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LPE Originals

When All Social Problems Become Financial Problems

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When it comes to government programs, credit support is often cheaper and less controversial than direct expenditures. Understand this, and you can understand why government officials have an incentive to define all sorts of social problems as financial ones. Government officials face considerable pressure to promote credit markets. Wall Street firms leverage money, expertise and…
LPE Originals

Sex, Markets, and Political Economy

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Among the various perspectives utilized to understand sex work, a political economy approach directs attention to the fundamentally political and moralized nature of markets. Markets are not abstract spaces for economic transactions but rather politically contested terrains of societal struggle where competing actors wield technical legal tools and moralized beliefs in attempts to shape structures of societal governance.

LPE Originals

To Reimagine Intervention Strategies: The Political Economy of Domestic Violence

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In recent years, mainstream anti-domestic violence programs have moved away from a fixation on the criminal justice system to undertake economic justice initiatives designed to “respond to, address, and prevent financial abuse” related to domestic violence.  The shift reflects the growing realization that strategies of remedy through the penal state have tended to fracture the…
LPE Originals

Money & Memory, Capital & Communion

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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.
LPE Originals

Money as a Constitutional Medium

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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…
LPE Originals

Law as the Code of Inequality and Wealth

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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.
LPE Originals

The Impact and Malleability of Money Design

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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.
LPE Originals

Black Proprietorship and Crises of Value

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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.
LPE Originals

Symposium: The Color of Money & Racial Capitalism

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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.
LPE Originals

Central Banking and Finance—The Franchise View

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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,…
LPE Originals

The Green New Deal: What’s Green? What’s New? What’s the Deal?

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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…
LPE Originals

Student Debt Cancellation: It’s Actually Good

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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…
LPE Originals

Accounting for Incorporation: Part 2

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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…
LPE Originals

Accounting for Incorporation: Part 1

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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…