In their essence, monetary systems are all very simple. But that essence can be buried and hidden from view by accretions of practices over time. Money systems give rise to additional, ‘emergent’ properties as the groups that develop them grow in size and complexity.
This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. In 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a comic book on the origins of money. The story, called “Once Upon a Dime,” unspools sweetly. Far far away, on the planet Novus, a community of good-willed…
Katharina Pistor’s new book, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality, deserves to be the essential text of any movement today that concerns itself with law and political economy. It establishes, as its central topic, how fundamental law is to political economy, in the tradition of classical social theory but with a considerable update in light of contemporary affairs. And, more fully than anything else I know, it vindicates the LPE intuition that legal intellectuals have something essential to bring to the current and ongoing debate about markets and injustice.
Only when the monetary project of the agrarian populists failed did Americans settle on the exclusionary system that Baradaran describes. The contrast suggests that designing money is shaping community; it can bring people together or set them at each other’s throats.
The Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968 is a shocking example of governmental policies shaping “markets,” or, rather, supporting investors to extract wealth from segregated black communities.
The history of black banking, even for its many failures, holds a unique perspective on property and its contradictions of value. It also contains a deep lesson about how economic strategies generate and are reinforced by affective practices—and how racist economic laws rested on public feelings of their own.
This history of black banks and the economy of segregation reveals how inextricably financial markets are tied to racial exploitation, and how the dominant economy can continue to extract from racially subordinated groups through “color-blind” market mechanisms.
It is common to claim that finance is about ‘credit-intermediation,’ a matter of channeling funds from virtuous savers to needful end-users. The picture behind this assertion is that of a gargantuan broker—the financial system as ‘go-between.’ But modern financial systems are much more about credit-generation than intermediation. We need a new metaphor. In our view,…
During their first weeks in the new U.S. Congress, U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues already have done something no other American political figure has managed for decades. They have got the whole country, and indeed much of the world, talking about massively transformative public investment as a real prospect. The ‘Green New Deal’ exceeds…
Whenever talk of student debt cancellation, or even of a “student debt crisis,” gets too loud, there is a bevy of pundits ready to tut-tut. Don’t you so-called progressives know that most student debt is held by young professionals? That the young professionals with the biggest debt loads are unlikely to default on their debt…
Introduction: From ‘Accounting For’ to ‘Accountable To’ In an earlier post I welcomed legislation recently proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her Accountable Capitalism Act, I suggested, not only bids fair in the long run to render incorporated business firms less sociopathic, but also affords in the short run a fine opportunity to recall what…
Last month Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed an innovative – or better yet, restorative – new piece of legislation to the US Senate. Something like the Senator’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which would, among other things, hold corporations accountable to other stakeholders besides shareholders, is long overdue. It is in consequence much more than welcome. This owes…
While we should be cautious about government demands for more data, nationalization can improve data protection and ensure more equitable access.
The debate around stagnant wages and job creation seems well-settled: scholars point to globalization, or skill-biased technical change, or the decline of union density. Others point to the ‘rise of the robots’, claiming that automation and technology are driving us towards a jobless future. But few consider that the dominance of shareholder primacy within America’s…
The expression “economic liberty” is a form of conceptual doublespeak. The word doublespeak refers to a kind of “language used to deceive usually through concealment or misrepresentation of truth.” This strategy of redefining reality with the clever use of language is central to the way in which power is exercised in Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.…
