The Future of Money: from Financial Crisis to Public Resource
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Mellor, Mary Book — Published Version The future of money: From financial crisis to public resource Provided in Cooperation with: Pluto Press Suggested Citation: Mellor, Mary (2010) : The future of money: From financial crisis to public resource, ISBN 978-1-84964-450-1, Pluto Press, London, http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/30777 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/182430 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode www.econstor.eu The Future of Money Mellor 00 pre 1 23/02/2010 15:07 Mellor 00 pre 2 23/02/2010 15:07 The Future of Money From Financial Crisis to Public Resource Mary Mellor Mellor 00 pre 3 23/02/2010 15:07 First published 2010 by Pluto Press 345 archway road, london N6 5aa and 175 Fifth avenue, New york, Ny 10010 www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of america exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press llC, 175 Fifth avenue, New york, Ny 10010 Copyright © Mary Mellor 2010 The right of Mary Mellor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988. British library Cataloguing in Publication Data a catalogue record for this book is available from the British library ISBN 978 0 7453 2995 6 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 2994 9 Paperback library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services ltd, 33 livonia road, Sidmouth, eX10 9JB, england Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, england Printed and bound in the european Union by CPI antony rowe, Chippenham and eastbourne Mellor 00 pre 4 23/02/2010 15:07 For Kate and Joe Mellor 00 pre 5 23/02/2010 15:07 Mellor 00 pre 6 23/02/2010 15:07 ConTenTs Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 What is Money? 8 2 The Privatisation of Money 31 3 ‘People’s Capitalism’: Financialisation and Debt 58 4 Credit and Capitalism 82 5 The Financial Crisis of 2007–08 109 6 Lessons from the Crisis 131 7 Public Money and Sufficiency Provisioning 152 Appendix: Acronyms and Abbreviations 176 Bibliography 177 Index 185 Mellor 00 pre 7 23/02/2010 15:07 ACknowledgeMenTs Many, many thanks to Molly Scott Cato, Paul langley, Sue Bennet and Nigel Mellor for their careful reading of the text and very helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to roger van Zwanenberg for helping frame the book and to two anonymous referees for very useful suggestions. viii Mellor 00 pre 8 23/02/2010 15:07 IntroductIon The financial crisis of 2007–08 has revealed both the instability of the global financial system and the importance of the state as lender, borrower and investor of last resort. The world of deregulated privatised finance proved not to be a source of wealth for all, but a drain on the public economy, as states poured money into the private financial sector. It has also been a destroyer of personal economic security as savings were threatened, jobs lost and homes repossessed. The crisis in the financial sector, most notably in Britain and the United States, but also in Europe and many other parts of the world, contrasts with the bombastic optimism of the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century with its glory days of ‘Big Bang’ deregulation and the financial sector’s dominance over national politics. Far from celebrating the ‘rolling back’ of the ‘nanny’ state, the implosion of deregulated finance has directly contradicted the neoliberal case that the market and its money system is a self- regulating process that will only be distorted by state intervention. The crisis raises many questions about the way the financial system operates under late capitalism, in particular the role of banks and other financial institutions. The financial system is about the flow of money in its many forms through human societies and this, in turn, raises questions about the nature of money itself. Is money just a mechanism that represents economic processes or is it a social mechanism in its own right? Where does money come from, how does it operate? Who controls money, and how? In this book the case will be made that money is a complex phenomenon whose economic functioning relies on social trust and public authority. The role of states in attempting to rescue the financial sector challenges the idea that money is a purely economic phenomenon. The crisis reveals money’s social and 1 Mellor 01 text 1 23/02/2010 15:07 2 The FuTure oF Money political base, but also its enormous power and lack of democratic control. It is therefore crucially important to understand how money operates within the capitalist market system and how the institutions that originate and direct its flow are owned and controlled. This book does not assume any prior knowledge of economics but will be of interest to those within the discipline who want to look beyond conventional economic analysis. For those seeking more radical approaches, it aims to broaden the debates about the crisis in the financial system in order to explore possible alternatives by looking at the wider social and political context of the financial crisis. Capitalist market theory sees money as the representation and product of a ‘wealth-creating’ economic system. As such, its operation should be left as far as possible to market logic. The case for the ‘free’ market and the privatisation of the money system is that markets are the most efficient way to organise and distribute economic goods, including finance. Given the assumption that all wealth is created by the private sector, the public/social sector is seen as parasitic upon this money/wealth creation process. Money circulation through the financial system is seen as the outcome of private economic acts, not as a function of social relationships and public authority. The notion that money issue and circulation should reflect the demands of the market means that public expenditure must always be contingent on the activities of private economic actors. Expenditure on social or public needs must be secondary to privatised economic forces. The private sector will authorise how much can, or cannot, be afforded since public expenditure is seen as a drain upon the private sector. The financial collapse has exposed the neoliberal ideology of market fundamentalism for the illusion it always was. In capitalist economies, the state is a capitalist state and has always stood behind the capitalist financial system as guardian of the money system, financial properties and contracts. Although public sector spending is decried, the state is expected to produce unlimited sums of money to stabilise the financial system when it experiences its regular crises. The exposure of the reliance of the private financial sector on the state has brought the financial system into Mellor 01 text 2 23/02/2010 15:07 InTroduction 3 full view and opens it up for analysis. The opportunity must be taken to challenge the private control of finance and ask whether such an important aspect of human society should be owned by, and serve, the interests of capitalism. If the conventional view of money and its systems is not challenged, public intervention in the financial sector during the current crisis will only be a stepping stone back to hidden state support of a more carefully regulated capitalist financial sector – until the next crisis. The core argument of this book is that the money system needs to be reclaimed from the profit-driven market economy and socially administered for the benefit of society as a whole as a public resource. In order to make this case it is important to look in detail at the nature, history and functioning of money and its institutions. There are dilemmas in opening up a debate about the nature of money and its role in economic life. The ideology of the market presents the economy as a natural process administered by inspired entrepreneurs in which exchange through money is conducted on rational principles. To say that money is as much a social and political phenomenon as an economic one is not an easy case to make. Confidence in money has largely been based on illusions about the origins of money and how it is issued and circulated.