(Cover Image: Scott Garrett) While science suggests that PIN pads are more dangerous than cash, the retail sector continues to spread fear about it. Is this just a naive mistake, or are there darker motives? In early March 2020, the World Health Organisation emailed a journalist to say ‘We did …
For Marxist monetary theory, and much more besides, an excellent vantage point can be adopted through Oscar Wilde’s famous quip that “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” For the economist, this signifies that price – as the monetary value of …
The project of launching a new cryptocurrency, Libra, was announced by Facebook on June 18th last year and explained with an official document, a White Paper available online. However, in the subsequent months the project met strong opposition from regulators and state authorities, culminating with a very hostile hearing on …
In response to the global financial crisis, a global network of experts and institutions is working to create an alternative financial system that conforms to Islamic restrictions on the unfettered mobilization of capital. The central tenet of Islamic finance is the prohibition of interest (riba), an injunction that is articulated …
Around the world, central banks have a number of different ownership structures. At one end of the spectrum are central banks, like the Bank of England, that are wholly owned by the public sector. At the other end are central banks, like the Banca d’Italia, whose shareholders are wholly private …
In this article, we attempt to explain why Monetary Reform (MR) concerns are valid but do not necessarily impact upon the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) programme. We lay out our argument as follows; we provide some key insights into MMT referencing the work of Alfred Mitchell-Innes, Georg Friedrich Knapp, Abraham …
In January of 2019, the culture jamming group Yes Men pranked Blackrock Investment Management by sending out an email to its clients purporting to be from CEO Larry Fink. It announced that the fund, heavily invested at the time in fossil fuel energy, would no longer invest in companies not …
According to Rodrik’s (2012) ‘trilemma’, we can have only two of the following at any one time: hyperglobalization, the nation state, and democratic politics (Rodrik, 2012). Given the destructive forces of hyperglobalization – environmental degradation, homogenization of culture, and financial instability (e.g Hornborg, 2017a) – and the undesirability of …
The Green New Deal started making headlines in early 2019 when newly elected congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez submitted to the United States House of Representatives a non-binding resolution laying out the main elements of a 10-year economic mobilization plan that would phase out fossil fuel use and overhaul the nation’s infrastructure …
Introduction Central bankers as well as monetary reformers are discussing the introduction of central bank issued digital currency (DC). DC is intended to coexist with bankmoney (sight deposits), both monies circulating side-by-side and in competition with each other, similar to the familiar coexistence of bankmoney with traditional cash. Money users …
