All events take place in Wasserstein 2036 (Milstein East B) unless otherwise indicated.
Wasserstein Hall is located at 1585 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA at the corner of Everett Street.
Friday | Saturday
8:00-8:45 BREAKFAST
8:45-9:00 Welcoming Remarks: Christine Desan
9:00-10:30 Monetary Sovereignty, Democracy, and Economic Development
Recognizing the character of money as a sovereign project throws the complexity of economic development, especially in a globalized monetary system, into high relief. The hegemony of certain moneys as reserve currencies, the dense growth of financial markets, and the role of international financial institutions all now configure the landscape. How have efforts to democratize money, an initiative that depends on domestic participation, fared in the past and how might they relate to public welfare and economic development in an era when monetary sovereignty is challenged?
Presentations and Discussion – Papers pre-circulated
"Capital Rules by Law"
“A Critical Legal History of French Banking and Industrialization”
“Democratic Sovereignty Makes Money”
Commentator: Roy Kreitner, University of Tel Aviv Law School
10:30-11:00 BREAK
11:00-12:30 Financialization and Inequality
Over the past few decades, the advanced capitalist countries have become increasingly financialized against a backdrop of deepening wealth and income inequality. How do we conceptualize and analyze the distributive consequences of the rise of finance? What do recent political upheavals, including the Trump presidency and Brexit, mean for the status quo of financialized capitalism? And what role, if any, can public policy play in tackling the un-equalizing effects of the contemporary system of money and credit?
Roundtable – Discussion material may be pre-circulated
Commentator: Sandy Brian Hager – City, University of London
12:30-1:30 LUNCH
1:30-3:00
Session A: Complementary Currencies (Milstein East B)
Communities for centuries have deployed tax anticipation credit enhanced with cash properties as money; arguably the practice defines what creates a viable unit of account. The contemporary issue is how communities may choose to facilitate economic development or improve societal well-being by creating and deploying moneys that are complementary to currencies issued by a monetary union or by a central bank against financial assets.
Roundtable – Discussion material may be pre-circulated
Moderator: Philippine Cour-Thimann, European Central Bank, Sciences Po, and HEC Paris
Session B: Monies and the State in an Age of Empire (Milstein East A)
Is money a democratic medium in an age of empire? This panel explores the roles of conflicting and complementary forms of finance in the British and French empires during the Age of Revolution. Participant papers show how even within seemingly monolithic imperial states, multiple monetary regimes could and did coexist. This multiplicity suggests that, historically, people creating monetary alternatives need not control all levers of power in order to effect significant – even revolutionary – change.
Presentations and Discussion--Papers pre-circulated
“Local Debt for Local People: Debt and the Languedoc 1750-1789”
“Money to Burn; Money to Spend: A Tale of Two Monies at the Beginning of the American Revolution”
“The French East India Company and the Monetary Politics of the French Revolution”
“From Distribution to the Protection of Private Property: The Politics of Money and Credit in the Early United States”
Chair: Stefan Eich – Princeton University
Session C: Money, Democracy, and Morality (Milstein Basement - B15)
The way we approach money shapes the moral implications that attach to its design and use. If money is a commodity or private trade credit that emanates from decentralized exchange, it might claim democratic legitimacy from its very genealogy. But if money is a matter engineered out of public debt and issued into circulation selectively, it has a very different relationship to democracy, one that raises the moral stakes for its creation and deployment within a community.
Presentations and Discussion
“Money Creation, Debt, and Justice"
"Money as a Social Institution: Its Historical Emergence and Implications for Politics"
“The Human Right to Democratic Control of Money”
“The Unnatural State: Money & Propaganda after New Deal Liberalism”
Commentator: Scott Ferguson - University of South Florida
3:30-4:45 Keynote: Payments Systems Accountability: The Case of Assault Gun Sales
The payments system, once routinely overlooked, is a critical and centralizing locus given its essential role in everyday transactions. Given that role, the issue arises how both public and private actors should take responsibility for its character, selectivities, and results.
Introduction: Jean Grosdidier – Sciences Po
Speaker: Andrew Ross Sorkin – New York Times/ “DealBook"
5:00-6:30
Session A: Behind the Green Curtain: Information Insensitivity, Information Encapsulation and the Democratic Project of Money (Milstein East B)
Money as a democratic project must engage with received economic thinking that underpins money creation and central banking design and practice. This thinking supports limiting the overt politics of the governance of money in the interest of reducing the information content of money instruments. Although mapping the political nature of money may be disruptive, the alternative of hiding the political nature of money and monetary policy to preserve the information insensitivity of money instruments is unsustainable. If financial crises cause money instruments to lose information insensitivity, they also strip the technocratic veil.
Roundtable – Discussion material may be precirculated.
Session B: Democratizing Money’s Power & Protection (Milstein East A)
This panel explores the problems and possibilities for developing money as a vehicle that transforms existing pervasive inequality and insecurity. How can a democratic vision reimagine credit and liquidity as more than a means for measuring and distributing the costs of entrenched social and economic risks? How can financial services be designed to focus on the goal of building power and protection for ordinary citizens and communities?
Discussion on pre-circulated papers
“A Public Banking Option As a Mode of Operation for Financial Services” (co-authored with Mark Paul)
“Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy: Fallout from Life in a Risk Society” (co-authored with Deborah Thorne, Robert Lawless, Katherine Porter)
"Digital Debt: Regulating Automated Decision-Making in Consumer Credit Markets"
“Saving the Canaries: Protecting Consumer Borrowers to Prevent Systemic Risk”
Commentator: Martha T. McCluskey - University at Buffalo Law, SUNY
Session C: Economic Democracy through Monetary Design (Wasserstein Basement - B15)
Recognizing money as a public project necessarily leads to a re-examination of the types of economic institutions promoted by our monetary system. Throughout American history, both social movements and the US government have seen the potential to create, through the monetary system, an economy dominated by more democratic forms of economic organization. This panel will examine both historical and modern attempts to create more widespread and democratic ownership of the productive economy through the monetary system.
Presentations and Discussion - Discussion material may be pre-circulated
“A Monied Yeomanry”
"The Citizen's Share: Reducing Inequality in the 21st Century"
“Economic Democracy through Corporate Governance.”
"The Currency of Agrarian Cooperation in the Gilded Age"
Moderator: Martin Drake – Harvard Law School
8:00-9:30 BREAKFAST
9:30-10:45 History and Theory
If money is a complex collective enterprise, protean in design possibilities both in practice and conception, then it has a history of change, carries profound moral significance, and lays a rightful claim to the concern of citizens and political theorists, lawyers and economists alike. How should an approach to money as a public medium re-orient fields that have ignored it? And how might the ideal of democracy matter in revised approaches?
Roundtable
Moderator: Roy Kreitner, Tel Aviv University School of Law
11:00-12:30 Plenary Session: The Public Option and The Narrow Bank (TNB)
Recent work identifies money as a utility or infrastructural service, suggesting the government’s obligation to provide access and to equalize compensation paid to those holding deposits. Innovative proposals for redesign argue that the central bank should provide transactional services directly to individuals or, alternatively, to large depositors.
Presentation and Comment – Materials pre-circulated
12:30-2:15 LUNCH
1:00-2:15 Keynote: The Color of Money: Banking and Racial Inequality
In the American tradition, commercial banking claimed public support in exchange for delivering public services. It has become increasingly clear that those services are both failing the poor and distributing resources, including access, authority, profits, and credit, along lines of race.
Speaker: Mehrsa Baradaran – University of Georgia School of Law
2:30 -4:00
Session A: The Monetary Case for a Job Guarantee (Milstein East B)
Significant evidence suggests that employment leads rather than trails economic growth. That conclusion supports programmatic initiatives to create jobs directly in the public sector. At issue here are models that identify sovereign money as a public commitment that anticipates -- and enables -- productivity rather than expending a finite resource.
Roundtable – Discussion material pre-circulated
Moderator: Daniel Sufranski
Session B: The Public and its Money Problems (Milstein East A)
The title of this panel is a variation on John Dewey’s 1927 book “The Public and Its Problems” in order to direct attention to the political turmoil that is connected to the logic of capitalism. As it is less and less tenable for progressive analyses to evade questions of money and finance, the question is increasingly what forms such politicization should or can take. Among the more prominent perspectives to have emerged in recent years is a neo-chartalism that emphasizes the role of public authority in the production of money and that views the most troubling policies of the neoliberal era as resulting from a misunderstanding of the ontology of money (for instance, political anxiety around deficits is seen to derive from the failure to appreciate that money is an accounting convention rather than a metallic substance). This panel will offer a number of sympathetic but critical engagements with the chartalist provocation, following its lead in foregrounding the question of the relationship between money and the public while exploring this connection through a series of different lenses.
Roundtable
Session C: Monetary Politics in U.S. History (Milstein East C)
This interdisciplinary panel examines periods of transformative monetary change in the 19th and 20th century. Participants’ research revises conventional portrayals of antebellum banking and its political/legal legacies, financial policy from the Fed’s creation until the era of Great Depression reform, and political debates over money from the New Deal to the rise of “neoliberalism.” Taken together, these papers treat the character of governmental monetary practices as an integral part of a contested political economy and examine how a range of actors shape monetary institutions, possibilities for political action, and ultimately the nation’s economic life.
Presentations and Discussion – Material may be precirculated
“The Shaky Constitutional Foundations of Antebellum American Money: Bank Charters as Delegations of Power”
"State Building for a Free Market: Financial Reform and the Rise of Monetary Orthodoxy in the United States, 1913-1935”
“What is Neoliberal about Neoliberal Money? Forgetting Money’s Public Purpose”
Commentator: Andrew David Edwards – University of Oxford
4:00-4:30 BREAK
4:30-5:15 Wrapping up: Reflections on the Conference
We conclude with brief comments from participants on a small number of core questions, including (1) what themes emerged most powerfully across the conference sessions, and (2) what steps can we take to ensure that this conversation continues in ways that support future work?
Thank you – Christine Desan