship
The power of folk ideas in economic policy and the central bank–commercial bank analogy

Sebastian Diessner, Leiden University, The Hague, Netherlands

This article argues that policy-makers’ non-expert or ‘folk’ ideas can affect policy outcomes in a way that challenges the assumption of economic policy-making being guided by expert ideas emanating from the realm of economics and other sciences.
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The power of folk ideas in economic policy and the central bank–commercial bank analogy”

Current Scholarship
Financialized savings in public water governance: An illustrative case study in the arid American West

Christopher Gibson, California State University, Fullerton

How does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? This article interrogates the influence that financial markets have over public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.
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Financialized savings in public water governance: An illustrative case study in the arid American West”

Current Scholarship
Sovereign Solvency as Monetary Power

Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima, University of Leeds School of Law

This article reconceptualizes sovereign insolvency from a money-centred perspective. Sovereign insolvencies are inherent to the asymmetric character of global liquidity, rather than solely the product of fiscal misfortunes or mismanagement. To correct those asymmetries, it is necessary to reset the international monetary system.
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Sovereign Solvency as Monetary Power”

Current Scholarship
Gold Clauses in the Capital Markets of the Early Twentieth Century

David Fox, University of Edinburgh

This paper scratches beneath the doctrinal analysis of gold clauses to the commercial and political purposes served by such clauses. It considers gold-clause contracts as historical instances of the early international bond markets in operation, and the litigation over them as one reaction to the financial instability of the era.
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Gold Clauses in the Capital Markets of the Early Twentieth Century”

Fall 2022
Money, Sanctions and International Law

Contributors:  Rawi Abdelal/Alexandra Vacroux, Charlotte Beaucillon, Ben Coates, Anna Gelpern, David Singh Grewal, Daniel Nielson, Stephen Park/Suzanne Katzenstein, Adam Tooze.

This roundtable deals with questions about the system of international monetary production, international law, and politics that have come into sharp relief in the context of economic sanctions issued against Russia.
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Money, Sanctions and International Law”