Introduction -- Part I: Modern money. What money is based on--viz., "nothing" ; Spending from nothing ; Promising from nothing ; Democracy's dollar -- Part II: The money contract. A very (very) brief history of finance--i.e., civilization ; Why money cannot be printed ; What we owe each other --...

The hallmark of a collective action problem is its aggregating multiple individually rational decisions into a collectively irrational outcome. Arms races, “commons tragedies” and “prisoners' dilemmas” are well-known, indeed well-worn examples. What seem to be less widely appreciated are...

The Fed's new Community QE Facility, which is unprecedented in Fed history, will function as a literal lifeline to States and their Subdivisions. But it remains, precisely because of its novelty, unfamiliar and possibly even off-putting or intimidating to many State and City financial officers,...

I propose both an interpretation of and an institutional optimization plan for the broad array of new Fed Liquidity Facilities announced in response to the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020. These represent an attempt by our central bank to fund concerted state and municipal action as if it were...

State capacity, stable currencies, and well functioning financial systems seem to be ‘package deals’ – one cannot have one without having all. I show that the intimate functional links among states, monies, and financial systems, ubiquitous across history and geography as they are, are not...

I critique the contemporary doctrine of central bank independence and its implicit correlate, the dogma that central banks can and must engage only in what I call credit modulation without engaging in what I call credit allocation. This thought-complex is wrong-headed as to both premise and...

The ‘financialization’ of ‘developed’ economies over recent decades has brought us a world in which seemingly near every spot market has a financial market correlate. It has also brought, via the short-termism that it encourages, deindustrialization and productive atrophy. Meanwhile,...