Rethinking Monetary Sovereignty: the Global Credit Money System And
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Rethinking Monetary Sovereignty: The Global Credit Money System and the State Steffen Murau, Boston University ([email protected]) Jens van ’t Klooster, KU Leuven/University of Amsterdam, ([email protected]) Abstract: This article proposes a conception of monetary sovereignty that recognizes the reality of today’s global credit money system. Monetary sovereignty is typically used in a Westphalian sense to denote the ability of states to issue and regulate their own currency. This article rejects the Westphalian conception. Instead, it proposes a conception of effective monetary sovereignty that focuses attention on what states are actually able to do in the era of financial globalization. The conception fits the hybridity of the modern credit money system by acknowledging the crucial role not only of central bank money but also of money issued by regulated banks and unregulated shadow banks. These institutions often operate ‘offshore’, outside of a state’s legal jurisdiction, which makes monetary governance more difficult. Monetary sovereignty consists in the ability of states to effectively govern these different segments of the monetary system and thereby achieve their economic policy objectives. Keywords: Financial ethics; political theory; international finance; money; offshore; shadow banking 1 1. Introduction1 Even though monetary sovereignty has repeatedly been declared dead, the concept remains an important reference point in both academic discourse and international politics.2 Its rumoured demise, we contend, is due to a poor understanding of what it means to be sovereign in relation to money. Monetary sovereignty is typically used in a Westphalian sense to denote the mere ability of states to issue and regulate their own currency. This, indeed, is the default understanding of the term in fields ranging from orthodox economics3 to heterodox monetary theory4, and from International Political Economy (IPE)5 to international monetary law6. However, the Westphalian conception has two weaknesses, which make it unsuited for the realities of financial 1 Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Benjamin Braun, Nik de Boer, Armin Haas, Elizaveta Kuznetsova, Perry Mehrling, Marco Meyer, John Morris, Fabian Pape, Eniola Soyemi, Anahí Wiedenbrüg and participants in the January 2020 Prospects of Money workshop at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung for detailed comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Steffen Murau acknowledges funding from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). 2 Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Benjamin J. Cohen, The Geography of Money (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998). 3 Paul De Grauwe, Economics of Monetary Union, 9th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Giancarlo Corsetti and Luca Dedola, “The ‘Mystery of the Printing Press’ Monetary Policy and Self- Fulfilling Debt Crises,” Discussion Papers (Centre for Macroeconomics (CFM), August 2014), https://ideas.repec.org/p/cfm/wpaper/1424.html; Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy: Banking, the Global Economy and the Future of Money (Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 2016). 4 William Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, and Martin Watts, Macroeconomics (Macmillan Education UK, 2019). 5 Deborah Mabbett and Waltraud Schelkle, “What Difference Does Euro Membership Make to Stabilization? The Political Economy of International Monetary Systems Revised,” Review of International Political Economy 22, no. 3 (2015): 508–34. 6 Rosa Maria Lastra, “International Financial and Monetary Law” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), https://econpapers.repec.org/bookchap/oxpobooks/9780199269341.htm; Charles Proctor, Mann on the Legal Aspect of Money, 7th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Claus D. Zimmermann, A Contemporary Concept of Monetary Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2 globalization: its formal understanding of sovereignty and its simplistic understanding of money. Our first objection to the Westphalian conception concerns its implicit understanding of state sovereignty. This conception is formal in the sense that it focuses on the legal competences of the state, which sovereign states are meant to exercise without interference from other states. So why should issuing and regulating a currency without interference matter so much? Although a national currency can indeed be an immense source of geopolitical power, the mere ability to issue a currency is by no means a guarantee for such power.7 Indeed, the existing literature on state sovereignty increasingly recognizes the conceptual limitations of conceptions of state sovereignty that focus on absence of interference.8 For this reason, political theorists have sought to rethink the concept to highlight its effective dimensions. Effective conceptions understand sovereignty as the ability of states to 7 Strange, The Retreat of the State; Cohen, The Geography of Money; Benjamin J. Cohen, Currency Power: Understanding Monetary Rivalry (Princeton University Press, 2015); John Agnew, “Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 2 (June 2005): 437–61, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2005.00468.x. 8 Robert H Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations and the Third World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Miriam Ronzoni, “The Global Order: A Case of Background Injustice? A Practice-Dependent Account,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37, no. 3 (2009): 229–56, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01159.x; Elisa Orrù and Miriam Ronzoni, “Which Supranation Sovereignty? Criminal and Socioeconomic Justice Compared,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 5 (2011): 2089–2106; Miriam Ronzoni, “Two Conceptions of State Sovereignty and Their Implications for Global Institutional Design,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 15, no. 5 (December 1, 2012): 573–91, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2012.727306; Peter Dietsch, “Rethinking Sovereignty in International Fiscal Policy,” Review of International Studies 37, no. 5 (December 2011): 2107–20; Peter Dietsch, Catching Capital: The Ethics of Tax Competition (Oxford University Press, 2015); Juri Viehoff, “Eurozone Justice,” Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 3 (2018): 388–414. 3 make meaningful choices and achieve their ends.9 Building on these approaches, we turn to the monetary realm to develop an account of effective monetary sovereignty. Our second objection to the Westphalian conception of monetary sovereignty concerns its simplistic understanding of money. Recent work on the monetary system highlights the crucial role of private money forms, thereby casting doubt on the state-centric focus of the Westphalian conception.10 In fact, public money forms, whose issuance is under the direct control of states, are only a small part of the global money supply. The larger share is made up of private credit money forms such as bank deposits and various forms of unregulated deposit substitutes, often termed ‘shadow money’. The recent literature also casts doubts on the Westphalian idea of states as constitutive building blocks of the international monetary system.11 Instead, the existing global financial system leaves money 9 Ronzoni, “Two Conceptions of State Sovereignty and Their Implications for Global Institutional Design,” 574. 10 Daniela Gabor, “The (Impossible) Repo Trinity. The Political Economy of Repo Markets,” Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 6 (2016): 967–1000; Daniela Gabor and Cornel Ban, “Banking on Bonds. The New Links Between States and Markets,” Journal of Common Market Studies 54, no. 3 (2016): 617–35; Daniela Gabor and Jakob Vestergaard, “Towards a Theory of Shadow Money,” INET Working Paper (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 2016); Perry Mehrling, The New Lombard Street. How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011); Perry Mehrling, “Elasticity and Discipline in the Global Swap Network,” International Journal of Political Economy 44, no. 4 (2015): 311–24; Perry Mehrling, “Beyond Bancor,” Challenge 59, no. 1 (2016): 22–34; Steffen Murau, “Shadow Money and the Public Money Supply. The Impact of the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis on the Monetary System,” Review of International Political Economy 24, no. 5 (2017): 802–38; Zoltan Pozsar, “Shadow Banking. The Money View,” Working Paper (Office of Financial Research, 2014); Adam Tooze, Crashed. How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018); Benjamin Braun, Arie Krampf, and Steffen Murau, “’Financial Globalization as Positive Integration. Monetary Technocrats and the Eurodollar Market in the 1970s,” Review of International Political Economy, 2020, https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1740291. 11 Stefan Avdjiev, Robert McCauley, and Hyun Song Shin, “Breaking Free of the Triple Coincidence in International Finance,” BIS Working Papers (Bank for International Settlements, 2015); Iñaki Aldasoro and Torsten Ehlers, “The Geography of Dollar Funding of Non-US Banks,” BIS Quarterly Review (Bank for International Settlements, 2018); Dong He and Robert McCauley, “Eurodollar Banking and Currency Internationalisation,” BIS Quarterly Review (Bank for International 4 creation largely to private financial institutions which issue money ‘offshore’, using a unit of account (e.g. the