This month, Money on the Left shares audio selections from our participation at the Public Banking Institute’s national conference: Public Banking for Public Prosperity: A Declaration of Financial Independence. The conference took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from October 22 through October 24, 2026.
Convened in the city where American banking started almost three hundred years ago, the event featured vital contributions from progressive leaders, including Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, Ralph Nader, and over twenty others from around the United States and Canada. Building upon the U.S. tradition of public self-financing through the creation of bank credit, academics, bankers, regulators, politicians, and civic activists engaged with intensive presentations designed to catalyze a national movement now underway in over thirty locales.
The episode begins with Scott Ferguson presenting Money on the Left’s overarching vision of Democratic Public Finance in which he argues against zero-sum logics of austerity that treat money as a scarce, privately hoarded resource tied solely to public and private revenues. Instead, Ferguson frames money as an endogenous, malleable public architecture of credit and debt capable of bypassing the revenue chokepoint to directly finance social and ecological care. Because his live address was condensed due to time limitations, listeners are encouraged to read the unabridged manuscript here, which features Money on the Left’s full argument for Public Grant-Making Banks, designed to grant public money in addition to making traditional loans.
The episode then transitions to a panel featuring Tyler Suksawat, Benjamin Wilson, and Billy Saas, who expand on the practical and theoretical horizons of Democratic Public Finance. Suksawat details our proposal for “the Loop,” explaining how establishing a sub-federal public bank to buy municipal debt stops interest payments from leaking to Wall Street creditors, thereby transforming public debt into a self-growing circuit that finances public goods. Wilson then challenges how the public uses language, metrics, and accounting to value communities, lands, and infrastructures. He implores us to get creative with how we value our shared world in order to drastically expand what the public sector presently harbors and can do. Finally, Saas explicates Money on the Left’s historical commitments to both critical and generative thought. He notes that while we share the broader left’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” to unmask exploitative power structures, we equally insist on actively pursuing a “hermeneutics of provision,” which imaginatively mobilizes money’s inexhaustible public powers to solve today’s urgent social and environmental crises.
Video footage of the full conference is still being edited, but the raw session recordings can be viewed on the Public Banking Institute’s YouTube channel: Day One, Day Two, and Day Three.
Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure
Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com
Transcript forthcoming …
* Thank you to Zachary Nosbisch for the episode graphic, Nahneen Kula for the theme tune, and Thomas Chaplin for the transcript.
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