Rethinking money and the state: a semiotic turn

David Gleicher

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2013, vol. 3, issue 4, 344-359

Abstract: A novel conception of money and the State is offered, in the context of post-golden-age financial and political systems (roughly from 1980 to the present), and with regard to the sovereign-currency States, focusing particularly on the USA. The basic elements of the paper are: (1) a novel semiotic understanding of money as language rather than as a unit of measure, money understood to communicate goods-ownership to the public, and debt ownership to the corporation; (2) a discussion of financial unsustainability under the present system in which the banking oligopolies possess a newfound freedom to create money capital both more independently and on a significantly larger scale than under the previous Glass--Steagall regime; (3) a critique of the neo-liberal simulation (in the sense of Baudrillard) of government debt and dissimulation of the sovereign-currency State, able to create money at will; (4) a delineation of two fundamental policy objectives: to genuinely meet the State's obligation to assure the life and pursuit of happiness that all citizens are entitled to, and secondly, to decompress ever-expanding and ever-dangerous capital; (5) specific, highly original policy actions are put forward, aimed at meeting these policy objectives, notably lifting budgetary constraints on federal government spending and transforming the central bank into a repository of guaranteed household deposits.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20430795.2013.854109 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jsustf:v:3:y:2013:i:4:p:344-359

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TSFI20

DOI: 10.1080/20430795.2013.854109

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment is currently edited by Dr Matthew Haigh

More articles in Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().