Finance Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

Goldbugs

An excerpt from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right

November 17, 2025 • by Quinn Slobodian

People make bad money, and that money makes bad people.— Peter Boehringer Monetary issues have long divided neoliberals. Can you trust a central bank to manage currency? Can the growth of the money supply be made automatic? Should fixed or floating rates reign in global currency markets? Must money be backed ...

Economy

Honduras Fights Back Against Global Oligarchy

How an unregulated techno-utopia came into existence and continues to sabotage a nation’s sovereignty

March 17, 2025 • by Nolan Young

Honduras money, financial business concept, banknotes and coins (2024) I Andrzej Rostek / Stutterstock ...

Capitalism

Who Gets to Retire?

An excerpt from Work, Retire, Repeat

October 17, 2024 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

For the first time in modern American history, gains in retirement time are concentrated at the economic top. ...

Economy

Is Finance a “Parasite”?

Tracing financial capital—from J. P. Morgan to BlackRock

June 25, 2024 • by Scott Aquanno, Stephen Maher and Anna Pick

Democratizing the state means deepening public control over the Fed and other macroeconomic institutions, to run finance as a public utility....

Finance

Platforms, Payments, and Ponzi Schemes

A review of Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform

May 1, 2024 • by Paulo L. dos Santos

Electronic platforms can also be thought of as a distinctive type of “terrain” that, like land, can define specific types of revenue and power for those who control them. ...

Corporations

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

From government oversight to “financial literacy”

April 30, 2024 • by Basak Kus

Consumer protection started to be seen as a responsibility that individuals, deemed rational and capable, were expected to shoulder themselves, assuming they were provided adequate information about the terms of exchange. ...

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

Economy

From “Boring” to “Roaring” Banking

A review of Gerald Epstein’s Busting the Banker’s Club

April 29, 2024 • by Anna Pick

Harder to measure, but no less crucial, is Epstein’s identification of the intellectual “capture” of both the academy and policymaking institutions—their infiltration by financial interests and the economic paradigms that prop them up. ...

Economy

Statistics as a Form of Knowledge

An excerpt from Quentin Bruneau’s States and the Masters of Capital

March 1, 2023 • by Quentin Bruneau

An excerpt from Quentin Bruneau's States and the Masters of Capital...

Finance

History Rhymes

As history’s pendulum swings back, the problems and promises of globalization’s fragmented frameworks become almost too evident

February 22, 2023 • by Rana Foroohar

The neoliberal thinking that has defined globalization in the West since the eighties decrees that state involvement in the economy is verboten-but that’s actually antithetical to America’s origins....

Finance

Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

January 9, 2023 • by Clara Mattei

Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...

Capitalism

The “K” in the Economy

Private equity and the rise of permanent capital

September 20, 2021 • by Andrew Moon and Janet Roitman

The consensus is that the road to economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is K-shaped: certain sectors and populations will thrive while others stagnate or decline. Outsized online retailers and digital infrastructure providers, like Amazon, have experienced boom times, while many Main Street small businesses have gone bust. Those with a stake ...

Economy

The Truth About the Minimum Wage

How to take the word “freedom” away from the GOP

February 25, 2021 • by John Stoehr

" Bernie Sanders, still talks about it as if he can’t quite escape the economic framing conservatives established a long time ago. To be sure, he talks about fairness."...