Money is Not a Medium of Exchange

by Jens Martignoni

With this brief provocation, Jens Martignoni develops a suggestion first put forth in an essay published in the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). There, he questioned the problematic idea that money is essentially a “medium of exchange,” which is still strongly rooted in the complementary currency scene. In this follow-up piece, Martignoni critiques the notion that money is a medium of exchange, along with claims that money should be defined according to its apparent functions. If a real change in the monetary system is to succeed, he argues, we must reconceive money as an inherently collective project and rethink monetary functions as resulting from political design. The following text was previously published by the IJCCR in 2023. The Money on the Left Collective thanks Martignoni for permitting us to republish his text here.

I used this “provocative title” already in a past contribution to International Journal of Community Currency Research (Martignoni, 2018) as a chapter heading. The idea was, to explain that the common functional definition: money is a medium of exchange, which is used in practically all economics textbooks is misleading or worse: completely wrong. But as such details in long papers may be read but may not be understood as fundamental (as there is still no extensive debate about this topic), it is worth repeating and deepening. Therefore, I dare to cite a large part of that section of the article first (with slight corrections in language, style, and references) and will add some more aspects after:

“Money is not a medium of exchange: This provocative title is intended to help us check the claim that “money is a medium of exchange”, which is used in practically all economics books and the widespread definition of money. More and more scholars have been arguing otherwise. The analysis of the exchange and market conception is an important building block for an understanding of money, but even more, the collective aspects of monetary structures must be taken into consideration. Ingham (2004, p.69) makes it short: the focus on money, as a medium of exchange, results in a categoric error in which specific forms of money are mistaken for the generic quality of ‘moneyness’.”

It is interesting to note that in ordinary textbooks of the national economy (for example, Samuelson, 2004) the exchange itself is not treated fundamentally, but presumed as a given.

A popular definition of exchange in the dictionary of business (Grüske / Recktenwald) says: “Exchange is the economic transfer of goods, the exchange of services based on the division of labour. Legally, exchange is a mutual contract, which is directed at the turnover of goods against goods, in contrast to the purchase, which is the turnover of goods against money due to prices.”

Here even the purchase is referred to as a contrast for exchange. Also, in no other definition money gets introduced as an exchange category, but as part of the purchase. While in exchange someone receives directly from the partner a product or service, which he (hopefully) desired, at the purchase he receives a payment in money, i.e. several vouchers for which the exchange partner is not responsible, but unnamed third parties. The vendor expects that these vouchers (when he wants and at whom he wants) can be redeemed. The decisive point is not that the exchange is now divided into two separate acts, and that each of these two acts can again be represented as an exchange, commodity against money and money against commodity (Röpke, 1979, p.114), but with the introduction of money a change of the level from the individual to the collective took place.

Röpke also mentions this shortly afterward (1979, p.116): money has therefore also been compared with an entry ticket to the “social product” (i.e. to the existing fund of goods and services), or as a “statement to the social product”. Röpke himself, however, doubts this point of view. Nevertheless, it is easy to see that money can only exist with “many” participants, i.e. in the collective. It must be recognized by a sufficiently large number of people and institutions, voluntarily or compulsory, otherwise it loses its money character quickly.

The first mistake in the “individualistic exchange theory” or commodity theory of money is therefore, that in the transition from exchange to money, money itself is presumed unquestioned and is taken as a commodity as it would just replace the exchanged good. Amato and Fantacci (2012, p.41) summon this up as follows: money properly called by its name is not a commodity based on the indistinguishability of its first two functions, but an institution designed to determine its relationship with a view to payment.

The foundation for money, however, is a collective that has already introduced money and the simplest and most effective introduction of money must also be done collectively, e.g. by the sovereign, or more recently by the modern manifestation of the sovereign, the state. Polanyi has already established this for social and historical reasons: the state, […] was in fact the guarantor of the value of token money, which it accepted in payment for taxes and otherwise. This money was not a means of exchange, it was a means of payment; it was not a commodity, it was purchasing power; far from having utility itself, it was merely a counter embodying a quantified claim to things that might be purchased. Clearly, a society in which distribution depended upon the possession of such tokens of purchasing power was a construction entirely different from market economy. (Polanyi, 2001, p.205).

From this point of view, money loses all the characteristics of exchange and commodity and is used as a means of legal remedy, primarily as a means of payment guaranteed by a community, usually to this day, by the nationalized large community called the state. This is reproduced everywhere by legislation on the money and the monetary system” (Martignoni, 2018, p.22-23).

But what if there is no medium of exchange and only a means of payment? And what about the functions of money as a useful definition anyway? The answer may not be so pleasant even for alert people who are trying to invent and introduce better forms of money as community or complementary currencies: If money and currencies were not to be defined by these functions, alternatives too would have to align themselves with other principles.

If we (I include myself here as a “money changer”) positively accept the search for other principles as a challenge, we can derive an even clearer mission from this, which must be addressed as an essential basis for changing money. It is necessary to gain a better understanding or awareness of the matter to be transformed. A very good guide to this can be found on Brett Scott’s (fantastic) blog Altered States of Monetary Consciousness (ASOMOCO) in the article How the ‘Functions of Money’ blind us to the Structure of Money. He points out three important aspects of how we should start to see money more clearly, which I have adapted slightly here:

  1. Firstly, we must start to draw the structure [of currencies and money], so that every time the word
    ‘money’ is uttered, a clear and full structural image appears, instead of sole individual aspects or dogmatic
    sentences from outdated economics. But we should be patient: we have a long way to go before the full
    structure reveals itself!
  2. Secondly, we need not agree exactly on what the structure looks like, but we do need to agree that it
    should be foregrounded. This will be a major step forward from the current status quo, which simply refuses to foreground it.
  3. Thirdly, we must be able to make a clear distinction between the individual experience of money – the
    everyday feeling of using money tokens at a street level – and the hidden structure which transcends that.
    Much like we experience the sun as a thing that ‘rises’ rather than something that stays fixed while the earth
    turns, there is a phenomenological realm of money that can differ from the reality of its structure, and –
    sometimes – the vague functional definitions can get by in this realm. When it comes to the politics of
    money, however, it is a downright deadly to stay in that realm (Scott, 2021).

When we embark on this journey to reshape our ideas about money, the confusion caused by false doctrines and
their unreflected application in our understanding of the economy and money begins to clear up surprisingly
quickly.

In this way, we can place the approach of currency functions in new contexts. Currency functions are not there to
define money but are essential foundations of currency design, i.e. the art of creating a usable currency. A function
must be subordinate to a purpose, otherwise it is not justified in this place. For example, the purpose of a car is to
transport people from one place to another. To do this, the car must have various functions, e.g., it must be able to
roll, be steerable, have a drive, protect the occupants from the weather, etc. It is then relatively clear which functions are right and which are out of place. For example, a “watering” function or a “baking” function in a car is absurd in the first instance. Money can and must therefore be defined by its purpose and not by its functions. However, the purpose of money is already subordinate. It starts with human existence and then is derived from there by willful
decisions:

  1. All people must provide themselves with the necessities of life according to their constitution together
    (this begins at birth).
  2. The economy is an instrument to coordinate and organize humans to provide at least the material existence for everyone.2
  3. In order to manage the economy in its complexity of contributing and receiving, a means could be created
    that makes the transactions (contributions and purchases) recordable and assessable.
    This could now be a monetary system that serves the above purposes.
  4. Accordingly, functions can now be derived as to how the purpose could be achieved in action. These
    functions can then be combined and built into a specific currency as an expression of a hopefully functioning monetary system. The currency should now contribute to fulfilling the purpose as well as possible.

So, it would be important that in the future textbooks would reflect on the purpose of money as a means of running the economy, as a kind of operating system of the economy.

However, this raises many questions about our lives and our coexistence on this planet, which must first be addressed in order to be able to jointly determine the purpose of the economy.

I’ll stop here and am curious to see whether a discussion can develop from this and whether such ideas will also be debated.

REFERENCES
Amato, Massimo; Fantacci, Luca (2012). The End of Finance. Polity Press. Cambridge UK.

Grüske, Karl-Dieter; Recktenwald, Horst Claus (1995). Wörterbuch der Wirtschaft. Kröner Verlag. Stuttgart. 12. Auflage.

Ingham, Geoffrey (2004). The Nature of Money. Polity Press. Cambridge UK.

Martignoni, Jens (2018). The district currency: a new currency design for managing the commons. International Journal of Community Currency Research. Volume 22 (Summer) 16-38. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15133/j.ijccr.2018.014

Polanyi, Karl (2001). The Great Transformation – The political and economic origins of our time. Beacon Press. Boston.

Röpke, Wilhelm (1979). Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft. Bern und Stuttgart. 12.Auflage.

Samuelson, Paul A.; Nordhaus, William D. (2004). Economics. 18th Edition. McGraw-Hill. New York.

Scott, Brett (2021). How the ‘Functions of Money’ blind us to the Structure of Money. Altered States of Monetary Consciousness (ASOMOCO). Substack Blog. https://www.asomo.co/p/structure-vs-functions-ofmoney?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2F%2522medium%2520of%2520exchange%2522&utm_medium=reader2 (accessed, 30.03.2024)

NOTES
1 Only very few of the articles submitted to this journal in recent years were not based on or did not reference the
“classical three functions of money” (medium of exchange, store of value, unit of account) as a definitional basis.
2 An evaluation is already taking place here. Not all people want to put everyone else on the same level as they put
themselves. Different people will therefore differently set the purpose of the economy.

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UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance

by Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson

Universities in the UK are in crisis. Job cuts in the sector are reaching ‘cataclysmic’ levels, with an estimated 10,000 already lost and many more at risk. Just days before Christmas, Coventry University confirmed shocking plans to make nearly 100 redundancies while transferring remaining staff to a subsidiary company on poorer terms and conditions. Such cuts harm the faculty and staff leaving the higher-education system as well as the diminished departments and institutions that remain. Downsizing higher education in the name of corporate efficiency squanders the collective expertise and experience in which immense public resources have been invested. This manufactured crisis, however, is far from inevitable. The time has come to revitalise higher education funding in the UK by extending what Cornell legal scholars Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova call ‘the finance franchise’ to universities.

Mischaracterised by university leaders as financial ‘saving’, austerity is in truth vandalism. It ravages decades of training, accrued and accredited knowledge, and publicly funded research. It abandons generations of students as the campuses and scholarly communities we invite them to join become, in multiple senses, impoverished. The fact that the asphyxiation of British higher education does not instantly count as a national scandal underlines the extent to which the austerity mindset continues to constrain our political imagination: even when the collapse of higher education is perceived as a problem, policymakers, academics, and the communities they serve are left with little recourse. One can only despair at the lack of viable alternatives. 

The immediate cause of the present catastrophe is a broken funding model. This model is based principally on tuition fees, financed by publicly provisioned student loans. Such fees rank among the highest in the world. The system is fundamentally unjust because it individualises the responsibility to fund higher education rather than treating it as a collective treasure. It also places the stability and supposed viability of courses of study, departments, institutions, and entire academic disciplines at the whim of a government-manufactured market. The Labour Party previously committed to eliminating tuition fees for universities. Keir Starmer’s Labour, however, dropped its pledge to scrap fees in England before the 2024 general election and, since entering government, has opted to increase fees for the first time since 2017. 

While student-based financing of higher education is the proximate cause of the present predicament, the roots of the crisis penetrate deep into the collective psyche. At its core, the current disaster stems from a deceptive Thatcherite conceit: ‘There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers’ money.’ Such thinking is fantastical. It is also false. The private money paradigm essentially wishes away the British pound’s institutional foundations in the public sphere–namely, in Parliament, the Bank of England, and the Royal Mint. Instead, it imagines that the pound rises up from private individuals, as in the misleading myth that money originates in barter between otherwise unrelated agents. Thus beneath this twisted logic lies another Thatcherite pretense: There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and their families. 

Those who oppose the current system of fees and loans regularly argue that the university system is a public good. We agree wholeheartedly. Yet in adopting the private money paradigm, the very same defenders of public education presuppose that the only alternative to the existing university loans system is one in which higher education is funded by the taxpayer. The trope of taxpayer money is the lynchpin in Thatcher’s private money paradigm. It upholds the backwards idea not only that fiscal outlays merely recycle private pounds, but also that the public good is somehow a burdensome drain on scarce public resources. The result pits communities against one another in a struggle over limited finances and frequently does so along conspicuously classed, gendered, and racialised lines. 

The reality–call it the public money paradigm–is just the reverse. Society exists. Contra libertine reveries, community is in fact inescapable. Money is a public good. The monetary system is a function of government, which can grant money-creation privileges to private banks and financial institutions. State capacity to finance public institutions is inexhaustible. In the words of John Maynard Keynes, ‘Anything we can actually do, we can afford.’ Taxation controls the distribution of wealth. At bottom, however, state spending never rests on private profit. This means that an impoverished public good such as the present higher-education system reflects an impoverished public imagination. Far from necessary medicine for economic ills, austerity answers injury with violence, attacking our capacity to provision and to hope. 

Now is the moment to think boldly and creatively about the financing of British universities. If higher education genuinely matters, then the state possesses all the monetary power needed to support it. The question is not if, but how. 

Practically speaking, Britain has any number of options at its disposal. The most conventional approach is, of course, for Parliament to provide funds by way of legislative appropriation. In addition to stemming recent and proposed cuts, such legislation would expand higher-ed provisioning where it is needed. Labour could also renew its pledge to eliminate tuition fees and shift the burden of payment from private to public. 

A second, more daring option is a public franchise model, elsewhere dubbed the uni currency project. According to this model, Parliament extends public money creation powers—Hockett and Omarova’s ‘finance franchise’—directly to the British university system. In this scenario, British universities would function much like banks, creating credit as needed in response to shifting needs and demands. As with private banks, university liquidity would be backstopped by the Bank of England, only in this case, universities would not generate money as private loans in order to turn a profit. Instead, universities would structure uni credit in the form of public grants payable to academic facilities and units charged with fulfilling specific academic missions and projects. 

In addition to eliminating tuition fees and repudiating austerity, a uni public franchise model for higher ed would go a long way to democratise university finance. First, putting budget decisions in the hands of universities stands to make such institutions more responsive to local circumstances. Second, the university finance franchise occasions opportunities to involve faculty, staff, students, and community stakeholders in establishing budgeting priorities. Third, liberating finance from hard monetary constraints promotes free thinking and debate across universities, in part, by widening job security and benefits to include all workers on public campuses and ending casualisation once and for all. The aim of the public franchise model is not to license willy-nilly cronyism or court moral hazard. It is to develop a new system of democratic accountability designed to cultivate talent, innovation, and problem-solving for the public good. 

A key challenge for transforming higher-ed finance is revising how we account for the university in crisis. When a student takes up study at a university, our current system accounts for their participation as if it were a cost or a liability rather than a benefit or an asset. We ask who should bear this cost rather than reckoning with the collective social benefits of education. We decide that the individual who studies must pay, in the future, via an interest-bearing loan. Likewise, university leadership counts the academic experts they employ as burdensome costs that, when faced with budgetary obstacles, must be efficiently trimmed. Rather than genuinely ameliorate extant problems, this type of accounting merely facilitates the managed decline of the education sector. 

The public-money paradigm, by contrast, enables us to account for the present situation differently. Indeed, we can tell another story, if we wish. Even now, undergraduate courses are provisioned and financed by a government-owned public body, which transfers funds directly to universities when students join their academic communities. This enables a process that educators and educatees the world over recognise as enriching. As all involved in higher education well know, students gain far more than mere subject knowledge or transferrable skills. Moreover, these gains do not end on graduation day. According to Judith Butler, ‘[A]s we leave the university,’ we take our ‘critical practices with us onto the street, into those spaces of work and love, and into our public lives.’ A university, in other words, does not exclusively benefit students. It is a locus of civic uplift and transformation. That we ever came to understand the gifts of higher education as unaffordable liabilities is absurd. 

At this hour of profound crisis, no options should be off the table, including the extension of the finance franchise to universities. In view of the cataclysmic failures of the present system and the dearth of alternative proposals, it is time to unleash the public credit that has always been at the heart of higher education and to recognise its potential to arrest the current crisis and to advance the public purpose. 

Unless we change course, British universities will no longer function as the community anchors they are today, nor will they continue to foster the attitudes of open-ended inquiry for which they are rightly championed or pioneer the solutions we desperately need to local, national, and global challenges. 

Unless we are open to new approaches to university finance, we will remain trapped by the austere logics that are destroying our cherished institutions. 

Unless we are willing to act imaginatively and fearlessly to save our universities now, we will soon find that there is nothing left to save.

* Every UK news outlet to which the authors sent this essay declined to publish it.

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Money & the Limits of Sovereignty

by Scott Ferguson

Money on the Left is proud to republish this talk by Scott Ferguson. It was initially presented at the request of Real Progressives on September 4, 2021. We reproduce the presentation here as a corrective to recent debates in and about Modern Monetary Theory, which continue to overlook Money on the Left’s contributions and insights.

As many of you are no doubt aware, my colleagues and I at the Money on the Left (MotL) Editorial Collective have offered some challenges to the notion of sovereignty within MMT scholarship over the last few years. I am grateful for this opportunity to explain and hopefully clarify (a) what we are actually claiming about money and sovereignty; (b) what we are certainly not saying; and (c) why all of this matters, in our view.  

MMT is, as we know, a state-based theory of endogenous credit money creation. This means that, for MMT, money arises from and remains primarily secured by centralized governments and that credit is created as needed as a function of monetary design.

The original MMT literature draws upon the German chartalist scholar Friedrich Knapp, who argued that money is first and foremost a token of the state. 

Where things get tricky, for myself and others in the MotL Collective, is that the modern nation-state has been overwhelmingly defined by the concept of sovereignty.  

Sovereignty, to begin with a preliminary definition, typically denotes a type of power characterized as the highest independent authority within a given territory. 

The most widely used notion of sovereignty is sometimes qualified as “political sovereignty,” referring to an entire political entity in all of its various functions, domains, and concerns.  

From this wider category, MMTers such as L. Randall Wray and Fadhel Kaboub have derived a theory of “monetary sovereignty.”  

Monetary sovereignty, for MMT, is linked to political sovereignty, but forms a specialized category of its own.  

This monetary type of sovereignty speaks, in a sense, to the economic dimensions of state power.  

One might say that monetary sovereignty, in this conception, is a sub-species of political sovereignty that reciprocally helps to shape the political order.  

Kaboub, in particular, has developed a helpful four-point list of criteria for defining monetary sovereignty. A so-called “full” monetary sovereign should include all four criteria. They are: 

(1) a country must issue its own currency  

(2) a country must levy taxes, fines and fees in its own currency  

(3) a country can only issue debt denominated in its own currency  

(4) a country must avoid currency pegs & engage internationally via floating exchange rates  

On the bases of these four criteria, Kaboub and others set forth an admittedly nuanced MMT approach to monetary sovereignty, one that works not in absolutes, but in degrees. 

Although not always evident in popular MMT discourse, deep down MMT does not actually promulgate a crude model of monetary sovereignty at all. MMT does not, for example, stretch monetary sovereignty between the twin extremes of “having” and “not having.” 

Instead, MMTers situate different monetary regimes with what they deem a “spectrum of monetary sovereignty.”  

According to this spectrum thinking, countries exhibit a wide variety of different monetary powers with respect to one another.  

No country is all-powerful since there are always political and resource constraints that must be confronted and negotiated.  

Conversely, no country can be totally without monetary capacities because any polity can create new credit regimes in order to freshly mobilize people and resources.

As I understand it, this spectrum approach is no mere quantitative checklist, either. 

At least at its best, it tends to be deployed in qualitative and historically contextualized ways such that, for example, one country may share two of the very same criteria with another but also have very different monetary powers at their disposal.  

Importantly, moreover, MMTers clearly discern that none of these features are natural or inevitable. They are politically and legally constructed over time and can always be challenged and redesigned.   

Indeed, I would maintain that these presumptions about contingency and transformability are precisely what MMTers have in mind when discussing monetary sovereignty, even as their language slips occasionally into logics of having and not having as a shorthand. 

Just because a particular country’s currency, for example, is pegged to the dollar today, according to MMTers, does not then condemn them to monetary powerlessness for eternity.  

That is why MMT’s theory of monetary sovereignty matters.  

This, I hope, is an accurate and judicious account of what MMT has meant by the expression “monetary sovereignty.”  

Now as I’ve stated, my colleagues and I at MotL have criticized the term sovereignty, complicating the role it has played both in MMT literature and in popular outreach.  

This has led some in the MMT community to feel confused and others quite resistant, imagining that what we are saying must somehow undercut MMT and its explanatory power.  

Well, I’m here tonight to not only clear up the confusion surrounding our critique of the concept of sovereignty, but also explain why we think our contribution improves rather than detracts from the MMT project.  

Let me commence by stating at the outset that I come in peace. I’m not here to destroy MMT. I’m honestly here to help. 

In this spirit, the first substantive point I want to make is a meta or methodological one.  

The point is this: Words and the concepts they express have complex histories and any account of sovereignty must attend to the history of the term itself.  

Indeed, words with seemingly stable meanings in one era can often mean something very different in another. Sometimes, a word can mean one thing and its very opposite!  

To take such tangled word histories seriously is not to indulge a type of nihilistic relativism in which we toss our hands in the air and declare that nothing means anything at all! To the contrary, it only means we should be aware of the words we use and their complex semantic legacies. 

This is especially true when it comes to the central and very important words we use to make sense of politics and economics.  

What about the word and idea of “sovereignty,” then?  

Turns out, it, too, has a history.   

Modern writers tacitly deny this all of the time. When modern thinkers turn back to ancient Greek, Roman or Christian writers to understand the allegedly antique origins of sovereignty, they retro-actively impose a modern conception of politics onto texts that were in truth never concerned with “sovereignty” as it is understood in the modern world.  

In actuality, the word sovereignty arose in early modern Europe over the long course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in order to articulate a new conception of political rule.  

Prior to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people in the European and wider Mediterranean world referred to political rule most often as a matter of “imperium.”  

Imperium meant, pretty straightforwardly, “rule,” “authority or “command,” framed as a general condition or question.  

Today, when we hear this Latin term “imperium” we are apt to associate it with the nasty modern notion of “empire.” This implies the political and economic domination of vast lands and peoples, employing violent means toward exploitative ends.  

In its historical context, however, imperium did not actually mean empire or territorial domination in that specific and narrowly modern sense.  

In fact, the word rose to prominence within the Roman Republic well before the Empire.   

Imperium in the Roman Republic denoted broadly who, what, how, when and where authority rules. 

Particularly during the Middle Ages, the elasticity of this term proved handy since the period was very self-consciously defined by a dizzying array of overlapping and interdependent jurisdictions. 

While the Holy Roman Empire and Catholic Church oversaw enormous and interpenetrating realms, myriad kingdoms, manors, and townships within these realms formed a nested latticework of interlocking rights and obligations.  

In this period, it is crucial to stress, political rule was seen as a necessary and inescapable part of humanity’s social interdependence, no matter what form it took.  

Leaders and thinkers, too, expressly situated any particular political regime within a larger inter-reliant world of political, social, legal and religious relations, one that of course exceeded any specific ruler or regime.  

The Middle Ages definitely saw its fair share of wars, feuds, and crusades during which different and opposing communities fought over any number of matters pertaining to political rule and legal jurisdiction.  

However, medieval thought did not articulate any of such conflicts in terms of absolute insides and outsides, selves and others.  

Today, we may certainly level plenty of legitimate criticisms at the period’s hierarchical political economy and anti-democratic order of rewards and succession.  

Yet as any medieval historian will frankly tell you, the modern world’s cartoonish depictions of unquestioned authoritarianism during the Middle Ages simply hold no water. 

The medieval period did, in fact, witness plenty of political contestation, both in word and in deed.  

The period’s leaders and thinkers developed a keen sense for what constituted the legitimacy of rule. 

They appreciated the limits of authority.

Tyranny, too, was a concern, and was variously criticized and resisted.  

In late medieval and early modern Europe, however, various jurists, theologians and philosophers began to invent a new and quite unfamiliar idea of political rule, which broke severely with previous conceptions.  

To get at this historically novel idea, it is instructive to return to and inspect the word “sovereignty” itself.  

This word sovereignty combines the term “reign,” meaning “rule,” with a superlative prefix related to modern prefixes with which we are now familiar like “super” or “hyper,” meaning at once “above” and “beyond.”  

So, in a very literal sense, the word sovereignty is created to imagine a new kind of super or hyper power meant to rule over and above all others.  

With this, those who conceived sovereignty as an idea sought to reconceive and seemingly disentangle the multifarious and overlapping cascade that was Medieval rule.  

Their desire was to imagine and ground a type of authority that would be self-legitimating and stand outside of these medieval entanglements.  

It would do so in a number of interrelated ways. Here, I’m going to try to spell out eight: 

First, the notion of sovereignty tended to fuse political rule with individual will. That will might belong to a particular emperor or king, but it would also be later ascribed to a particular group of people, as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notorious idea of the “general will.”

Second, the concept of sovereignty aligned this notion of willful rule with a single site of power, which would then be associated with a very particular and distinctly bounded sense of territory.

Third, sovereignty as a concept demanded the political power would command exclusive authority over said territory, barring all other political actors.  

Fourth, sovereignty as an idea assumed that the political realm is an artificial construct erected through contract and backed by violence, or at least by the threat of violence.  

Fifth, it presumed that political & legal institutions are not necessary for organizing relations and mediating conflict between interdependent beings and realms, as was believed in the Middle Ages.  

Instead, the logic of sovereignty began with a so-called “state of nature,” wherein apparently disconnected and naturally independent individuals, families, or organizations come together as matter of choice and, ultimately, force.   

Sixth, the notion of sovereignty tended to subordinate every relationship or organization within a supposedly sovereign territory to an expression of the overarching sovereign will.  

Seventh, sovereignty starkly divided inside from outside sovereign borders.  

That is, it held not only that seemingly external concerns or domains were simply not a matter of sovereign responsibility, but also that the people within a sovereign territory were in no way related or beholden to those outside of it.    

Eighth, whether explicitly or implicitly, sovereignty created a political vacuum between territorial regimes. In opposition to the wildly interwoven jurisdictions of the Middle Ages, this raised constant questions and problems about the order of things in the seemingly external spaces between regimes.  

Perhaps the most well-known mature articulation of the early modern logic of sovereignty came from Thomas Hobbes in his well-known book, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. That book was published in 1651 during the uncertain period of the English Civil War. But in many ways, Hobbes represents the first early culmination of a tradition that includes many earlier works such as those written by French jurist Jean Bodin.  

I cannot offer a thorough or in any way satisfying summary of Hobbes’s or Bodin’s arguments here beyond the admittedly hand-wavy sketch I’ve already provided.   

Suffice it to say that throughout the early modern period, this new word and idea of sovereignty would be twisted in various and seemingly conflicting directions.  

Sovereignty, for instance, has equally underwrote absolutist arguments for the divine right of kings or, later, modern fascism, as well as Liberal and leftist ideas about Republicanism or socialism.  

Eventually, as we know, sovereignty would give rise to the idea and institution known as the modern nation-state.  

The modern nation-states presumes an independent organic or ethnically related community–sometimes conceived as a hybrid or melting pot of several communities.  

In any case, no matter what political form said community takes, the nation-state model imagines government as the expression or representative of that organic community’s independent will.  

Equally important, the modern nation-state presumes a particular global organization of politics, one that is comprised of supposedly independent territories.  

Such sovereign territories, goes this logic, relate to one another as external, regionally specific and ethnically bounded populations.  

This order of sovereign nation-states is sometimes referred to as the so-called “Westphalian” system after the famous “Treaty” or “Peace of Westphalia.” Constructed out of what were in fact two important treaties in the mid-17th century, the Peace of Westphalia brokered a new order of security between rival powers, closing a calamitous period of European religious warfare that had by that point killed approximately eight million people. 

It is now a truism that the Peace of Westphalia established the order of sovereign nation-states that gave rise to the modern world. 

For a critique of this just-so story, I recommend a great article from 2011 by Sebastian Schmidt titled, “To Order the Minds of Scholars: The Discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations Literature.” You can find it in the journal, International Studies Quarterly.  

As Schmidt and other critics have explained, the nation-state as we know it did not arrive overnight after the Peace of Westphalia.  

Nothing even close to its idealized early modern theorization arose as a generalized institutional form until the 19th century.  

Some have even argued that the nation-state as a general form doesn’t fully come into its own until the 20th century when the midcentury era of decolonization saw an explosion of freshly formed nation-states on the model of European sovereignty.  

For my colleagues and I at MotL, the ultimate problem with sovereignty and the modern nation-state system is two-fold.   

Put succinctly, we argue that the logic of sovereignty is not only violent, it is also outright false.    

Sovereignty as a concept is violent for many reasons. Most plainly, it is violent because it presumes that political rule is always founded upon violence or a monopoly on force.  

Yet fundamentally, for us, the logic of sovereignty is violent because it denies that everything in this world is interdependent—which is to say, meaningfully and necessarily intertwined–in both social and ecological senses.  

Meanwhile, we contend that sovereignty as a concept is false because everything, in our interpretation actually is interdependent, no matter how much the logics or institutions of sovereignty pretend they are not.   

The interlinked crises of global climate change are, of course, screaming evidence that autonomy is a myth and interdependence is the actual name of the game.  

But interdependence goes well beyond matters of crisis.  

It also provides at least as many opportunities for cooperation and participation as it does problems and competition.  

In any case, on MotL’s view, sovereignty disastrously fails to describe the reality of global political economy in any helpful way.  

Today, we would add, the world remains, in a sense, thoroughly medieval, by which I mean, that our world, too, remains a dizzying array of overlapping and interdependent jurisdictions, with credit creation occurring across and between different forms and scales.  

The idea of sovereignty does not permit us to actually perceive this, let alone change it for the improvement of humanity and the planet.  

To clarify: When we critique sovereignty as a concept, we are not flatly critiquing analysts, activists or legislators for focusing on the existing countries or governments in the world.  

We are all for politicizing, challenging, and transforming extant countries and governments for the better.  

Thus we do not in any way wish to ignore or overlook American, French, Japanese or Senegalese governments in the name of either a hyper-localist politics or a supranational globalism. 

Nor do we wish to immediately or unequivocally abolish the state.  

To the contrary, we don’t take the modern nation-state at its word about its own alleged sovereignty. Instead, we want to challenge this misconception, while working to radically transform and transcend the nation-state.  

In this way, we continue to argue that MMT’s fundamental insights about political economy are both correct and urgent.  

Our message is that, given its historical legacy and the problems associated with its meanings, sovereignty may not be the best descriptor for us to use when we are trying to understand present political economy and to release what have been historically repressed currency-creating powers.  

As a retort, one could persuasively argue that MMT has thoroughly transformed sovereignty’s original meaning by giving it a new and very specific set of definitions and criteria, none of which necessitate that we treat the modern-nation state as a self-standing and territorially bounded agent. 

To this we say: Fair enough! Our critique, then, may perhaps simply serve as a reminder that sovereignty’s semantic legacy is a problematic one. Maybe what we have to offer is merely a word of caution against perpetuating sovereignty’s unquestioned assumptions.  

But we can and do go further: The semantic baggage of terms like sovereignty has a tricky way of haunting new usages, even as they aim to outstrip their pasts.  

We see this around MMT, for example, when critics who, ignoring the nuances in the literature, conflate MMT with statism, as best, and autarky, at worst. 

It also comes from certain members within the MMT movement, who avowedly embrace MMT for ethno-nationalist politics.  

For this reason, we do recommend phasing out the language of sovereignty in order to avoid these problematic associations.  

Instead, we prefer to use the language of monetary “capacity,” “power,” “capability,” “agency,” or in some circumstances, “sustainability” and “resilience.”  

These terms, we think, better and more accurately describe what MMT is getting at in the first place.  

The largely unquestioned implications of sovereignty, we would also suggest, can hamper MMT from time to time, bogging us down in unnecessary contradictions.  

On one hand, for example, MMT stresses that money is an endogenous credit/debt relation, as opposed to, say, a finite thing, or a passive vehicle for individual preferences or an expression of commodified labor time.  

Money on this view is never recycled like a finite chit or embodiment of value. It is created from thin air by virtue of credit granting institutions endowed with different degrees of authority and receivability.  

On the other hand, however, MMT tells us that only sovereign currency-issuing governments have the power to create credit, while everyone else is condemned to be a mere user of credit that must recycle extant money throughout the economy.  

Such statements contradict one another.  

Which one is it? Is credit created from thin air through a hierarchy of money that extends in endogenous patterns from government to locality and across the globe?  

Or, is the government’s sovereign will the sole locus of infinite money creation, while every other person, group or institution must merely use and recycle said money as if it were a finite substance?  

The problem, here, I would wager is not that MMT is deep down just bluntly wrong or self-undermining.  

It is not wrong to emphasize the important and central role played by federal governments in organizing money.  

MMT does not undermine itself by explaining the hierarchy of endogenous monetary creation. 

The trouble is in tethering the government’s role in the process to language and assumptions of sovereignty, permitting sovereignty’s absolutist and exclusionary logics to creep back in.  

This is what creates these puzzling and, frankly, needless contradictions in MMT.   

In truth, I would suggest that MMT scholars know damn well and express all of the time that state money and endogenous money are not in conflict.  

MMT scholars know that credit issuance occurs in heterogeneous forms across global and local registers.  

While government currency issuers variously anchor these forms, we see myriad regimes of non-finite, non-recycled credit all of the time—from IMF Special Drawing Rights and Euro dollars to airline miles and Chuck E. Cheese tickets.  

The modern nation-state unquestionably plays important roles in authorizing, regulating and even informally sanctioning credit creation across these heterogeneous scales. And the nation-state is arguably the central institution with which we should now be concerned.  

But to take the nation-state seriously does not then mean that we must blind ourselves by naturalizing the fantasies of absolute independence and exclusivity baked into sovereignty as a historical term and concept.  

This matters not only for describing the current monetary systems of the world, but also for imaginatively transforming money into a more robust and democratic process.  

A great example of this is the proposal my colleagues and I have been developing for a public university issued credit system we call “the Uni.” 

The Uni, as we conceive it, would give credit creation capacity to cash-strapped public universities, which have been increasingly starved of funds by feckless state legislatures for decades. 

Extending what Hockett and Omarova call the “finance franchise” to public universities, the Uni would end austerity and privatization in public universities. It would also, on our design, increase the democratic agency of faculty, staff, students, and surrounding community members.

Perhaps the most mind-blowing aspect of the Uni, furthermore, is what it demonstrates about the plasticity of endogenous credit creation.

The Uni shows that no one is merely a passive user of a currency, that credit always precedes returns and that, as a result, money as such is never driven by recycling revenue.  

This has tremendous implications for democratic monetary design, challenging us to imagine credit systems that transcend not only revenue constraints but also the profit motive.  

Instead of finance franchisees lending money that must be paid back, for example, we can establish granting institutions that disburse credit not according to a logic of quantitative payback but, rather, through a qualitative logic of communal and environmental obligation.

Crucially, we think, the Uni can serve as a generalizable model for similar projects elsewhere, revealing MMT’s still-untapped potentials for political and economic transformation in unexpected ways.

From one point of view, the Uni is fully compatible with and wholly stems from MMT.  

At the same time, however, we believe that the language and logics of state sovereignty that linger in MMT sometimes have a tendency to squelch such imaginative leaps and possibilities.  

Now, I’d like to quickly sum up before concluding:  

  1. I come in peace, which is to say, I’ve spoken with you here tonight in order to improve rather than to condemn MMT. 
  2. MMT’s spectrum of monetary sovereignty is important and persuasive on its own terms.
  3. Sovereignty is neither an innocent nor ahistorical synonym for the power of the federal government. 
  4. Sovereignty arose as a very specific term and concept, which sought to expel interdependence from political thinking and organization. 
  5. The logic of sovereignty is not only violent, but also false.
  6. We can and should appeal to alternative words to describe the world of monetary governance such as monetary “agency,” “power,” “capacity,” and others.
  7. Moving beyond sovereignty enables us to expand MMT and iron out some unfortunate limits and contradictions in MMT discourse.

Thank you again for inviting me to share our work at the Money on the Left collective. I am honored to have had this chance to walk you through our thinking and concerns.

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Community Currencies with Jens Martignoni

Money on the Left speaks with Dr. Jens Martignoni, lecturer at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and chief editor of the International Journal of Community Currency Research (IJCCR). Community or complementary currencies are phenomena of great interest to monetary scholars and activists. We’ve spoken often about them on this show–whether about the Benjamins classroom currency at SUNY Cortland, the DVDs currency at Denison, or our recurring work on the Uni Currency Project. During our conversation with Martignoni, the appeal of such projects becomes clear. Community currencies not only lay bare the false claims of prevailing monetary orthodoxy–and in so doing make powerful teaching tools, as Jakob Feinig has argued. They also permit and even compel us to imagine a world that is otherwise–a world figured first in terms of abundance rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of scarcity. In our dialog, we focus on Martignoni’s provocative essay for the IJCCR, titled “Money is Not a Medium of Exchange.” In doing so, we reflect upon the limits of “exchange” as a framework for understanding money, while simultaneously experimenting with more generative linguistic and conceptual tools to help us re-imagine monetary provisioning.   

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

Scott: Jens Martignoni, welcome to Money on the Left.

Jens Martignoni: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Scott: We’re happy to have you.

To start us off, we’d like you to tell our listeners a little bit about your background, your personal background, your professional background, and also how you came to take up a heterodox approach to questions of money and political economy.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, thank you. It’s kind of a long story, but I started in the northeast of Switzerland quite a time ago when I was born in a rural region. My first idea was then–when I was a little bit older–to go to the U.S. and to start as a rocket engineer and do space travels to the moon. Because I thought, yeah, we have some major problems and issues on this earth with our civilization. But this was maybe something from the gods.

But I took this track and went for becoming an engineer, mechanical engineer. But when I was there, even in the study then in the university, I found out that maybe it’s not a good idea to leave Earth, but maybe better to see that we have and find a better solution for our society. And therefore, I started as an engineer in different jobs, but was always thinking how we could improve or change our society or, let’s say, our behavior.

That was in the 1990s, a time when I moved to Zurich. This is the biggest city in Switzerland. There I found out that it would be a good thing to work differently, not as in a regular job or as an engineer, but more independently. And with a couple of friends, we founded an association to help us–self-help, let’s say–a kind of cooperative in a form of association. We started our own businesses, but together and tried to have an exchange and tried to build up a network. So like a startup, kind of startup platform before “startups” were a word, maybe.

Very soon we arrived at the point where we found out that, OK, it’s nice to exchange or to have projects together or something like that. But it’s also very important to get the money inside our circle. So, we found out that we have to establish a known monetary system in our association. And that was the first step. From a very practical point of view: how we can keep the resources inside and not flowing away and leaving us faster than they arrived.

So, we founded a kind of currency, a local currency in today’s term, which was quite unique. Somehow we had some ingenuity, not only me, but others together. Before, we didn’t find much about such systems. LETS was already on the market then. It’s from the Canada local exchange and trade system. But we had a different approach, more like a common approach.

However this worked, it was fun also for some years. But after a while, it turned out that it was not really working. It was helping us. It was fun. But we would have to invest a lot more energy, time and knowledge and also to have many more members, for example, to get it on a certain level. And so it disappeared slowly.

That was my first real experiment with such a system, a little bit out of the blue. We made many mistakes, if you look backwards. But it was just really a good thing. From then on, I was a little bit hooked and always thought about how to keep on in this topic. Professionally, I was then leaving this self-employment because I had founded a big project, which then was covered by the state. I became an employee again of this project and so on. But after a while, I was convinced that I have to add to my engineering degree, more economic knowledge to get along with this story. So I went, I did a master’s in an university here in Switzerland. And later on, I also did a Ph.D. in a university in Germany. And there, on both occasions, I took this topic of money or different monies or local currencies or whatever as a master thesis or a PhD thesis was included in that.

I started to become more of a researcher in this topic and then went on to be involved in some European research projects where I also did some parts concerning such monetary systems or such local exchange things. And yeah, that was a bit of the thread about the money. As for my personal situation, I stayed the whole time in Switzerland, except my visits in Germany, in the German University of Köln. But yeah, I was here and getting into contact with the worldwide networks of other people working on this local community or complementary currency. That was still until today. It’s a big issue.

But of course, as your question also posed: Why did I come to the heterodox approach? Because it’s not necessarily needed if you try to start a local currency. The orthodox or the classical approach does not really cover local currencies. It just says nothing about it. So, you can live together without bothering, maybe. But for me, it was very clear that something in conventional orthodox or classical theories cannot be true. So, I was always looking for how could money be seen, posing this famous question, “What is money?” There are many books written about this. Money is what you name it, for example.

Billy: Social construction.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, money is a social construction. This is harder to find, but you can find it. But yeah, money to become rich or money is psychological things about money or many things about what money is. And after a while, I came to the conclusion that maybe this question is not right. This is a kind of trick question. Because if you ask “what is money?” you presuppose money as existing entity. It is already here. It’s like a kind of plant species or a kind of rock formation. And you start to look at it and now you know what money is.

Usually it’s done by the history of coins that, “ah, this is money,” all the coins and developed like this and like that. For me, this was  a key moment, maybe when I thought, “okay, maybe this question is not good because money is made by men.” If you ask “what is money,” then also we should first ask who has made money and why? What exactly is it for? And is it really the same all the time? And so on and so on. It becomes more interesting if you look at it that way.

Billy: That’s a fascinating story. As somebody who very recently completed a class, I’m working with students all semester on complementary currencies. And in fact, each student was tasked with developing their own. I’ve talked about it a lot on the show. But I’m really curious to know what that initial in your co-op, what was the name of your currency? Because I think ultimately that becomes a vexing question for students. What did you call it? And was there any debate about what to call it?

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, we had some debates then. This association or this co-op was called “Flexibles.” Then, even the English name, it was very fancy in that time in Europe or in Switzerland. Because the name of the association was Flexible, we thought we named the currency after flexible and then existing predecessor of the Euro, it was the FLECÜ. So it was called “Flexibles-Ecu” and yeah it was a paper money–I don’t have one here unfortunately but there are still some I can send you an image. How do you spell ECU? Yes, this is a French word, “ECU,” but because in German, the U is with two points.

Scott: Umlaut.

Jens Martignoni: So it is, yeah, so it’s F L E C Ü umlaut. It was funny, we had one important issue: to find out how the money was traveling, where it’s going. We had a list on each bill where you had to fill in when you gave it to, when you bought something, when you gave it to the next. And you have to fill in when and for what and whom, from whom. And so after a while you had the whole list, you could see where this and for what this bill was, this note was spent. And this was for us a very important idea, somehow to track this.

Billy: It’s an engineering problem. Did you see it from the engineer’s lens?

Jens Martignoni: Maybe. Yeah, of course. In the end, then you pay 100 FLECÜ and you have 10 bills and then you have to write it 10 times on each of these 10 things. The next would give it to different sorts. So, you have a big mixture of things, this one from here, this one from there. But I think it was a good exercise to point towards the use of money, that each transaction really changes somehow the money or prints some new kind of color on it or kind of value. And so you could enforce, the idea was, of course, we wouldn’t like to travel it by like–“bought some cocaine” or whatever, or horrible environmental things, or I don’t know, “nuclear power plants- I bought one.” But I think this brought us a bit towards this idea that, “okay, money is changing from each transaction, is changing money somehow.” There were some interesting insights from this experiment.

Scott: It makes me think of library books on the one hand. You check out a library book, you can see who has checked it out—you know, sometimes decades of people checking it out. On the other hand, it also makes me think of what is actually now standard in private payment platforms, like Venmo, where you can record what the transaction is for, include emojis. So, all of this ends up shaping and creating different kinds of values that are certainly not the kinds of notions of value they could talk about in classical or neoclassical economics.

Billy: With the FLECÜ, did you did you go into that with any kind of theoretical framing background? Or, you said it was a practical project, did you draw on any pre-existing complementary local or community currencies as examples?

Jens Martignoni: Yes, very little. Interestingly enough, we had just more of an idea of how we would work. How our economy should be. Then this, we had, I think, one or two books from not really very theoretical approaches of about different aspects of money. The LETS, for example, was a little bit known, but not really, and we weren’t really happy with how they did it. So, we did another. I still hang on to this method to really start without knowledge in the monetary field. Because money and the currency, all this stuff is so overloaded with weird and wrong ideas. You start to dig into them and you lose–you’re lost. Then you load yourself with a lot of wrong stuff, wrong premises and so on. And if you start from nothing, it’s much likelier that you get to some interesting or useful solution. So a pity for all the theorists, of course, if I say that.

Billy: “Babylonian madness,” I think Keynes called it.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, course, then later on, for me, it was important also to study all this or a lot of such theories. But it was a good thing. And I think it somehow, to a certain degree, it worked without any theory at all.

Scott: Could you tell us a little bit about your graduate-level thesis about money and currency?

Jens Martignoni: Yes, I did a study about a bunch of existing local currencies in Switzerland, Germany, or in the German speaking part. The idea, there were two things: First, I found out that I should do a kind of classification typology because it was difficult to compare. There are so many systems like these LETS or time banks or maybe a regional currency–all kinds of different approaches because they mostly were started by local groups. Like myself, they did not know much and they took some system and changed it. So, it was very diverse.

So, one thing was this typology. The other was to find out some success factors.  If there are some really some points where these local, these small currencies are successful or how they fail or could have found and find out something about that. The typology was also published in English in 2012, I think, later on translated.

Interestingly enough, the typologies of money are quite an open field. Until today, there are some, but not really many. The reason is very simple: Because a long time it was believed that money is money. It’s one thing. So there’s no typology at all necessary. And then there were a lot of discussions about is or that. Is this money, or the checks money, or are the vouchers money? But always compared to that money that we have today or then the same. But as you go deeper, of course, you find out that money, that you have to have a typology because it’s just one option or one possibility how to do it.

Like we have it today in the dollar, for example, or very closely the same in the pound or in the francs or in the euro zone. The other thing is how such a local system would be successful. It was a small sample. I found out some things like, of course, you should have quite some resources, money to start up a new money, because it’s really hard work and it needs a lot. We forget it a little bit in our very big monetary system that we have today that there is a systems operation tax. Somehow we have to pay the banks and the computers are running and the vending machines and so on. But this appears in our very big economy.

Yet if you have a very small one, like in this local currency, then of course the costs can be high or the work you have to do to keep it running and or to get towards a certain number of members to have a stable situation. So the resource situation was very crucial. Then the design, of course, and then some other points like, “Do you have some initial working circles where money is flowing?” Can it be recycled? If not, then it will become difficult after a while.

Yeah, there was this study. It was interesting, but not really well read afterwards.

Billy: Sounds like, if it was translated and published in 2012 it would have been pretty useful in the context of the Greek discussion of leaving the Eurozone, where I think the startup costs of considering returning to the lira with ATMs, with actually designing, printing, rebranding essentially was prohibitive. So I appreciate that point very much.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, by the way, at that time, together with my colleague Christian Gelleri, he’s the founder of the Chiemgauer. This is such a regional currency in Bavaria, Germany.

Billy: My students studied it.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, it’s somehow successful. It’s really 20 years now, more than 20 years. At that time of the Greek troubles, he made a suggestion of parallel currency. So, not really going back, but to have a parallel currency. And we tried to suggest quite an option to do that. But yeah, it was not heard by the politicians.

Billy: Well, in that case, you had a semi-pseudo-heterodox finance minister who had very strong ideas about what ought to happen as well.

Jens Martignoni: You mean [Yanis] Varoufakis or no?

Billy: I do.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, he was not. He was from his side. It was good. But of course, he was then dismissed. Or he left. I don’t remember. So, he left.

Billy: We put together a small proposal, which was definitely not very closely considered, for Spain around the same time. 

Jens Martignoni: Oh, wow. Nice. Yeah, such ideas are too far away from these politicians, and unfortunately, at least to be considered, even to do some experiments.

Billy: You mentioned it’s good to have zero knowledge of money, but one of the things that I’ve come to appreciate more dearly over time is how it’s not, most people don’t have zero knowledge of money. They have lots and lots of knowledge, wrong knowledge, right? And misconceptions that to get to that zero point, there’s a lot of chaff you have to pull away to just have the discussion.

Scott: Meanwhile, people’s lives are on the line and they’re fire-selling public infrastructure in Greece to the lowest bidders in the private marketplace. I mean, we’re tearing our hair out. The world is burning, but nobody can expand their imaginations to think this way. And of course, it’s in many people’s interest not to do so.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, very true. However, back to my study, maybe, or shall we continue with the politics?

Scott: No, that’s fine. We can go back to your study.

Jens Martignoni: And yeah, that was this study about these local currencies. But as you maybe know, the failure rate is very, very, very high. And some have survived, just like the Chimgauer, or some even thrive, like the Sartex or in the Berkshire, what’s it called?

Billy: The Berkshires.

Scott: The Berkshires.

Jens Martignoni: The Berkshires, yeah, okay, something like this. Then that was, of course, also one of my conclusions that somehow this theory behind everything is also a major reason for failure. Because if there is a wrong theory and you still talk about “exchange,” money as a “medium of exchange,” for example, then you get somehow on the wrong track. Then it becomes even more difficult to build up such an alternative on a small scale.

So, that was also a point to continue and think and read more and go back in time to older scholars, especially in Germany, who had done quite amazing things 100 years ago. But then because of this Nazi time, everything was buried, or sometimes discredited, or however difficult to reach. So, I was also looking there and took other assumptions and options and talked to people and found that these regional and complementary currencies are a good test bed for monetary theory because everything is much smaller. You really see direct effects. You can think about it much more easily.

Scott: So you’ve hit the nerve that I see at the center of our conversation. Before we start messing around with this nerve I want to tell our listeners a little bit about how we found you. We at Money on the Left are always thinking about who can we communicate with? Who can we talk to? Who can teach us? Who can we teach? I would say, in general, our foundations are in macro political economy, but we are also interested in smaller scale or multi-level or nested levels of money and currency. Yet not all of us have spent a lot of time reading the literature about complementary and community currencies–some of us more than others. I think Billy has, for example. I think I’ve read less–and somebody among us mentioned your journal, the International Journal of Community Currency Research, which we should plug. I would invite you to say some things about where it came from and what it is and what its mission is. But we’ll hold off on that question for now.

So I found this journal and I’m just looking around as one does. I’m exploring. I’m clicking on links. And all of a sudden, I get to a fairly recent piece by you titled “Ideas for Debate, Elementary Monetary Concepts and Ideas: Part 2.” And here’s the doozy: “Money is not a Medium of Exchange.” My jaw dropped. My jaw dropped because we at Money on the Left feel like we’re the only ones out here saying “money is not a medium of exchange–stop talking about it as a medium of exchange.” 

We’re very influenced by Modern Monetary Theory. This is often referred to as “neo-chartalism.” We’re also influenced by a certain kind of critical legal work, especially associated with Christine Desan at Harvard University, who thinks of money as a constitutional project. But I would say that even in those discourses, which reject the barter origin story that money comes from bilateral barter exchanges between individuals, I would say that the trope of exchange still circulates. It’s still used. Maybe this is me above all else, but I personally think that this is such a toxic trope. It’s such a toxic frame. It’s a toxic topology. And it really eradicates larger systemic design questions and political questions and value questions from the get-go and just sort of wishes them away. Whether you’re an apologist for neoclassical economics or you are a critic along Marxist lines or any other school. So, I often feel like I’m screaming into the void: “Money is not exchange! Money is not exchange!” And instead it is…

Billy: I pat him on the head and I say, it’s okay, Scott.

Scott: Yeah, it’s okay. Calm down. Calm down. For me, this cuts to the heart of everything we’re trying to argue, that money is a public system. It’s a public utility. It’s inexhaustible. You can always afford to do whatever you can mobilize your community to do. Money is a system of public obligations and capacities. “Exchange” just eliminates all those possibilities from the ontology of money. Anyway, so I stumbled upon your provocation: “money is not a medium of exchange.” My jaw drops and I think to myself, oh my God, there’s another strange alien out there in the universe who also seems to think that we should not be talking about money as exchange, which is really hard to do. It’s really hard to do.

And not only that, when I opened your short provocation, I saw that you are influenced, as you were suggesting, by German writers that we are equally influenced by, probably above all, Georg Knapp. Maybe  you can tell us–take this in whatever order you wish– you can talk about the journal, where it came from, what its mission is and how it’s doing; and then eventually, I would really like to just hear you talk about this provocation of yours.

Jens Martignoni: Let’s talk about the exchange question first because energy is going through the ceiling. This idea that money is a medium of exchange is for me I think it’s a kind of methodological error but it’s not a bad error. It was like in the times of the 19th century, maybe, that the people started to use this research methods of the natural sciences towards to study the economy. And so you go into the economy, you look, you’re the spectator, you’re the subject, so you have to cut you off from the object. And then you look and you see there is something, there’s a coin going from here to here and there is some whatever bought going back. And so you say, “Ah, you see, this is an exchange!” And so, you start the next point where you say, “Okay, now the other has the money and this person has the good.” And what’s now with this money? What does it do? He doesn’t have anything he wanted somehow, but he has something he can find another thing he wanted.

So then, of course, you can say, “Okay, money is not really a good in this exchange.” So, it must be something else. It must be like a medium of exchange. And then you start this story from there. And the other myth you already mentioned from how money was then invented, I think that followed. Because you found out that money is a medium of exchange. They took it back to this village approach where everybody is trying to get cows against eggs and so on.

However, then you see it’s a kind of observation. It’s okay. And it’s also real. There is something kind of like a medium of exchange in that moment, in that situation, but it’s absolutely not useful to define or even see money as a whole. This is especially because this exchange theory also has two people, one and the other. And money is absolutely impossible with two people. You need at least three, otherwise it’s not money so you have to give another person money and then he or she can find someone else who takes the money instead of giving some goods to the other person. So you need at least three people for a monetary system and then this exchange thing starts to become more complicated and then, yeah, it starts, it complicates and complicates.

And so it’s better to leave it out and say, no, no, we cannot define money at all through this function. It’s even maybe not even really a function. It’s kind of an observation, kind of something happens there, but we have to go somewhere completely somewhere else. And of course, the main point in this transaction is that the other person, because the person who has the money and gives it to someone else, let’s say could be really happy. Finally, he gets rid of this paper, of this nothing, and he gets some real stuff. And the other person who gets this only paper, this promise, then, of course, has to be really sure that others are willing to give something against this sheer nothing paper. 

So the whole community of people accepting this money, this is the most important part. It must be a community or a bunch, a group of people accepting this money. Then, it’s money. That’s the point. Now, how you get these people together? You can also do it by force, like the king says, “This is money! Everybody has to accept it. I put the tax on you.” Or, you also have the option to say everybody likes joining. I am willing to do it. I’m part of it. That’s why I accept it. You have different options how this community comes into life.

Knapp then of course derived it from the other side. He said okay there is the state and the state because it’s a community, because it has the option of the king or whoever or of the government to say we are now accepting this money. This is now our money. Everybody should take it. Then it’s working. Then to put this obligation on everybody to have to take the money. And of course, there are some more technical and other clues you have to include that it really works. But this is the main point to start from there.

Then you also see that this obligation is a kind of credit. You can then also go to the credit theory or maybe think more about that point and then start from there. Yes. So these were my ideas. I’m still not finished and that’s also why I put this provocation into the journal to start a discussion and it worked. The hook went to you. You took it and I think we can can discuss it more and maybe frame it better or and find other ways and to strengthen this approach. 

Scott: Well I’d like to get into some of the messy and complicated details, especially about the relationship between what we typically just refer to as a currency or a national currency or a supranational currency and something more like a community or local currency. I’ve been really fascinated by troubling that binary, and to see where that takes us. But before we do that, I’d like you to talk about your journal and explain what the mission is and whatever else you’d like to say about it.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, exactly. The International Journal of Community Currency Research was funded, I think, twenty-two, three or four years ago by some, I think in Australia even. Then, it went to England. It was from some scholars in a private initiative, I think. And they started to collect articles about this phenomenon of community currencies. There have been other examples before, even script money and other things longer before, but the phenomenon restarted maybe around in the 90’s of the last century. And so this journal was able already then to collect some articles of some exotic scholars doing such work in their universities. And yes, after a while, it was passed over to the then-founded RAMICS.

RAMICS (Research Association on Monetary Innovation and Community and Complementary Currency Systems) is a research association for community currencies of academics who were in this field, or tried to be in this field. The journal was passed over to them because the original founders did not continue. And now it’s a part of RAMICS and it continues to publish articles about all kinds of alternative monetary systems or ideas, also practical approaches or things like that. We tried for quite a while to become more academic and to be ranked and so on, but it’s a little bit difficult. And in the last two or three years, it came even into a little bit of crisis because it lacked resources. So, we had very few articles only.

Then I took over about two or three years ago and now I try to rebuild it to make it a little bit stronger. For example, I have a better platform also to publish. So everything is a bit old-fashioned. But I think it’s still very valuable and there’s really a good, more than 140 articles already where this phenomenon of alternative money or different monetary approaches or whatever is collected in a very good way. And I try to do more and also to improve.

Also in this scene of complementary currency practitioners or community currency practitioners, it’s very usual that they start with money as a kind of exchange system. And so we have to start there and improve the exchange. Then, of course, I also tried to evangelize this topic a little bit, in the bubble itself. That was part of this provocation.

Yes, and RAMICS also has a biannual congress. The last one was just held in Rome in November. The next one will be in Rio–yes, I think in two years–where the people of this community or the academics of this field come together. But there are very few real professorships on that topic, I think, maybe three or four on this planet. And the other academics are on the side working on this topic or additional or somehow from another viewpoint. So it’s a small, how do you say, island still. But I think it’s very important to keep it and to rebuild it even and go forward, because the other side is not really delivering good results or better results in their research. So I think we can go to the front and present our results maybe also in a bit higher ranks. That’s about it.

Billy: We have our own humble, relatively new journal, and we can i think identify on the level of the editorial  policy being our editorial position being a little bit different because so many people have ideas about money they come with  yeah exchange-based or neoclassically informed or funded ideas, and it becomes a process of education in the editorial space, but not trying to shape. I guess where do you land if a neoclassical straight-up or orthodox proposal comes in? Maybe we can edit this out if we don’t want to include it, but what’s the position? What do you do in that moment? Tell us, please.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, nice to hear, by the way, about your journal. I also have to have a look in Twitter and maybe, yeah, the more the better, I think. However, yeah, what can you do? We don’t have so many of these papers because, of course, this community currency is already a kind of barrier.

Billy: It’s a niche.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, it’s a niche. But I think, of course, I would try to talk to the people or send some first editor’s review. If I find enough interesting ideas that could be confronted with the other ideas, or expanded or something, then I would encourage the author or try to convince him to add or to change a little bit or so on. And in the other, if it’s really completely going in another direction, I really send some polite instructions of how money could maybe be seen differently in the hope that he or she will at least be a little bit waken up.

Billy: Well, in your position as chief editor, are there any pieces that stand out to you over the last couple of years as particularly compelling, or where you would suggest new readers go to first when they visit your website and look at the journal?

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, well…

Billy: Standout articles.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, we have some…

Billy: Not a favorite, because they’re all great.

Jens Martignoni: Absolutely. Well, there are some classics like, for example, the articles of James Stoddard, who researched the Swiss franc against the WIR system. This is a very large-scale complementary currency in Switzerland. He found that it has some real economic impact already on the Swiss economy and some contrast cyclical impacts.

So, this is some interesting message for many people to start already, and also to see that if such a currency has certain, how to say, issues big enough, the impact starts to be visible because these are very, very small currencies. You have also research on the impact of such currencies with 200 people. So it’s very difficult to find the real impact of things, except the social side. There you can clearly find an impact. But we’d like to have the economic impact. And this is very difficult. 

Then we have quite a new article by Will Ruddick. This is not completely an academic article, but it’s a kind of ethnographic study about–I cannot say “exchange systems”– in Africa and also in other countries. He started to detect mechanisms how to manage the commons and to common labor and to work together and how this works. And I think it’s a very basic thing also to understand money without money. If it’s how this system of participation, of obligations, of capacities, how do you provide your work? What do you get from the others and so on? What are the possibilities and options that the people use or used or still use in some rural areas? And he has done very good, very nice work there–still continuing.

And what else? There are some articles about typologies. Also mine was, then I sent it to this journal. What a coincidence. No, but others also to see a bit of these typological approaches, which enable us to see more across monies and to recognize that it’s easier from this more systemic or design perspective where you can really see, “Ah, it’s different, ah, this one, this one, what happens?” And I think these articles are more like from Jérôme Blanc or others. There are some in this field which are really interesting and also well cited.

Scott: I’d like to bring us back to the topic I raised earlier, maybe getting into the weeds of some of the complications that I’ve found when thinking about complementary currencies, but also moving back and forth between larger macroeconomic currencies and  community or local forms. I found that I began with a more naive way of talking about these different types of currencies. But over the years–and largely because of a lot of  anxiety and pushback that I get from the world in response to talking about these things–it’s forced me and, I think, us to begin to complicate things. We need to recognize that you can’t think about money and currency as an atomized entity. Not only can you not think about it as an individual euro or an individual pound, but you can’t think of a money system as somehow hermetically sealed. It is designed in relationship to other systems that it participates in and relies on in reciprocal and very often asymmetrical ways. So there’s already a kind of leakage, I think, between any currency systems. They’re mutually interdependent in all kinds of ways, which is not to say that a local complementary currency in one city is going to have the same kind of power or capacity that a national or a supranational currency. 

It is to say that it’s important not to get so locked into the idea that every currency sinks and swims alone. So then, we’ve thought both theoretically, historically, but also in terms of contemporary examples of, well, what are some examples of where things get messier. One example has been taken up by a former colleague of ours, Maxximilian Seijo. At a certain point, Maxx started thinking about Knapp’s example in his well-known book, The State Theory of Money: the cloakroom. The cloakroom, you could call a complementary currency. It’s not denominated in Deutschmarks, right? It’s not denominated in dollars. A cloakroom has its own redemption system, its own obligation and capacities. But it also doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It doesn’t exist in a state of nature. It’s not in a desert and people just randomly come by and decide willingly whether they want to dump their coats or not.

It’s part of entertainment. It’s part of a whole economy that uses other units. A more pointed question I could lob to you: What counts as a local currency or a complementary currency? Does a cloakroom count? Do airline miles count? Do Starbucks gift cards count? Because they don’t have the same liquidity that the macro unit has, but they’re still being relatively priced in interdependent relationships with the macro currency. One of the reasons why this is really important to me is that there’s a tendency, as you know, to dismiss local currency projects as if they’re just weird or freakish. “That’s not how money works.”  Or, “Oh, that’s weak; it’s not going to work.“ And of course it ends up not working very often. But nobody says that about video game currencies. Nobody says that about credits for private businesses. Nobody says that about cloakrooms. I wonder to what extent that’s just a kind of ideological blockage that we have. Well, why not? Why won’t it work? 

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, these are really important points, a lot of points to think about what exactly, or how do we define currency, or where is it exactly? And I think it’s in the systemic approach, it gets a bit easier if you see there are systems, and then there are borders, and then their interactions between different systems. So, if you have a small cloakroom system working for exactly one purpose. And then you have a large system, which is a multipurpose system, but wouldn’t work in a cloakroom, interestingly enough, if you give a dollar instead. Because you give your cloak, then you will not get back a dollar. And it would also be very complicated. You go back with a dollar, and then where is your cloak? It doesn’t work. The number, there is no number.

So it’s interesting that the money or such valuation areas maybe defined by some issues and some borders. And very interesting as in nature, the borders are the most interesting part to look at what happens in the systems come together. And I think this will be in the future a very interesting research field. But the situation now is, of course, a bit difficult, as you said, because we have one system, which is not really true, but it looks like one system of money worldwide. You can buy everything from the whole world. It works. Maybe some small exchange rates between, but nothing more. And then you have the smaller systems like, yeah, they are not really money or what do you do there? And if you have a false idea of this, that is one system or that is no system at all.

Usually they don’t say it’s a system. It’s like money. Money is money. That’s a hard thing. For my opinion, it’s true. We can have a really large definition or a very weak definition of money, like everything that is used from a certain bunch of people to regulate their economic relations, what we call money or something like that, in this direction.

And the air miles, yes, of course. Any vouchers are kind of, I would say, a pre-state of money because as soon as you just buy the voucher, go to the business and get it, and the business gets it back, it’s a kind of, well, it’s usually, maybe it’s a triangle. But as soon as you make a gift with a voucher to your nephew, then it becomes more the character of money because it’s transferred and somebody else then will be responsible for receiving or getting the benefit or whatever.

However, I think this border issue is an idea which I would like to research more, because the transfer to the border crossing of such a value is a very interesting moment. Because then a kind of economy one and economy two do interfere. Then if you take away this border, as it was done, for example, by this trade, different free trade things and so on, then you change a lot also. And if you have a border–Trump is maybe now reinstalling borders. And how do you say them? What’s the English word for?

Scott: Tariffs.

Jens Martignoni: Yeah, he will put up tariffs. But I think it’s more interesting to see the exchange of the money, exchange rates. This is much more interesting. You could somehow avoid all tariffs and just in a future world, you could do everything by the exchange rate of the different monies to value different economic areas against another economic area. And to balance the world better, you would install different currencies and in a more or less homogeneous area economically. And then you would have transfers between different areas by adjusting the exchange rates to regulate the worldwide traffic or trade. I think that that would be an idea to go towards this instead of tariffs and so on.

But however, now I was moving a little bit far away from your question. Sorry.

Billy: That’s a really good one, Scott. On my campus, as on many other campuses, we have several complementary currency systems or parallel currency systems through meal plans and other sort of, you know, esoteric campus-driven or campus-based currency programs. So it’s interesting to start a conversation in the context of a classroom. It’s like, we’re going to make a complementary currency and then to take inventory about just how many similar sorts of systems exist around us. And that question of, you know, what separates, I think returns us to a question that was posed, but not pursued earlier in the conversation in the context of talking about the tax obligation. And I know Scott and many in our collective are, myself included, are uncomfortable with the concept and reject it maybe outright that that the system of like a successful monetary system is contingent on. That there has to be a force in the form of the state that can compel people, can coerce, can force violently to use the currency in one shape or form.

And so I guess I’m generally interested in your perspective on that question. Because when I think about it in the context of the complementary currencies that we’ve been talking about, like that may not normally read as complementary, but as you say, have their own use cases, the cloakroom. To a certain extent, on that view, that money is kind of inherently got a coercive element to it, all currencies, whether complementary, secondary, or parallel, exist at the pleasure or at the discretion of the sovereign. If the berkshire was truly successful or too successful it would probably be regulated out of existence. It exists in the United States in a sort of gray area. So, whether in the scholarship, in your journal, or in your own work, I think we have some of our answers to that question. But I’d be interested to hear where you land on that question, sovereignty, coercion, violence, and money.

Jens Martignoni: Money and power. Yeah, it’s true. This is, as I explained before, if you have this viewpoint of that money is a kind of collective agreement, let’s say in a neutral way, then, of course, it also means that the collective can force some individuals to behave differently. That’s very difficult to avoid.

But as we have invented democracy and other instruments to handle this a little bit more intelligently, I think the money of the future would include very strong input from the users. So I could kind of participate in decisions or maybe let’s say it better. It would make my decisions more clear to me and to the system. For example, the purchasing decisions could be translated directly into systems behavior and the kind of feedback. For example if in one system everybody would like to buy from the neighboring system some very nice stuff, all go there and buy it and there is an exchange and they can do it and then of course what’s going to happen is there will be a trade imbalance and the neighboring system sooner or later will ask back to them and say hey listen You buy and buy, but what can you offer? Because we work a lot and deliver. So what can you offer? And if you don’t offer anything, then it will get more expensive for you. The exchange rate will change.

So you could have a kind of direct feedback, if you start with your purchasing decisions. And, for example, also you could implement some kind of ordering system. You could pre-order things to be made for you later or they need a manufacturing time. And by this pre-ordering, the whole price could be calculated. And if everybody pre-orders and we have a lot of people who can work on that and then it will be a cheap price and so on. And that will be, so you decide directly and your influence really directly and you can see your direct influence in the system by your economical behavior. That would be one thing to make it more transparent. And also, of course, you’re working in today’s system. The money is not used in that way, that it’s really a direct feedback. It goes to the brick, or it’s trying out somewhere else. And on the other side, also, a very important part is to decide about the future. All investments, if you invest something, it means you prepare something for the future. A real investment, not a financial investment. And a real investment, for example, you build a plant, it will be able to produce whatever in the future. And now you invest and then in the future you have that plant and it will produce and you will not have another plant. It’s that plant. So you decide about the future.

And I think that’s a very important part to implement also in the monetary system that investing is done by democratic measures. You will decide” where do we want to go, really? So I think I started to answer your questions by the kind of solutions, but of course the problems are now there because still the simplest way of a monetary system is to impose it on the people and to use the credit system to suppress the people. If you get credit, you have to pay it back and the interest you have to pay additionally. So you have to get more money back than you get. And all these things should, of course, be reduced because otherwise you land where we are. It’s a power game. It’s good to hoard as much money as possible and so on and so on. And the more money you have, the more power you have. And in the design of new currencies, this must be as far as possible prevented. Yeah, for example, if you hoard money, you’re a systemic parasite.

All the other people have an obligation to work for that money that is in the system. So they have to wait until you spend it. And if you don’t spend it, maybe they die from hunger because they never could get your money. And so this is a kind of parasitic behavior and you can, yeah, that should be very transparent in a new system, in the existing system. It’s the opposite, of course.

Billy: We’re modeling in these complementary currencies the kind of currency we’d like to have for the future, democratically driven, even if it’s not that way today. I like that.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, not one answer. So you can have more democratic banking, for example. It’s a good step because the banks should be the investing part.

Billy: They’re deputized, right, by the government to sort of oversee that investment.

Jens Martignoni: Yes, and also this is, of course, the strange behavior of today’s economy that the government, at least the government, all people, democratic, should take the future of the state into its hands. But it has sold it to the banks somehow. And of course, then if you do that, I think that’s also a kind of secondary effect that the taxes become somehow meaningless or strange or kind of punishment. Because by the taxes, you don’t pay into your future. You pay for something and the future is going somewhere else, and the banks are lending the money to other people than the ones that would be good for the home, for the state, for example. So I think the failure of the state is very closely knitted to this behavior to this money that is not issued by the state. I don’t say it would be better in today’s state to really issue the money by the state, but at least it’s a big thing that it was separated from the state. I think you had such struggles in the US with the greenback and so on. And yeah, it’s really a pity that it was not, at least, it has not been understood by theory. And then we would have seen where we went.

Scott: I have one more provocation for you. It’s something I wrestle with all the time. And the only word I can use to describe this sort of question that I pose for myself is topology. The way that we kind of spatialize money, the way we imagine money as a kind of spatial arrangement. Of course, money is temporal, as we’ve been talking about. But it is also spatial and we have different models and imaginaries of spatialization. Some might be more helpful than others. And in some of your answers to our questions, what I would say is that you were using a topology of what I might call adjacency, where you have a system here and a system over there. And then the question is the border and where they interface.

I definitely think that there is a lot of explanatory power in this adjacency model, but I also in my own work have found limits to this adjacency model. I don’t have the end-all be-all answer. However, I tend to find that what adjacency leaves out is a topology of nesting, of deputizing and nesting of small systems and big systems. This opens up possibilities for analysis, but also for creative provisioning that adjacency will not. I’m curious, how does that strike you? Does that make some sense? How would you respond to that?

Jens Martignoni: Absolutely. No, no, you’re absolutely right. So maybe I went a bit too far because in the sense that to have a clear picture or a clearer picture, you could use this adjacency model and to separate first everything a little bit and you see, ah, this is going from here to here and from here to here. But of course, this is not really the reality. As you say, everything is nested. And where is the point of, what do you say, nestiness? The point where everything is nested, of course, it’s me, it’s you. It’s the human. The human decision maker, the person who uses the money, is the multi-agent nester. So I have my emeralds, I have my Swiss francs, I have my dollars, I have my berkshires. And of course, if you start to include the human itself in this picture, then you will go back.

First, it becomes completely different again, but maybe you still can keep the systemic simplicity a little bit in the back. But you have to deal with other effects like psychological or every moment. For example, we have such stories that in like, I think even 200 years ago or 250 years ago, one person in Zurich had a purse with about 30 different currencies, coins. And so because it was always very small currencies like the canton had one, the city had another one. So, if you have to go to buy something you to pay in different currency for the same. I think if you would have this silver coin, Austrian silver coin, and I have Basel copper coins. No, no, no, the Basel ones I don’t want. They are not good. So give me, give me this one from Paris. Yeah, okay, okay. So it was more like that. And I think this is, this is an important tier where we have to research too, or later on, maybe if we have a clear picture of the first, we can go to the second and look, and maybe go back.

I see it more like this. And that’s very crucial, of course, also what’s happening inside, because money is a kind of hybrid technique. It somehow exists as a paper or even a number, but it somehow is only in our heads. It’s somehow a kind of mental. And it’s like a hybrid thing. And so this is a big issue, how we could deal with that. Yes.

Billy: It seems like a good place to conclude our conversation. Jens Martignoni, thank you so much for joining us on Money on the Left.

Jens Martignoni: Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), William Saas & Scott Ferguson (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)

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