Finance Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

Trump vs. the Fed

Or how history is forcing the question of a democratic politics of central banking

August 27, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Donald Trump’s move to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook “for cause,” escalates his long-running battle with America’s central bank. The news has triggered outrage. In the pages of the FT, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center for Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, warned: “President Trump seems determined to ...

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....

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. ...

Social Research

Conspiracy Thinking, the New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its latest issue

November 10, 2022 • by Social Research

The Fall 2022 issue of Social Research tackles the subject of conspiracy thinking, from ungoverning to elective affinity....

Conspiracy Thinking, the New Issue of <em>Social Research</em>

Capitalism

As New York City Rebuilds, Business Can Be Part of the Solution

Higher taxes are necessary, but who will have the political courage to make it happen?

October 1, 2020 • by Kim Phillips-Fein

Early in September, more than 160 executives from companies like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, the white-shoe corporate law firm Skadden Arps, and a host of real estate developers and financial firms sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio. They expressed their fear that “deteriorating conditions” in the city might slow ...

As New York City Rebuilds, Business Can Be Part of the Solution

Economy

Where Is the Risk in the COVID Economy?

A look at shadow banking

July 30, 2020 • by Janet Roitman and Andrew Moon

We are witnessing a public bailout of the private sector that dwarfs the bailout response to the 2007–2008 Great Recession. Compared to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) implemented in 2008, today’s mobilization of public funds through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act amounts to ...

Finance

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Universities can immediately bypass feckless state and federal legislatures and finance themselves directly with “Unis” supported by the Federal Reserve.

May 22, 2020 • by Scott Ferguson, William Saas, Maxximilian Seijo and Benjamin Wilson

In truth, however, the collapse of the American university is far from inevitable. As the present health emergency suggests, moreover, it will take more than business-as-usual to remediate its long-standing structural inequalities and injustices, according to an emerging minority of educators, staff, and students. In our capacity as a 501(c)(3) dedicated to bringing accurate and ...

#Unis4all: An Open Letter to the U.S. Higher Education Community

Economy

The COVID-19 Crisis Demands Bold, Progressive Economic Ideas

A Call for Papers

April 2, 2020 • by Teresa Ghilarducci, Richard McGahey and Paulo L. dos Santos

This pandemic poses a series of unprecedented economic challenges. It compromises our ability to engage in productive and commercial activities that require close contact between groups of people. Because fighting the disease requires non-essential workers to stay at home, it threatens to trigger a catastrophic recession, if not depression, as entire ...

The COVID-19 Crisis Demands Bold, Progressive Economic Ideas

Feature

The Radical Imagination

Imagining the future in financial capitalism

June 2, 2017 • by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Chiara Bottici

Architectural fantasy stimulates the architect’s activity, it arouses creative thought not only for the artist but it also educates and arouses all those who come in contact with him; it produces new directions, new quests, and opens new horizons. Iakov Chernikhov (1933), ‘101 architectural fantasies’ Why the radical imagination? Today more than ...