The Politics of Money

Today, as in the 1960s, there is an immense interest in the form that money takes as a central factor in politics and social life. Monetary policy is more than ever a political question of direct concern to people otherwise uninterested in its arcana. There is reason to think that the global system of money and finance is approaching a disruptive threshold of historic significance, with the potential to change how societies invest, insure, and trade.

Of course, the form of money — essentially the socially and politically constructed “promise to pay” — has always fluctuated. What is distinctive about the transformation of money in the early-twenty-first century is, first of all, the proliferation of digital currencies and tokens. Operating in the shadows of hegemonic monetary systems, these cannot simply be seen as tools for bottom-up emancipation pitted against authoritarian central banks and austerity-inducing monetary politics, as is sometimes claimed by their boosters.

Rather, non-fungible tokens, Web3, blockchain technology, crypto, and decentralized autonomous organizations are at the forefront of a financial revolution driven increasingly by transnational platforms and central banks themselves. In the name of flexibility and efficiency, they prefigure the end of physical cash, thereby jeopardizing privacy and further undermining democracy. Such developments signal the exhaustion of the quantitative easing (QE) regime since 2019.

Although they are far too complex to be analyzed in any detail here, they represent one prospectus for the so-called post-neoliberal order, whose features cannot be understood as progressive, promising in some instances to surrender still more authority to the lords of finance themselves, potentially directly by administrative means.

The terms in which this new monetary architecture is discussed recall earlier debates. In the field of digital currencies, for example, the highly restricted, limited, and market-disciplining logic of Bitcoin bears comparison to the built-in scarcity of gold — and if introduced more broadly, could reproduce the logic of the gold standard — while the seemingly endless proliferation of absurdly branded private money over the decade of QE resembles the wild speculation enabled by free-floating exchange rates.

To this familiar opposition, a third pole may be added: central bank digital currency, issued either formally by central banks themselves or — what is functionally equivalent — by the largest private banks. This novel form of money is distinct in that it introduces the prospect of directly imposing socio-political conditions on transactions or penalizing savers through very low interest rates.

It is perhaps for this reason that the more principled neoliberals themselves have joined in to sound the alarm when it comes to some of these innovations. As the historian Adam Tooze has suggested, paraphrasing Antonio Gramsci, “crypto is the morbid symptom of an interregnum, an interregnum in which the gold standard is dead but a fully political money that dares to speak its name has not yet been born.”

Exorbitant Privilege

Another live issue in contemporary discussions is the status of the dollar as the world reserve currency, an “exorbitant privilege” ratified by the shift to floating exchange rates. The effects of this fateful decision, as a volume published on its fiftieth anniversary records, “went far beyond the international monetary system and have had momentous geopolitical and political as well as economic and financial implications.”

Today, if dollar hegemony remains intact, ever more voices question its permanence, and with it, the ability of the United States to maintain its unrivaled geopolitical position. In this regard, the present moment echoes that of the 1970s, when monetary policy reflected the jostling between world powers and management of the relations among allies. With the introduction of the BRICS basket of currencies and the prospect of de-dollarization it suggests, in the aftermath of Brexit and the eurozone crisis, forecasts of re-regionalization often turn on monetary policy.

Still, amid chatter of deglobalization and evidence of a fall in capital flows, the share of transactions conducted in dollars has remained relatively stable over the last decades. Nonetheless, the US “dollar creditocracy” is threatened by the internal contradictions of QE, and the US current account and budget deficits continue to exert downward pressure on the dollar, exacerbating resentment of US unilateralism.

Finally, the liberalization of capital movements in the 1970s must be seen as one side of the exhaustion of economic growth across the advanced industrialized countries; both are effects of overaccumulation and declining productivity growth and have taken the form of secular stagnation. The subsequent period has seen a tremendous explosion of fictitious capital, or financial assets that are in essence claims on future production and profit.

The financialization of the post-Fordist era has produced a lopsided economy, where such claims exceed by significant measure the size of the underlying real economy. Its logic is that of a growthless casino, based on transfer and appropriation largely decoupled from real-world use values. Such a top-heavy dynamic was exactly what produced the over-leveraging responsible for the 2008 meltdown.

Fictitious Capital

Pledges to reregulate and curb the power of finance aside, the metastasis of fictitious capital has continued apace. While the use of some assets — those complex instruments at the heart of the housing and financial crisis, such as CDOs — did indeed decline, the overall quantity of fictitious capital has in fact continued to increase. This dynamic is evinced by the outsize importance of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector and the run-up in prices of housing and art objects as financialized assets.

Trading in global foreign exchange markets — the marketplace that determines the exchange rate for global currencies and that originates in its modern form from abolishing the Bretton Woods system — soared from negligible levels in the 1970s to a nominal value of $620 billion in 1989 and $4.5 trillion in 2008; by 2022 it stood at $7.5 trillion. Such massive flows of money, buoying what some have called a “technofeudal” rentier class, pose a potentially systemic problem given the attendant pressure to seek their realization in the real economy.

In the age of climate overshoot, secular stagnation, and polycrisis, these claims on future production — now far greater than global GDP — create a fundamental dilemma. Given mounting evidence that calls into question the ambition of greening economic growth, efforts to realize future profits of fictitious capital will lead to either unsustainable growth that dangerously destabilizes planetary life or an alternative post-growth scenario, in which societies regain democratic control and turn fictitious capital into stranded assets.