Reclaiming Money’s Public Powers for Imaginative Intersectional Politics

By Rob Hawkes

Alongside my Money on the Left colleagues Will Beaman and Tyler Suksawat, I recently joined Gus Dunn-Hindle of the Maine People’s Alliance to discuss public money and public banking on the Beacon Podcast. During the conversation, I cited our podcast’s regular opening announcement that Money on the Left is ‘a monthly interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics.’ The imaginative part of this is especially important – when we free up our imaginations to think about monetary design in new ways, we can begin to move beyond the austerity mindset that condemns millions to poverty, even in the wealthy societies of the global north, while treating extreme inequality and social exclusion as natural and inevitable facts of life.

Many of today’s most intractable challenges, from crumbling public services to the accelerating ecological crisis, look very different when we cease to view them through the orthodox prism of monetary scarcity, privation, and limitation. For the former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, ‘the failure to rise to the challenge of the nature and climate emergencies’ is reflective of an ‘imagination deficit’ and ‘a failure to imagine that a better world is possible’. Indeed, as Cory Doctorow points out, the ‘true meaning’ of Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan ‘There is no alternative’ (TINA) ‘isn’t “No alternative is possible,” but rather, “Stop trying to think of an alternative.”’ Speaking as a sci-fi writer, Doctorow likes to quip that ‘thinking of alternatives is literally my job.’ In Doctorow’s fiction, most notably in 2023’s The Lost Cause, the envisioning of an alternative future engages directly with the emancipatory potential of democratic public finance, when a character recalls a moment in the past when ‘Towns and universities started minting their own currencies’ (a nod to Money on the Left’s Uni Currency Project). In the novel, this ‘wildcat money’ becomes an engine of democratic possibility and change.

This is one of the many reasons why cultural analysis – from the MCU to literary modernism – has always been central to the Money on the Left project. As I wrote last month, ‘what connects my approach to the interpretation of cultural, monetary, and political forms to our group’s proposals for public banking, municipal bond issuance, and university finance’ is the framework we at MotL call ‘the public money paradigm’. And ‘when we understand that inequality and exclusionary violence are built into the logic of private money we can begin to imagine new possibilities for monetary design founded on democratic inclusion, collectivity, and care.’

This is also why the intersectional part of ‘imaginative intersectional politics’ is vital. From the perspective of the private-money-based orthodoxy, the pursuit of justice appears as a series of either/or battles where the liberation of the marginalised can only ever come at another’s expense. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that this summer’s hounding of Jason Arday, an autistic black professor, first out of British academia and then to his shocking and untimely death has taken place in the midst of an increasingly brutal financial crisis in the UK’s higher education sector (which, as The Sunday Times recently revealed, saw universities collectively spending over £400 million excluding people from its workforce through redundancy schemes in 2024-25 alone). This is not to suggest that the austerity wrecking ball that’s currently trashing courses, departments, disciplines, and institutions across UKHE was responsible for Professor Arday’s death in any direct or uncomplicated sense. As Kieran Rose argues, the ‘ONLY reason’ Jason Arday’s story became a ‘story’ after he was publicly accused of plagiarism by a known eugenicist was ‘because of racism’. Nevertheless, the fact that UKHE has been systematically starved of funds while simultaneously facing relentless attacks on its commitments to equality, diversity, and inclusion, has undoubtedly damaged the already precarious safety of marginalised groups and individuals such as Arday within our academic communities.

The vision of zero-sum exchange that defines the private money paradigm also corresponds closely with the rationale underpinning attempts to split the queer community by pitting LGB against TQIA2+ as well as the ‘overdiagnosis’ panics that, in the UK, have coalesced around Dame Uta Frith’s divisive and exclusionary views on autism and Channel 4’s irresponsible documentary ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ Since March, when a piece appeared in the TES titled ‘why I no longer think autism is a spectrum’, Frith, an autism researcher since the 1960s, has repeatedly been given a platform across new media (including podcasts), legacy media, and academic publications from which to take issue with the present interpretation of the diagnostic criteria for autism and especially to question the validity of late diagnosis. Meanwhile, ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ aired on 18 August and asked ‘whether ADHD is a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder, or a social construct’. As Rose explains: ‘These aren’t isolated stories, instead, they sit within a much wider journalistic ecology in which Autism and ADHD repeatedly appear alongside welfare expenditure, SEND budgets, NHS demand, school absence, social-care pressures and questions about who genuinely deserves support.’

In each of these cases, then, those whose full participation in society is impeded by racism, transphobia, and/or ableism are regarded as competing for scarce resources in a world where there is never enough to go around. In a private money universe of barter-like trade-offs, care for the vulnerable must always come at the cost of someone else’s suffering. By contrast, reclaiming money’s public powers for imaginative intersectional politics means recognising that monetary design choices shape and condition everything from our hierarchies of academic privilege to university funding crises, battles over trans rights, SEND provision in schools, and the wider recognition, accommodation, and support afforded to disabled people. Picturing another world is not the same thing as bringing one into being, of course, but freeing our imaginations from the austere limits of the private money paradigm is an important first step towards a better, more inclusive, and sustainable future.

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Money Is Weird

by Rob Hawkes

Isn’t it strange that social inclusion and climate justice appear unaffordable, but not the status quo?

In July, I presented at the Weird Modernisms conference at Loughborough University. My talk (which you can read here) argued that money is weird. This may sound like a rather bizarre claim; let me explain.

The word ‘weird’ suggests strangeness or oddness but, of course, also carries connotations of the magical and the supernatural (think of Macbeth’s ‘weird sisters’). Indeed, evidence of money’s uncanny ability to ‘emerge from thin air’ is all around us, from government spending to bank lending, from complementary currencies to video game coins, and from high street store credit to crypto. And yet, our media and political debates remain dominated by the insistence that there is simply not enough money to fight economic injustice or to avert climate catastrophe. Stop trying to imagine a different, better world, they scream at us. We’d all like to see less poverty, properly funded/functioning public services, a liveable planet, etc., but what can you do if the markets aren’t in favour? Sure, we can always pay for wars, but a socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable society is unaffordable. Weird, huh?

Perhaps it is unsurprising that the inherent strangeness of money and the language we use to discuss it is ignored, overlooked, and repressed in mainstream discourse. Just as the economic orthodoxy functions to preserve existing social hierarchies – which are simultaneously patriarchal, white supremacist, imperialist, classist, ableist, hetero- and neuronormative – the way we routinely discuss public finance and the limitations we impose on monetary design are thoroughly normative and rest on the exclusion of the inexpressible weirdness of money and the humans who create it.

At the conclusion of my talk in Loughborough, I turned to the words of the neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker, who explains in Neuroqueer Heresies (2021) that: ‘Neuronormativity and heteronormativity, in essence, are systems of artificial restriction on human potential. By their very nature, they limit our possibilities. To neuroqueer is to refuse to be constrained by those limits.’ It is no coincidence that neurodivergent people have often been dismissed and/or vilified as weird (and, by extension, as magical, uncanny, supernatural, even monstrous), but as Walker also affirms, ‘anyone can liberate themselves from the strictures of normativity.’ In asserting that money is weird, it is my hope that we can all ‘unzip’ our ‘normal-person monetary imaginations’ and refuse to be constrained by the artificial restrictions the economic orthodoxy imposes on our understanding of money’s limitless creative potential. The status quo relies on the exclusion of weirdness, strangeness, and otherness to maintain its illusion of affordability. To build an inclusive and sustainable future, we’ll need to recognise and celebrate money as malleable, redesignable, and thus much weirder than we’ve been taught to think.

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Prototyping Democratic Public Finance With the Seattle Loop

By Will Beaman

Seattle is once again being told that a projected budget deficit requires difficult choices about which public commitments the city can continue to honor. Councilmember Robert Kettle recently used the city’s projected $175 million shortfall to call for a budget “realignment” around essential needs, explicitly opening the door to withdrawing from public work judged to benefit only particular groups. Money on the Left’s Seattle Loop model offers a way to enlarge the city’s financial capacity while reorganizing the relationships among public commitments, institutions, and constituencies.

The Seattle Loop is a proposal to establish a municipal bank that can purchase Seattle’s bonds. When the city pays interest on those bonds, the money flows back from the bank into the city’s own general fund, where it can support further lending and public investment. This creates a continuing circuit between the city’s commitments and the financial capacity available to fulfill them. Rather than allowing municipal interest payments to leave the public realm as income for private creditors, the Loop keeps that income circulating through Seattle’s own institutions.

The Loop also offers a prototype for a different way of governing. Progressive programs are usually introduced into a fiscal system that treats the public budget as a fixed quantity to be divided. Every commitment consequently appears to reduce the amount available for another commitment. Political constituencies enter the budget process as competing claims on scarce money, even when meeting their needs would strengthen the same social fabric.

This structure shapes how people understand one another. A new public commitment comes to appear as a cost imposed on everyone whose own needs remain unmet. The budget thus translates social interdependence into fiscal competition. People who depend on different institutions are encouraged to ask whose program must shrink and whose expectations must be deferred.

Even progressive governments can enlarge the funds available for public provision and distribute them more fairly while remaining caught in this antagonistic structure. So long as public needs must be assembled into a finite package, the pressure to rank them does not disappear. It shifts toward defining which commitments are sufficiently basic, universal, or broadly beneficial to deserve inclusion. Those categories can always be narrowed, and people whose needs are less easily represented as common can be cut away from the public they are supposed to share. Coalition then becomes an exercise in negotiating which differences the budget will recognize and which forms of life must be excluded or deferred.

Once we question the background assumption that money is inherently scarce, however, the social fabric comes into view as an additive ecology. A well-supported institution expands the capacities of the people and institutions around it. Its workers receive income and the communities it serves gain resources to participate in public life. These effects cascade throughout society, far beyond the line item where the initial spending appears.

Conventional public budgeting has difficulty representing this additive quality. It records the financial commitment at the point where money is spent, while the real capacities provisioned through that commitment are represented only where they generate profits. What appears in the budget as a collection of separate costs functions socially as a mutually reinforcing ecology.

The Seattle Loop gives this ecology a more honest financial expression. The city’s commitments become part of the asset base of a public bank, while the bank’s activity generates income and financial capacity that can support further commitments. Budget priorities enter a circuit in which spending helps sustain the institutions that make additional spending possible.

All of this works because money itself is an expandable accounting instrument, even when the productive capacities it mobilizes cannot be expanded all at once. Those capacities can impose real limits on what a city can accomplish at any given moment. The Loop makes those limits questions of coordination and sequencing rather than reasons to treat every new commitment as a subtraction from a fixed fund. It asks what Seattle can produce now, where additional capacity must be developed, and how public investment can expand what becomes possible over time.

This changes the meaning of fiscal responsibility. Responsibility extends beyond keeping each commitment within its assigned budgetary container to designing relationships through which public institutions can support one another over time. The city can govern its financial system as part of the social ecology it is responsible for sustaining.

For progressives, this points toward an additive conception of coalition. Constituencies do not enter public life solely as claimants seeking their share of a common fund. Their flourishing can expand the capacities on which others depend. Public finance can organize these connections, making solidarity into a durable institutional relationship rather than an appeal for groups to accept sacrifices on one another’s behalf.

The Seattle Loop is a local proposal, but its political implications extend beyond Seattle. It suggests that progressive governance can build institutions through which public commitments accumulate, reinforce one another, and generate new possibilities for collective action. A budget that forces constituencies to experience one another as costs will continually weaken the public it is supposed to serve. An additive financial architecture can help our democracy become more stable and resilient through the very act of providing for itself.

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Measure for Measure: A Shakespearean Defense of the NYC Tenants’ Rights Movement

by Antonia Marrero 

On July 16, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani gathered at the historic Tenement Museum alongside housing advocates and organizers to release New York City’s landmark Rental Ripoff Report. Shaped by testimony from thousands of working-class New Yorkers during the citywide Rental Ripoff Hearings, the report outlines a package of 23 policy reforms designed to hold negligent repeat-offender landlords accountable, enforce basic housing conditions, and legally recognize tenant unions.

Taking the stage to deliver a powerful address was Antonia Marrero, an organizer with the 196 & 214 Rockaway Parkway Tenant Union and a member of Housing Organizers for People’s Empowerment (HOPE). In a speech invoking Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Marrero likened the moral hypocrisy of powerful elites in 17th-century Vienna to the systemic abuses of modern corporate landlords, issuing a ringing call for tenant power, union solidarity, and housing justice.

Following the event, right-wing media outlets troublingly singled out Marrero’s address for mockery, attacking her characterization of evictions as a form of social violence and deriding the press conference as a “freak show.”

We at Money on the Left reject this sensationalized right-wing framing. To claim that displacement, homelessness, and the state-sanctioned removal of families from their homes are anything other than violent is an exercise in bad faith. Eviction is not a neutral transaction; it is a profound act of physical, emotional, and social violence visited upon working communities. Housing is a fundamental human right, tenants’ rights must be fiercely protected, and tenant organizing remains our strongest defense against predatory landlord harassment.

Below is the full transcript of Antonia Marrero’s speech, published here with her blessing.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Antonia Marrero, and I am thrilled to be a member of HOPE Tenant Union: Housing Organizers for People’s Empowerment. HOPE facilitates tenant unity, HOPE offers civic education, and HOPE insists on the high road, the path of justice and housing for all. I was honored to participate in this year’s Rental Ripoff Hearings, and I want to thank Michael Tiger, General Counsel of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, who listened to my testimony and welcomed my questions with kindness. Mayor Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings will echo for generations–the way the lessons of this museum have increasingly resonated for generations.

When I think about HOPE, I think about Shakespeare. In the comedy Measure for Measure–set in Vienna, a city famous for its social housing–the character Isabella talks about the political machine. She says: “[A]uthority, though it err like others, hath yet a kind of medicine in itself, that skins the vice o’ the top.” Isabella, the novice nun, says: “[K]ings, landlords, bishops, judges, and inspectors, all these powerful figures … are subject to mistakes; but because they have power, their mistakes have little consequences, at least, little consequences to them.”

But Sister Isabella also says: “Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” What my heart knows is that we are living in an epic chapter of history. An epic is not a romance, it’s not a melodrama. An epic is the story of a new order. Our city is turning the corner on Tenant Power. When we organize, we win results. The Mamdani Administration is emboldening us so that we no longer tolerate the violence of evictions as a matter of “business as usual.”

My landlord owns dozens of buildings, but he is not a steward of public trust. In fact, it is the opposite. Since 2005, I survived three faulty eviction cases. I have lost three friends to eviction, two of whom lived on my floor, and for the past year, our supportive housing neighbors have been dissuaded from joining our tenant union.

But today’s report shows there is a path forward.

I am grateful for Mayor Mamdani’s leadership, the commitment to improving our housing quality and holding “low road” landlords accountable, and the commitment to having tenant leaders — not just real estate leaders — at the decision-making table. Mayor Mamdani’s Rental Ripoff Hearings will be remembered in the Book of Lady Liberty, whose torch beacons the homeless, the tempest-tost, to our shores, so the greatest cosmopolis of interdependent neighborhoods that the world has ever known will set a new standard of what humanity can achieve when we prioritize collaboration over dominion, when we prioritize love over profit.

See a video of the full press conference here.

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Euthanize the Rentier: Seven Steps to Democratic Renewal

By Will Beaman

John Maynard Keynes’s call for the “euthanasia of the rentier” has long occupied an uneasy place on the left. In the decades after World War II, as a domesticated “bastard Keynesianism” became part of Cold War economic governance, the phrase often came to symbolize an idealist hope that class antagonism could be managed away through lower interest rates and expert macroeconomic policy. Yet Keynes’s metaphor permits a more capacious program than interest-rate management alone. Read today, amid the renewed possibility of left governance after Trump, the “euthanasia of the rentier” can be taken up as a deeper provocation. Rather than asking how to protect democracy from finance, we must ask how to redesign finance so that democratic commitments become the highest-priority promises in the system.
 
Today, promises to private creditors are treated as inviolable while democratic commitments—to employment, education, housing, public health, reparations, libraries, and ecological repair—are treated as mere aspirations to be fulfilled only sometimes as discretionary expenditures.
 
Euthanizing the rentier begins with inverting this hierarchy. Private financial claims should remain enforceable only insofar as they do not undermine the standing promises a democracy makes to the people it governs. And that means giving democratic commitments institutional form.
 
Reparations should be recognized by central banking and public finance institutions as a permanent public obligation capable of capitalizing the institutions charged with carrying it out.
 
Libraries, schools, and guaranteed employment should be recognized as productive public assets rather than accounting costs. Public balance sheets should be organized around expanding democratic capacity instead of maximizing returns to creditors. What does this mean concretely and institutionally?
 
First, it means establishing a hierarchy of public promises. Employment, housing, health, education, climate obligations, reparations, and basic public services become primary public commitments. When private financial promises conflict with this, they’re restructured and/or written off completely.
 
Second, it means turning democratic obligations into financeable public assets. Law should authorize institutions to record the capacities that reparations, the right to a job, etc. create as durable public assets and to issue claims against the continuing public commitment to maintain them.
 
Third, changing central bank collateral rules. Central banks should accept bonds and obligations issued for democratically authorized purposes, purchase them directly or through public intermediaries, and provide permanent refinancing facilities. Private investors should have no role to play.
 
Fourth, it means building public balance sheet institutions wherever it’s possible. Public banks, reparations trusts, employment authorities, housing funds, and municipal finance facilities should be empowered to hold public assets, issue promises of their own and collateralize public commitments.
 
Fifth, cut out bond markets. There are other ways to tell if an investment is sustainable than if it makes money for a rich person. Charter public banks and have them purchase bonds and deposit interests in public coffers like Money on the Left‘s “Seattle Loop” plan.

Sixth, formalize the breaking of creditor power by making creditor claims revisable by design rather than only during emergencies.

Lastly (seventhly), reform public accounting. Fiscal rules should measure whether spending creates and sustains real capacities, rather than treating all public outlays as costs. Record jobs, functioning institutions, public knowledge, and social stability as assets and capacities, not as costs.

In summary, euthanizing the rentier should prompt a constitutional reordering of public finance: Democratic commitments must be formalized as durable claims on the state, institutions must be created to carry and refinance those claims, and private creditors must lose the power to decide whether those promises are affordable.

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Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust in Fitzgerald, Ford, and Larsen; or, Isn’t Money Weird?

By Rob Hawkes

What follows is a slightly expanded version of a talk I gave at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference at Loughborough University, UK (1-4 July 2026), a collaboration between the UK-based British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) and the US-based Modernist Studies Association (MSA). ‘Weird Modernisms’ brought over 400 delegates together in the midst of an escalating crisis in the UK’s higher education sector (UKHE), which has seen multiple course closures, departmental restructures, and over 30,000 job losses in the last 3 years. Around the world, many academics face similar threats and much worse, and yet, at a time of rising authoritarianism and ecological breakdown, the critical capacity to think beyond the status quo that universities exist to foster and expand could not be more vital. My acute frustration with the ‘shrinking’ of UKHE[1] is that it is driven by a disastrous funding model designed according to the logic of what I describe in my recent writing as the ‘private money paradigm’.[2] As Scott Ferguson and I wrote last year, the private money paradigm:

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.[3]

As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, however, money is much weirder and more capacious than the austere and exclusionary monetary politics that’s now threatening the future of our universities (and much more besides) will ever allow.

At ‘Weird Modernisms’, I shared these thoughts during a panel on ‘Weird Epistemologies’, chaired by Ruth Clemens and also featuring brilliant presentations by Anna Dijkstra and Graham Borland. My essay considers three modernist writers whose works are centrally concerned with sexual, racial, and classed forms of passing. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), we learn of the transformation of ‘Mr Nobody from Nowhere’ Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby, a transgression of class boundaries that takes place in a novel where several characters, including the narrator, may also be straight-passing queer people.[4] In Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, a light-skinned African American woman, passes so successfully for a white person that even her racist husband is unaware of her background, and, in Ford Madox Ford’s The Rash Act (1933), Henry Martin Aluin Smith, an American who has been bankrupted by the Wall Street Crash, and Henry Monckton Allard Smith, a British millionaire, switch places after both plan to commit suicide on the same day. Thus, all of these texts feature characters who assume, perform, or inhabit identities that may be regarded as deceptive, fraudulent, or fake. Nevertheless, each novel also complicates the epistemological basis on which these performed selves might be understood to be straightforwardly ‘false’ (or indeed ‘true’). Building on the claim recently advanced by the Money on the Left editorial collective that ‘money is queer’, this essay adds the analogous observation that money is weird.[5] Here, I argue that Fitzgerald’s, Ford’s, and Larsen’s characters encapsulate and express money’s epistemological weirdness, due in part to the way their performances both problematise and depend upon trust. Thus, while financial circumstances appear both to drive and facilitate the deceptive acts of Jay Gatsby, Clare Kendry, and Henry Martin Aluin Smith, they also point towards what I describe elsewhere as the ‘(un)conditional openness’ without which neither monetary tokens nor experimental novels could do the weird things they do in and to our worlds.[6]

Before I say more about the three novels already mentioned, I want to go back to the book I’ve probably thought more about than any other in the last quarter of a century. As it happens, I gave my first ever academic conference paper almost twenty years ago, in September 2006, at the University of Birmingham. At that conference, I considered Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, beginning with this passage:

For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart—or of his own? I don’t mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case—and until one can do that a “character” is of no use to anyone.[7]

Two decades later, I continue to find this an endlessly fascinating moment in John Dowell’s narrative and I think the reason for this is its epistemological weirdness. Famously, The Good Soldier is obsessed with the problem of knowing: can we really know other people? Did Dowell ever truly know the real Edward Ashburnham (the supposed ‘good soldier’ of the novel’s title)? In Ford’s hands these questions also attain a metatextual dimension: what is the point of writing novels if we cannot know the characters that inhabit them?[8] Indeed, this points towards two ideas that are in productive tension throughout modernist fiction: a profound sense of the textuality of the self, its construction in discourse and its shifting unknowability, alongside the modernist commitment to descending deeper into the self than ever before, as exemplified by the development of the stream-of-consciousness technique.

It is with this tension in mind that I turn to Ford’s 1933 novel The Rash Act. Prior to its publication, Ford described The Rash Act as: ‘the beginning of a trilogy that is meant to do for the post-war world and the Crisis what the Tietjens tetralogy [better known as Parade’s End] did for the war’.[9] So, for Ford at least, The Rash Act was up there with one of his very best works and it was also very specifically about ‘the Crisis’ (in other words, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed). Like Parade’s End, The Rash Act is a time-shifted, impressionist, and fragmented narrative which makes extensive use of free-indirect style. In another sense, however, The Rash Act is a quite simple prince-and-pauper fairy-tale in which Henry Martin, a ‘down-and-out’ American, and the British millionaire Henry Monckton exchange identities after both attempt the rash act of suicide.[10] While Hugh succeeds in killing himself, Henry fails, but sustains a blow to his face which (along with the fact that the two look very similar) enables him to assume the other’s identity. This is from the moment just after Henry Martin’s failed suicide attempt:

A voice said:
‘This is Monsieur Monckton Smeez. . . .’
Another:
‘Vous ne le dites pas! . . . You don’t say! I wish I had his money. But not at the moment his face.’ […]
If he wasn’t at the bottom of the Mediterranean he was at the side of a road under some plane trees and he had changed his identity.[11]

So, immediately upon being mistaken for Hugh Monkton, Henry is thinking in terms of changing his identity and money is already part of the equation.

Henry Martin writhed. […] He tried to say:
‘You must not say that.’ But they were binding his jaw over his head with a lint bandage. . . . After all he had wished to be Hugh Monckton. Now he was.[12]

This refers the reader back to a scene earlier in the book, when the two men meet for the first time in a Provençal nightclub and Henry experiences an intense desire to switch places with Hugh. However, beyond the fantasy of trading places that the novel appears to offer, it also asks typically weird modernist questions about identity and the self: two important markers of Hugh Monckton’s identity here are his money and a facial scar that he acquired during the First World War. During the course of his failed suicide attempt, Henry sustains a similar injury and is thus mistaken for Hugh. If he gets his money and also gets his scar, does this transform Henry into Hugh?

Nella Larsen’s Passing, like The Rash Act, is a fragmented modernist narrative containing hermeneutic gaps, time-shifts, multiple ambiguities, and epistemological uncertainties. Ittells the story of two African American women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, both of whom are light-skinned enough to pass for white. While Irene only passes occasionally, Clare is married to a wealthy white supremacist who does not know and would not take kindly to knowing that she has, in the novel’s own terms, quote-unquote ‘Negro blood’.[13] Importantly, Clare, we learn, started passing in the first place to escape from poverty as well as from racism and so, like The Rash Act, Passing centres on a character who is motivated by money to take on or create a new identity. This is from the second chapter of Passing, as Irene and Clare discuss the topic of ‘passing’ for white:

“Tell me, honestly, haven’t you ever thought of ‘passing’?”
Irene answered promptly: “No. Why should I?” And […] hastened to add: “You see, Clare, I’ve everything I want. Except, perhaps, a little more money.”
At that Clare laughed […]. “Of course,” she declared, “that’s what everybody wants, just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don’t blame them. Money’s awfully nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ’Rene, that it’s even worth the price.”[14]

Here, Larsen makes a very direct link between passing and money. The act of passing has apparently enabled Clare to get all that she wants in life (‘what everybody wants’) but it also entails a cost: ‘all things considered […] it’s even worth the price’. But, once again, there is also a sense that passing destabilises the categories and the hierarchies that both race and money have hitherto functioned to hold in place. Both novels, therefore, explore identities as discursively constructed, performed, and open to negotiation, contestation, and creative reimagining, while also placing money at the centre of their narratives of passing.

This essay is titled ‘Weird Epistemologies of Money and Trust’ and there is, perhaps, an obvious sense in which the novels discussed so far raise questions to do with trust and/or trickery, given their concentration on characters who ‘pretend’ to be people other than their ‘true’ selves. However, I would argue that, where questions of money and trust are concerned, these stories are about more than fraudulent and deceptive central characters. As I mentioned earlier, my recent work has made a distinction between the ‘private money paradigm’ of mainstream discourse and the ‘public money paradigm’, which my fellow members of the Money on the Left Editorial Collective and I advance in our writing and our activism. The private money paradigm dominates orthodox economic thought, teaching, and rhetoric as well as framing our political debates (see for example, the idea that a new Prime Minister needs the permission of ‘the markets’ to act in the public interest).[15] It insists that money originates in private exchange, that it is finite, scarce, and that ‘difficult decisions’ about who to exclude and marginalise must always be made according to the rules of ‘budget responsibility’.

This narrative of privation, limitation, and zero-sum binary choices is embedded in the transactional logic of exchange that we can trace back at least as far as Adam Smith’s infamous claim that there is ‘a certain propensity in human nature […] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’.[16] And, indeed, despite there being no historical or anthropological evidence to support this view, most economics textbooks continue to explain that money is a ‘medium of exchange’ that emerged as a solution to the ‘double-coincidence-of-wants problem’ of barter.[17] This, for example, is from Case, Fair, and Oster’s widely-used Principles of Economics:

A barter system requires a double coincidence of wants for trade to take place. […] Some agreed-to medium of exchange […] neatly eliminates the double-coincidence-of-wants problem. […] Money is a lubricant in the functioning of a market economy.[18]

We can only speculate as to why the language of lubrication is so pervasive in economic writing, but it is echoed in Robert Putnam’s influential Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, where it is also associated with the concept of trust:

A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than a distrustful society, for the same reason that money is more efficient than barter. Honesty and trust lubricate the inevitable frictions of social life.[19]

This is just one instance of a pervasive trend in the scholarly discourse on trust, which I’ve been tracing across a number of disciplines for quite some years now, and which frequently frames trusting in transactional terms as, if you like, a kind of barter system: I’ll trust you if you trust me back; I’ll trust you if I can be certain you won’t double cross me.[20] Here is another, even more recent, example from Philippa Ryan’s Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies (2019): ‘Trust has proven to be integral to economic development and human security, because trust is central to exchange’.[21] My contention in all of this is that strategic, transactional, or, indeed, ‘calculative trust’ is not trust at all;[22] and that a much better way to understand the concept is to think of it in terms of the openness to the other that Derek Attridge describes as essential to ‘responsible reading’.[23] Indeed, as I’ve previously put it, the ‘openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness’ (a list to which we might also add weirdness) that is ‘fostered and demanded by experimental fiction’ (and, indeed, other works of art) is much closer than we usually think to the trust inherent in the acts of using and creating money, which entail both performative promises to pay and collective acknowledgements of interdependence: IOU or, rather, we owe one another.[24]

For the purposes of this essay, what I want to highlight is that, while there is a way of reading both The Rash Act and Passing as stories in which identities are exchanged in barter-like transactions – Henry for Hugh (which, incidentally, is the title of the 1934 sequel to The Rash Act),[25] and African American for white – and while this reading might also foreground the idea of trust – other characters must trust that Henry is Hugh or that Clare is white to enable them to pass – such interpretations would miss important aspects of these texts. Indeed, from our perspective at Money on the Left, the weird epistemologies and malleabilities that we find in modernist texts, when it comes to questions of identity and selfhood, are neither separate nor separable from public money’s always-already ungraspable, capacious, and open-ended weirdness. So, however tempting it may be to conclude that, although Passing and The Rash Act complicate fixed ideas about identities – presenting them as shifting, ambiguous, and discursively constructed – they perpetuate an orthodox understanding of money as a realm of transactional zero-sum exchange, my colleagues at Money on the Left and I would say ‘whoa, hold on!’

As I mentioned at the beginning, at MotL we have been affirming for some time now that ‘money is queer’. As Scott Ferguson explains in his 2025 article ‘Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?’:

By this, we mean not only that public money should be mobilized to serve LGBTQ2+ communities, but more profoundly that money as a social medium is never as straight or alienating as it feigns to be. Like language, money’s many words, sights, sounds, smells and feels never communicate exactly what they intend.[26]

Even more recently, Lea Steininger has added, in an article published just a couple of months ago (and which I heartily recommend):

Just as sexual/gender identities are not fixed but constructed through discourse and power, so too are economic goods and services not stable, preexisting entities. [… M]oney itself is queer in the sense that it embodies polyvalent and contestable public structures and performances, which cannot be reduced to the narrow definitions offered by dominant economic ideologies.[27]

My contention here is that the weird epistemologies that we find in modernist fiction can help us to ‘think queerly’ about money in a number of important ways. Moreover, if it is better understood as (un)conditional openness, and not as calculative exchange, then the trust involved both in reading modernist novels and in creating money is much weirder than we may hitherto have recognised. The recent celebration of weird modernisms in Loughborough, then, demands to be recognised not just as an expression of the weird obsessions of weird scholars, but as academia fulfilling what Stefan Collini has called its ‘governing purpose’, that of ‘extending human understanding through open-ended enquiry’.[28] As ‘choreographers of credit’, trust, and openness to newness, strangeness, and otherness, universities foster the very weirdness that the private money paradigm consistently fails to recognise, comprehend, or value.[29]

At the 2024 BAMS conference in Leeds, Scott Ferguson and I presented a paper on The Great Gatsby which we have since developed into a book chapter that came out in April this year in a volume titled Inflationary Modernities, edited by Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown.[30] In that chapter, we discuss this moment, when Nick meets Gatsby for the first time:

He smiled understandingly […]. It was one of those rare smiles […] that you may come across four or five times in life. […] It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished – and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.[31]

Returning to this passage in preparation for ‘Weird Modernisms’, I was struck once again by the way it exemplifies what Scott and I have described as Fitzgerald’s method of ‘impressionist accounting’.[32] Nick’s idea of Gatsby here wavers and blurs before his eyes so that, again, this is not simply a matter of ‘elegant young roughneck’ Jimmy Gatz pretending to be the extravagant party host Jay Gatsby. Instead, Gatsby complicates and queers (or perhaps I should say weirds) orthodox understandings of gendered, raced, classed, and sexual identity while also offering glimpses beyond the private money paradigm’s austere logic of exclusionary violence.

The image at the top of this essay is the ‘Weird Pride’ flag, co-created in 2021 by autistic writers, advocates, and community organisers Fergus Murray and  Quinn Dexter for the first Weird Pride Day (March 4th), ‘a day for people to embrace their weirdness, and reject the stigma associated with being weird’.[33] In Murray’s words: ‘Creativity is driven by divergent perspectives, and squashed by demands for conformity.’[34] To conclude, then, I want to turn to the words of the neuroqueer theorist Nick Walker and to affirm that, by embracing what Walker calls ‘beautiful weirdness’, we can open up new possibilities not only for rejecting normative attitudes to identity but also for jettisoning the economic orthodoxies embedded in the private money paradigm. I suspect that every delegate at the ‘Weird Modernisms’ conference was there because at some point in the past they’d been willing to approach the beautiful weirdness of modernist art with an attitude of openness and trust. As Walker explains:

[A]nyone can liberate themselves from the strictures of normativity. The already neurodivergent can reconnect with, and cultivate previously suppressed or undeveloped capacities, in order to more fully manifest their potentials for beautiful weirdness, and those whom we call neurotypicals are just potential neuroqueer mutant comrades who haven’t yet woken up and figured out how to unzip their normal-person suits.[35]

My hope is that by embracing weird modernisms and by affirming, not only that money is queer but also that money is weirder than the austerity mindset that’s currently doing its utmost to destroy our universities, and indeed our planet, will ever be able to appreciate or contain, we can build a postnormal, inclusive and sustainable world and unzip our ‘normal-person suits’ (along with our normal-person monetary imaginations) together.

[1] I refer here to QMUCU’s indispensable ‘UK HE Shrinking’ webpage: https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

[2] See, for example, Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby: Austere Modernisms, Exuberant Avant-Gardes, and their Orgastic Futures’, in Inflationary Modernities: Literature, Culture, and Economy, ed. Wayne Stables and Kieran Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), 21-47; and Rob Hawkes, ‘“Too paranoid for you?”: Suspicion, Trust and (Post/Meta?)Modern Money in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge’, in Dis/Trusting the Digital World in Imaginative Literature, ed. Adam Kelly and Katerina Pavlidi (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 185-204.

[3] Rob Hawkes and Scott Ferguson, ‘UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance’, Money on the Left, 16 January 2025: https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/01/16/uk-universities-in-crisis-time-to-transform-higher-ed-finance/

[4] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby [1925] (Penguin,1990), 123.

[5] Scott Ferguson, ‘Analog Critique; or, Isn’t Money Queer?’, Public Culture 37.1 (2025), 86.

[6] Rob Hawkes, ‘(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust’, Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice 1.1 (2025), 1-42. See also Rob Hawkes, Scott Ferguson, and Will Beaman, ‘(Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust’, Money on the Left, 4 July 2025: https://moneyontheleft.org/2025/07/04/unconditional-openness-towards-a-neochartalist-theory-of-money-and-trust-2/

[7] Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, ed. Martin Stannard (Norton, 2012), 105-8.

[8] My first academic conference paper subsequently developed into my first academic publication, which was on this very topic. See Rob Hawkes, ‘Personalities of Paper: Characterisation in A Call and The Good Soldier ’, in Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations, ed. Andrzej Gasiorek and Daniel Moore (Rodopi, 2008), 43-60.

[9] Ford Madox Ford, letter to Ray Long, 2 July 1932, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton University Press, 1965), 208.

[10] Ford Madox Ford, The Rash Act [1933] (Carcanet, 1982), 74. For further discussion of this fascinating novel, see Rob Hawkes, ‘Trusting in Provence: Financial Crisis in The Rash Act and Henry for Hugh’, in Ford Madox Ford, France and Provence, ed. Dominique Lemarchal and Claire Davison-Pégon (Rodopi, 2011), 229-42; and ‘Bogus Modernism: Impersonation, Deception and Trust in Ford Madox Ford and Evelyn Waugh’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer, and Christine Reynier (Routledge, 2017), 175-86.

[11] Ford, The Rash Act, 212.

[12] Ford, The Rash Act, 211-12.

[13] Nella Larsen, Passing [1929], in Quicksand and Passing (Serpent’s Tail, 2014), 158.

[14] Larsen, Passing, 160.

[15] ‘Andy Burnham would enter Downing Street already “boxed in” by financial markets’ according to a recent piece in the Guardian by Alex Daniel: ‘“Walking a tightrope”: Burnham’s borrowing plans clash with fiscal realities’, Guardian, 24 June 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/24/walking-a-tightrope-andy-burnham-borrowing-clash-fiscal-realities

[16] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations [1776] (Penguin, 1999), 116.

[17] Karl E. Case, Ray C. Fair, and Sharon M. Oster, Principles of Economics, 10th edn. (Prentice Hall, 2012), 502.

[18] Case et al., Principles of Economics, 502.

[19] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000), 135.

[20] See Hawkes, ‘(Un)conditional Openness’; and Hawkes, ‘“Too paranoid for you?”’ for detailed discussions of these issues.

[21] Philippa Ryan, Trust and Distrust in Digital Economies (Routledge, 2019), 3.

[22] According to Laura Poppo, Kevin Zheng Zhou and Julie J. Li, calculative trust ‘informs expectations by deliberately and rationally assessing forward-looking conditions’ and ‘hinges on the relative values of cheating […] and cooperation’. Poppo et al., ‘When Can You Trust “Trust”? Calculative Trust, Relational Trust, and Supplier Performance’, Strategic Management Journal 37.4 (2016): 725, 724.

[23] See Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004).

[24] Rob Hawkes, ‘How can novels help us think about money… and maybe even save the planet?’, Money on the Left, 26 February 2024: https://moneyontheleft.org/2024/02/26/how-can-novels-help-us-think-about-money-and-maybe-even-save-the-planetguest-lecture/

[25] Ford Madox Ford, Henry for Hugh (J.B. Lippincott, 1934).

[26] Ferguson, ‘Analog Critique’, 86.

[27] L. E. Steininger, ‘Against inflation: queer-feminist monetary (and price) theory’, Review of International Political Economy (2026), 18.

[28] Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (Penguin, 2012), 91.

[29] Scott Ferguson, Benjamin Wilson, William Saas, and Maxximilian Seijo, ‘Overcoming COVID-19 Requires Rethinking University Finance,’ b2o (2020): https://www.boundary2.org/2020/07/scott-ferguson-benjamin-wilson-william-saas-maxximilian-seijo-overcoming-covid-19-requires-rethinking-university-finance/

[30] Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby’, 21-47.

[31] Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 49.

[32] Hawkes and Ferguson, ‘Green-Lighting Gatsby’, 33-6.

[33] Weird Pride Day (n.d): https://weirdpride.day/

[34] Stimpunks Foundation, ‘Weird’ (n.d.): https://stimpunks.org/glossary/weird/

[35] Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021), 190.

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(It’s Not) All About Olivia: A Study in Citations, Retroactive & Otherwise

by Jonathan Haynes

A different girl now, but there’s nothing new

— Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu” (written by Olivia Rodrigo, Daniel Nigro, Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff & St. Vincent, and everybody’s team)

The Taylor Swift–Olivia Rodrigo “feud” is bullshit. It makes me angry — and, I’ll admit, it breaks my heart — to watch the Livies and the Swifties snipe at each other online. And it frustrates me that every Olivia profiler has to circle back to it, when somehow Swift never gets asked the same question, yet lives by its terms to the degree that her last album often plays like a hymn to a certain celebrity football player’s[1] phallus.[2] I know parasocial investment can be real and even nourishing. But this particular mystery is doing harm. It’s not how art works. It is, depressingly, how oligarchic neoliberalism works.

The story the culture wants to tell about Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift is All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950): the adoring ingénue who studies the star, learns her moves, and then slips the knife in. And the aging star, watching it happen, curdling into vindictiveness as the protégée takes what was hers. It’s an irresistible script because it gives everyone a villain to choose. Either Rodrigo, a self-proclaimed Swifty from early childhood on, is Eve Harrington — the thief, borrowing too much and calling it homage, who echoed Swift’s “Cruel Summer” on “déjà vu” closely enough that Swift’s camp landed a retroactive writing credit to the tune of millions of dollars — or Swift is Margo Channing at her most petty, the elder star so threatened by her younger (self) that she has to litigate a credit. And it’s a stupid bind, because the script only offers those two roles, jealous predator or past-her-prime grudge-holder. The more honest story — the one the All About Eve, Taylor vs. Olivia mythology obscures from us — is lineage.[3]

Call it the Catfight Economy[4], and grant right away that the diagnosis isn’t mine — critics have been describing this for years, and the manufactured rivalry has a whole literature behind it (and about it; among many other works, Brian De Palma’s 2012 film Passion also tells the All About Eve story, via Persona [Ingmar Bergman 1966] and Mulholland Drive [Lynch 2000]). To summarize: two successful women cannot share a professional space without one of them being a threat to the other. The press supplies the frame, the fans supply the labor, the platforms supply the distribution, and that leaves two artists narrated into a fight neither one started, so far as any human who doesn’t actually know them personally knows. And surely their friends don’t even know, really, whether or not Swift and Rodrigo are “frosty” in real life.

What interests me is less the mechanism than its ideology: the things the Catfight Economy quietly trains us to believe. It teaches that influence is theft, that admiration is weakness, that producing art is powerful and receiving art is debt (I fully intend the sexual resonances there). That there is only ever one musical chair and the other woman is already sitting in it. It is a scarcity story dressed as gossip.

The machine is not exclusively aimed at women. Pop has always run on manufactured antagonism, Beatles versus Stones, Beach Boys versus Beatles, Blur versus Oasis, Biggie versus Pac. But the men’s versions tend to read as competition between equals, a sport with two champions, even a spur to better work. Consider the Kendrick–Drake cage match of 2024, which also managed to steal the spotlight from the quiet revolution surfacing at that year’s Grammys, where six of the eight Album of the Year nominees were women, including Rodrigo and Swift (the eventual winner – I’m still throwing beers at the screen that told me Midnights beat GUTS), a changing of the guard that held the stage about as long as it took two megalomaniacal, multi-millionaire assholes to start calling each other domestic abusers and pedophiles in public (I love much of the work of both of them). America crowned Kendrick Lamar the winner of the Drake battle-to-the-death the following year, when a hundred million people, both in the bleachers and at home, sang along as he hurled a blistering insult at his former collaborator at the Super Bowl.[5]

A metaphor for America in general in 2024, I guess.

When turned on women, the same machine sours[6]: the rivalry curdles into a catfight, and only one of them is allowed to survive it. A field with room for only one is a field that never has to take women’s art seriously as a tradition.

Consider the blows Swift absorbed to clear the commercial ground Rodrigo now shares with her. She came up through the Nashville songwriting machine as a teenage girl who had to have the best idea in the room just to be heard by professionals twice her age.[7] She spent years as a target of an online abuse campaign that ran through Kanye West and the people around him. And in 2019 she watched the masters to her first six albums get sold out from under her when Big Machine was acquired by Scooter Braun — who had managed West for years — an event that crystallized, in public and at her expense, exactly how little her little girl self’s signature on a contract was worth. Each of these events is also a Catfight Economy event in its way: each got covered as drama, as personality, as Taylor-being-Taylor, when each was actually structural — a girl up against an industry built to extract from her.

Rodrigo’s generation negotiated in the shadow of that lesson. Where Swift had to re-record her own catalogue to reclaim it — Taylor’s Version — Rodrigo and peers like Chappell Roan entered an industry where creative control had become a thing a young woman could think to ask for, because they had all just watched the cost of not asking. There will never need to be a GUTS (Olivia’s Version). That absence is Swift’s bequest. This is the inheritance the rivalry frame can’t see: the older artist’s losses became the younger artist’s terms.

Which is what makes the recently announced Daisy Chain Fields concert so important. The festival Rodrigo founded is something more than a festival and more than a tribute to the Lilith Fair; it is the Catfight Economy’s exact inverse, built on purpose. Where the Catfight Economy profits by pitting women against each other, Daisy Chain Fields is dedicated — in Rodrigo’s own words[8] — to the belief that “joy, community, and creativity can inspire meaningful change,” celebrating the voices, artistry, and contributions of women in music. Where the Catfight Economy extracts value from women and routes it to platforms and press, Daisy Chain Fields routes its net proceeds outward, to nonprofits advancing and advocating for women and girls. Where the Catfight Economy insists inspiration and curiosity must harden into competition, the mission statement insists on “knowledge, strength, and action.” It closes on an image that is Olivia’s whole argument in one line — daisies are “wild and beautiful,” and “as a chain they are strong and unbreakable.”

Seen this way, Rodrigo’s so-called evasiveness about Swift in interviews[9] stops looking like coldness and starts looking like intellectual consistency. She has been on the record about hating the manufactured-feud framing, and her refusal to feed it is the same gesture as the festival: a person who has built an explicit stand against the Catfight Economy is not going to step into its oldest set piece on cue.

So the mythology gets it backward. All About Eve is a story about a theater with one dressing room and one star, where the only way up is to displace the woman already standing in the spotlight. Eve doesn’t want to make her own work, she wants Margo’s part, Margo’s audience, Margo’s life. That is the only plot the Catfight Economy knows how to run, and it is the plot it keeps trying to cast Rodrigo into. Swift, more than anyone, knows it, and she has spent a career writing it (among millions of other things) down. “Clara Bow,” the closing song on The Tortured Poets Department (2024), is the It-girl assembly line set to music: the industry’s eye slides from Clara Bow to Stevie Nicks to, in the final verse, Taylor Swift herself, each new arrival told she’s the real thing, dazzling, the new god worth worshipping — until the eye moves on to the next one, who has an edge the last one never did. It is Margo Channing’s nightmare written by Margo, the star narrating her own replacement on the same conveyor that carried her in. And believe me, there is a ton of fan and critical speculation that this is one of many Swift songs about Rodrigo, which is so much more than missing the point. It’s a cruel[10] irony.

Swift is the great chronicler of the trap. But the interesting relationship between these two artists isn’t antagonism, it’s transmission: the elder who took the structural punishment, and the younger who studied the wreckage and wrote her way around it. Rodrigo is rejecting the whole theater and building a field of daisies. Swift sings the cage with unmatched clarity, and thus, somewhat like the Jane Austen of D.A. Miller’s monograph[11], transcends it; Rodrigo, standing on the ground Swift cleared, gets to start dismantling it.

[1] Travis Kelce’s.

[2] Taylor Swift, “Wood,” The Life of a Showgirl, Republic Records, 2025.

[3]A caveat, because it would be ultra-shitty to let it pass without saying so: getting a retroactive co-write on a song you didn’t write is a graceless thing to accept, and Swift accepted it. But the music business is litigious to its bones, and a young artist is so incentivized to hand over the co-credit and the royalty points rather than prolong the online nastiness that — five years later — it is somehow still a story that Elvis Costello did not sue Olivia Rodrigo. None of which is to claim Swift invented the position she occupies. She has predecessors, obviously, and similar All About Eve stories have been told about Madonna and Mariah Carey many times over. But the lineage I’m tracing isn’t stylistic, it’s structural — the terms of creative control a young woman can now think to ask for. And the asymmetry of admiration matters: Rodrigo arrived a self-proclaimed Swifty, modeling herself on a songwriter-auteur with total command of her own persona and catalogue. Swift arrived a girl gushing about LeAnn Rimes — herself a teenage phenom, but the inheritance there was a way of singing, by way of Patsy Cline, not a way of owning your work. The bequest I mean is the one Swift’s own losses created, not the longer history of women in pop, which runs back well beyond her.

[4]I am thinking here of Gloria Steinem’s “Catfight Theory of History,” from an editorial she co-wrote with Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. The occasion was the release on streaming of Mrs. America, an historical film (TV show? Content thing?) that she believed portrayed the fight for the ERA as a catfight between her and Phyllis Schlafly instead of “a battle between the ERA and economic interests.” (LA Times, “Why ‘Mrs. America’ is bad for American women,” July 30, Covid year zero).

[5]“A Minor” is funny and clever. Lamar is also a genius who won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Nonetheless, if I were scoring that Superbowl scene, it would be to “All the lonely people,” and “Eleanor Rigby” (The Beatles, Revolver, Capital Records, 1966) is in E minor.

[6]Olivia Rodrigo, Sour, Interscope Records, 2021.

[7] See Taylor Swift’s interview for the NYT project, The 30 Greatest Living Songwriters (2026). Come to think of it, why isn’t Billy Joel on that list? I haven’t checked, but I bet Swift had him on her ballot. And Olivia – who might have made the list herself had the new one come out before the list dropped – David Byrne nominated her on his own (citation forthcoming, I know I read that somewhere) – well, we already know from “déjà vu” that she was “the one who taught you Billy Joel.”

[8]It could have been her “team.” What is an author?

[9]See (hear?) the NYT Popcast interview with Rodrigo, in which Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica ask her intelligently designed questions about the “frostiness” between her and Swift, so that she can redirect without sounding like she’s hiding something. Good journalism still happens there!

[10]Taylor Swift, “Cruel Summer,” Lover, Republic Records, 2019.

[11]Miller, D.A., Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style, Princeton University Press: 2005.

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Invisible Republic (With Apologies to Greil Marcus)

By Jonathan Haynes

Given the miserable state of American life generally, here’s a thing that astonishes me. Two of the best homegrown popular artworks I can think of came out recently, within months of each other, are enormously popular, and are political (I beg you to please stay with me here): Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. You could read each as a defiant argument for the humanities. Of course it’s unclear whether the artists know they’re making that argument, or would say so if they knew.

Listen to how they explain how their new works came to be. Anderson (Esquire): “Vineland was always going to be too hard to adapt, so I stole the parts that spoke to me and just started running like a thief.” Rodrigo (NYT Popcast): “I was really inspired by this book Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux. She’s having this affair with this person and she’s not quite happy, she’s kind of going insane… I was really inspired by all of the ways in which love makes you insane and miserable.”

Wait. Back up. You guys are reading Ernaux and Pynchon? Like it’s nothing. Like it’s just something that you do. Meanwhile I’m sitting here listening to Pod Save America with a gun in my mouth.

After all, these are quintessential LA artists — Anderson out of the San Fernando Valley, Rodrigo originally out of Temecula — who actually get to make art in an industry town that has lost its industry, as devastatingly and, hopefully not but seemingly permanently, as any coal or steel town lost its in the seventies. Brilliant people with decades of experience at every tier of the entertainment business can’t get jobs at CVS or Target in 2026. (I have a friend like this, a superior researcher and writer with excellent pedagogical skills and a stunning depth of knowledge of movie history and culture. If you’re hiring, DM me and I’ll connect you.). But I’m not making the easy point that PTA and OR are privileged to make the art they want. Sure, they have one-percent lifestyles that buy them room to concentrate, instead of lives frantically lived between DoorDash and Lyft shifts. Nor am I saying I’m just glad they’re using that privilege well, though I obviously do think that. I’m not even really talking about them. I’m talking about the astonishing, vertiginous fact that there exists a massive popular audience for their work — an Invisible Republic, if you will — that consumes it not just avidly but ecstatically.

I’ve never actually cried to an Olivia Rodrigo song. I loved “drivers license” in 2021 because of its stylistic mastery; my initial reaction was exhilaration at the rare aesthetic achievement, and I started thinking about the implied connection to the canon of American rock and roll “car songs,” including the previous year’s “Murder Most Foul,” Bob Dylan’s masterpiece about the Kennedy assassination. Great bad trip car songs bracketed the pandemic. Dylan’s arrived in the first month of quarantine, when auto-mobility became a deadly thing. Her song came ten months later, amid the first vaccine roll-out, when it felt safer, but still low-key miserable, to drive your car places.

(Here, my ingenious sister-in-law, the novelist Megan Moores, would interrupt: there is plenty of textual evidence You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is about a romance with a guy with just such an emotional deficit who knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.”)

Historically, crying to Olivia Rodrigo songs is the primary mode of engagement with her. There is a TikTok genre dedicated to getting deep in your feelings while listening to her songs. My favorite of those that I’ve seen is the guy with red eyes and dribbling snot blurting out the titles of the songs on the new album that turned him into a sniveling wreck: “Fuck you, ‘begged.’ Fuck you, ‘honeybee.’ Fuck you, ‘less.’ Fuck you, ‘cigarette smoke.’” Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is on record as having bawled her eyes out hearing “drivers license” for the first time. Right after the song dropped, there was an SNL sketch about gruff guys wearing flannel shirts getting into their feelings in a pool hall. The whole world was gutted by that song, allegedly. I loved it but experienced it…differently (Dylan, etc.).

But with “honeybee,” Olivia Rodrigo wrecked me too. She did it out of the blue with a couplet on a song that has gotten some flack for being out of the sonic universe of most of the album. It sounds like a Disney tune, a fair description meant as a criticism, to which I retort, one of the most celebrated American directors of all time just released (on the same day as Olivia’s new album) a blockbuster movie that “discloses” that his entire psychic universe — and the universe’s — is organized around “When You Wish Upon a Star.” John Lennon closed the turbulent White Album with a song that was explicitly based on Disney music. St. Vincent did a whole album based on that sound and called it Actor. Olivia Rodrigo, now occasional St. Vincent collaborator, began her professional life as a child actor in Disney shows (do your own research).

The couplet:

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

The purity of these lines is astonishing and lifts the album lyrically (whatever you think of Disney songs) into very rarified company. I think Lorenz Hart, at least the one played by Ethan Hawke in the new Linklater film, would have been proud to have written them. At the exact second I was admiring the craft, the eleven-year-old who sobbed at ET knocked me on my ass.

I hope I never see what your face looks like going

A face I swear that I could spend my whole life knowing

I am seeing a lot of faces going these days: my parents’ faces, the childish face of my now-teenage son, my own face.

The mortal irony of this lyric is that if she got her wish, she’d spend her whole life watching this person’s face going.

Fuck you, “honeybee.”

There is another TikTok from a listening party where Rodrigo plays the new album for fans hearing it cold, a live mic resting on her knee. As the chorus of “stupid song” climbs higher than you expect it to go, the room starts leaking into the audio — a gasp, “oh my god,” and then the screaming. Those people weren’t screaming before. The music made them do it. The screams are the flip side of the sobs, and sometimes done simultaneously. And it’s like Dylan — those verses in “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” in which the words just keep piling up and you never know when or where they’re going to land. Allen Ginsberg said everything in Dylan was “collected into that one column of air coming out of him and the vibration of the sound,” and that fits Olivia Rodrigo even better. And it also fits the climactic One Battle After Another car chase that Scott Ferguson and I worked through on the Money on the Left podcast, Superstructure.

Switched on Pop names the mechanism better than I can: spiraling. On their recent podcast dedicated to You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the musicologist Nate Sloan hears Rodrigo’s choruses as those coin funnels in children’s museums: you set a penny on its edge and it circles the bowl, faster and tighter as it falls, until it loses its orbit and drops through the hole at the center. The Rodrigo chorus does the same — the line winds and accelerates, as she spins out more and more words and lifts ever higher into her vocal register, until it lands on the title phrase and drops out of motion. “Kiss me and I might drop dead.” “I love you more than any stupid song could ever say.” The orbit, then the hole. And it is the same shape Anderson cuts in One Battle After Another: a VistaVision camera with a telephoto lens strapped to the nose of a Dodge Charger, the car running the undulating California hills, the pursuit going on and on over those swells until Chase Infiniti slams on the brakes. Two funnels, two dead stops. And in both cases, a mixed-race girl behind the wheel. Make of that coincidence what you will. I’ll leave that question open, as I imagine that Greil Marcus would.

But the invisible republic that I borrow Marcus’s title to identify is built precisely out of rhymes like that one — uncanny correspondences the culture throws up without being asked, which it falls to criticism only to notice, and to refuse to explain away.

It brings into unwitting communion beleaguered English teachers grading endless piles of AP exams, college students with gender studies degrees graduating into an American void, rock critic Substackers traveling hundreds of miles in The Paranoid Style band tee shirts to see Hamell on Trial in a beloved local music venue that is closing soon (where will we go?), movie-scene-deconstructing 35-year-old YouTubers who can’t get over the color timing in One Battle and issue their manifestos from their parents’ living rooms, lonely denizens of livvieshq on Instagram with “maggots for brains,” and work from home tech guys with moldy Ph.D.s who spend their days busily feeding their careers into AI tools.

This essay is already piled high with allusions, but I must add one more — George Miller’s masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City. I’m thinking of the scene – it always makes me sob – when Babe saves the Bull Terrier from drowning and the Bull Terrier says “Whatever the pig says, goes” to all the other animals. And so all of these different species — who are, in some cases, even biologically, instinctively, constitutively driven to hate and fear each other, and in others, to blithely ignore each other — must share the jelly beans. Or everyone starves.

And then they become an army.

UPDATE: 24 hours after the present essay was published, this announcement went out to subscribers from the official Olivia Rodrigo mailing list.

* Note that alphabetical order, asked to do nothing but sort names, quietly places Bikini Kill above some of the biggest stars in the world — including the promoter herself.


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I Think You’re What’s Wrong With Me: On Influence, Absorption, and Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love’

By Jonathan Haynes

Watch what happens when the reviews of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album — a concept record that tracks a single romance from first date to bitter aftermath — go looking for its value. Almost without exception they find it somewhere other than in Rodrigo: in the older male band she references, in the New Wave gods her producer conjures, in the Gen X canon her sound supposedly pays its respects to. The dominant critical move is to sort the tracks into the Swiftian and the Smithian and grade each by which influence wins (Slate Magazine literally does this), and the songs that come out on top are reliably the Cure-saturated ones, praised as the moments where the record connects to something serious, something legitimate, something a man made first. I want to name this as the symptom it is, and the stakes are larger than one album. We are at a moment when pop music by young women is taken more seriously than it has ever been, and yet the reflex persists — even among women writing the reviews — to locate the worth of that music in a male precursor who authorizes it, rather than in the woman herself. The song-by-song tally is not just a clumsy method. It is the gatekeeping impulse wearing the costume of rigor: the search for the father who makes the daughter’s work admissible. And it is exactly backwards, because You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is an album about a woman who does not borrow her authority from the canon but absorbs the canon into herself, who takes the male precursor everyone is reaching for and makes him sing her words. The critics handing Rodrigo’s value upstream to Robert Smith have the current running the wrong direction. The record reverses it.

Right from the start, in the third line of the first song (“drop dead”), Rodrigo mobilizes the Cure as a narrative instrument. “You know all the words to Just Like Heaven.” The Cure is not Rodrigo’s stylistic frame imposed from above. It is his music — the crush’s — and so when the record itself begins to sound like The Cure, the sound is not homage but possession. We are listening to a consciousness being colonized by a lover’s taste, the way one absorbs a partner’s vocabulary, their sleep schedule, their way of seeing, their taste in music. This is the Annie Ernaux problematic Rodrigo named directly in her New York Times Popcast interview when she cited Simple Passion — that slim, clinical diary of an affair that consumes a whole life — as the inspiration for “stupid song”: passion as affliction, a desire that floods and saturates everything like illness or insanity. Ernaux’s achievement is a collision of registers — flat, exact, diaristic notation applied to total erotic derangement — and that collision is exactly what the album performs. The Swiftian lyric is the deadpan diary; the Cure engulfment is the derangement the diary is recording. You cannot separate them, because the lyric is narrating the sonic takeover as it happens. The title says as much before a note plays: You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love is not a description of a moment in the romance but the verdict on the whole of it. Darkness was inside the love from the first date.

This is why the song-by-song method fails in this case. A critic who prefers the Cure-leaning tracks to the Swift-leaning ones believes, ironically, that he is identifying her most original mode (measured against a presumed Gen Z pop-princess archetype). He is in fact charting the depth of the character’s possession, crowning as most hers the songs where she is most someone else’s. The thing the critic likes more is the symptom. And it’s a double bind for her: measured against Smith she is borrowing, measured against Swift she is belated, and either way the verdict denies her any artistic ground of her own. Variety gets closest to the truth with its line that the album “tracks the arc of a love affair: Rodrigo’s love affair with the Cure,” but means it as a witticism about influence, not as a structural argument. The album dramatizes its own sound as a love-symptom. No tally of borrowed gestures can register that, because the borrowed gestures are not influences to be scored, they are characters in the story. And the impulse to score them, to find the songs where the male precursor is most present and crown those the best, is oddly shared by the character Rodrigo has created: the conviction that value must be located in him.

But Rodrigo is too strong an artist to leave the influences as influences, and here the argument turns. She sublates The Cure — cancels it as an external source and preserves it as her own material, lifted onto a plane where it no longer points back at Robert Smith but expresses Olivia Rodrigo. The song “the cure” arrives at rue album midpoint, but it is not about The Cure — nor does it particularly sound like them. This negation is the point. This is what divides what she is doing from pastiche, which stays marked as borrowed. By the back half of the record the Cure-ness is simply her sound, the influence negated as foreign and retained as self. And then comes the benediction, the moment where the structure becomes flesh: Smith himself appears on “what’s wrong with me” — singing, playing bass, embodied inside her track. Not sampled, not echoed. The precursor walks into the song he has been haunting and takes a part, and he takes it on the diagnostic song, the one that asks the Ernaux question directly, which is exactly where an internalized voice would speak. He is not a guest star. He is the second half of her brain — the absorbed half answering the diaristic half, two voices staring down the same dread from opposing ends. This is the form of a dialectic and not the form of a love duet.

Here is a fact underemphasized or ignored in the deadline reviews: Smith is singing her words and her music, in a style that resembles his own. The man has been made to perform a Robert Smith who is now her creation — voicing her reconstruction of his idiom, handed back to him to inhabit. This inverts the entire vector of influence. Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” runs one way: the latecomer swerves from the precursor, clears space against his priority, escapes the father. Rodrigo does the opposite. She absorbs Smith so completely that she can write him, and he ratifies the absorption by consenting to sing her writing-of-him. It is apophrades literalized — the return of the dead made to seem authored by the living — except he is actually there, performing his own style after it has passed through her and come out as hers. The strong artist is not the one who escapes the source. She is the one who can produce the source as her own material and have it agree to perform her. That is the furthest claim anyone can make on a precursor, and Rodrigo makes it on the record, in his voice, with his hands on the bass. The reviews are still at “cool, Robert Smith’s on it.” The album is at “Robert Smith consents to being Olivia Rodrigo’s creation.”

But that consent is not a concession. It is the proof that what she does is additive rather than competitive. The credit-and-citation model the reviews run on knows only two roles, the original and the impostor, and it is built to adjudicate who owns what. Rodrigo is not playing that game. She does not depose the precursor. She brings the whole canon kicking and screaming into a world it has to share with her.

One last observation (finally caught up with her interview on Jimmy Kimmel the other night). The biographical Rodrigo’s father reportedly has seen the Cure thirty times; he wept when he finally met Robert Smith; his phone screensaver is now a photo of the two of them. She has said her dad spent her childhood “introducing me to all the bands he went to see when he was my age” — among them, The Cure. So The Cure is the father’s music before it is anyone else’s in this drama, the canon handed down the paternal line, and her father, as it happens, is by profession a family therapist — an analyst. Now consider the fascinating work the album’s romantic plot is doing with that inheritance. The boyfriend knows all the words to “Just Like Heaven.” He loves The Cure, which is to say he loves her father’s music, the music she was raised on, the sound of the house she grew up in. And the buried logic of the infatuation, never stated outright but everywhere in the songs, is that this is why she falls for him: he loves what her father loves, he carries the paternal music, and so he arrives already occupying the place the father holds. That is the Freudian pattern, stated plainly — the daughter drawn to the man who returns to her the father, the beloved chosen because he stands where the parent stood.

So it turns out that the album itself is not only a concept album that tells a coherent beginning to end story; it’s a double plot. The story of the romance and break-up mirrors the larger one we have been unpacking the whole time — the artist’s relation to the canon she was raised inside. The main plot ends with a painful break-up. The other climaxes with the man who made the music she was raised on — idol to both lover and father — walking in to perform her recreation of him, and the world receives not Robert Smith but Olivia Rodrigo’s Robert Smith, authored by the singular genius of Olivia Rodrigo.

* See here for a follow-up reflection from the author.

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Zooming in on the Loop

By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson

In previous writings, we advanced an inventive new model for municipal finance: what we call the Seattle Loop. By establishing a city-owned public bank, we propose, Seattle can not only expand public investment through municipal lending and provide residents with low-cost financial services; it can also purchase its own bonds and “loop” the interest back to the city itself, rather than to Wall Street. Over time, the Loop promises to save Seattle (and any other municipality that adopts the Loop) hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments annually. More important, it stands to turn the city’s public debt into a self-reinforcing system of public finance, capable of addressing community and environmental needs far more democratically and robustly than ever before in the city’s fiscal history.

Here, we take a more granular approach to some of the Loop’s key operations—capitalization and maintaining reserve balances—zooming in, as it were, to address logistical specificities that our broader model facilitates.

How precisely can a city like Seattle capitalize a public bank? That is, how will Seattle secure enough funds to, first, acquire a banking charter, and second, steadily marshal sufficient owner equity, or “capital,” to meet ongoing regulatory requirements? Concomitantly, how can a Seattle Municipal Bank attain and maintain adequate reserve balances, ensuring daily liquidity in managing interbank payments with the rest of the U.S. financial system?

In what follows, we explain both processes. Ultimately, we demonstrate that capitalization and reserves are not separate stumbling blocks to be surmounted, but deeply interrelated operations that—when designed in tandem—create a mutually reinforcing engine for public provision.

No Cap: A Closer Look at Capitalizing the Loop

Since we first introduced the Seattle Loop, several interlocutors have expressed concerns regarding the city’s capacity to sufficiently capitalize a new public bank. Frequently, these anxieties rest on the erroneous notion that much of Seattle’s current holdings are functionally off-limits, either because they are supposedly locked in high-yield investments or because tax revenues earmarked for future spending are deemed unavailable for democratic deployment.

In reality, all funds Seattle presently holds in private banks and investment portfolios are readily available to the city. This includes earmarked revenues, waiting to be spent according to legislative directives. No city, state, or federal laws prevent the city from mobilizing its assets toward the capitalization of a new public bank.

The scale of Seattle’s public wealth is immense, totaling over $8.1 billion in managed assets. This figure rests on two primary pillars: the city’s $3.8 billion Treasury Investment Pool, which handles daily operating cash and earmarked reserves, and the $4.3 billion managed by the Seattle City Employees’ Retirement System (SCERS).

The trouble is, under current municipal arrangements, this $8.1 billion foundation is sequestered in private financial institutions, reducing the city’s greatest strength into a passive subsidy for Wall Street. As a result, Seattle is forced into a perverse position: the city pays hundreds of millions of dollars in predatory fees and exposes retirement savings to volatile speculative markets, all while providing the very liquidity that private banks use to underwrite their own exploitative and destructive regime of lending.

Seattle possesses the capacity to liberate its public wealth from private capture, reallocating its massive holdings to capitalize a democratic municipal bank. While this transition demands adept financial management—including the careful disaggregation of funds and a move away from speculative vehicles—the challenges are solely logistical. Potential liquidity bottlenecks and termination fees from private vendors represent one-time and short-term transitional hurdles rather than systemic barriers. Any payment or dip in yields marks the final extraction by private intermediaries, a cost that will be swiftly recovered as the Seattle Loop commences in earnest.

After Seattle secures this initial capitalization and, with it, a banking charter, the city’s reclaimed equity then serves as its public bank’s regulatory foundation, providing the balance sheet capacity necessary to absorb municipal debt and extend credit at a scale far exceeding the initial investment. From here, Seattle can begin issuing bonds directly to—and, when necessary, receiving loans from—its own public bank. Henceforth, the city will systematically retire its legacy obligations to private investors. However, all future interest payments will remain within the public circuit. Consequently, Seattle recuperates wealth once lost to the rentier class, looping interest back into the general fund to support social provisioning. It also effectively democratizes debt issuance, wresting control from bond rating agencies and private intermediaries to empower local government and the voting public.

Throughout this process, it is essential to recognize a more fundamental point about the entire logic of capitalization. Capital requirements do not obey immutable natural laws; they are legal constructs subject to democratic redefinition. 

As California Assembly Bill 857 (2019), or Public Banking Act, demonstrates, it is entirely possible to legally codify what counts as capital in the first place. This landmark legislation reclassifies existing investment portfolios as suitable for bank capitalization, providing a clear regulatory roadmap for municipal entities. Recognizing that these definitions are flexible opens the door to creative capitalization strategies that were previously unimaginable. Indeed, Assembly Bill 857 utilizes the same powerful assumption to endow California public banks with depository functions. In addition to reclassifying what assets can be used to capitalize a bank, the legislation also legally redefines what counts as a public depository to explicitly include public banks. All this is to say that when we treat monetary terms and procedures as flexible tools of governance, the perceived limits of municipal finance reveal themselves to be legal constructs that can be rewritten for transformative action.

Of course, legal redefinition is nearly always a complex process. Bill 857, for example, explicitly reclassifies anticipated state tax revenue as credit that can be counted toward the capitalization of a public bank. Currently, however, federal law excludes projected tax revenues from Tier 1 bank capitalization requirements. What this means is that, while the State of California cannot use anticipated taxes as credit to capitalize its initial public bank, Bill 857 does give the state and its municipalities legal authority to leverage future taxes toward the capitalization of a second, third or fourth public bank. After the first public bank is founded, in other words, California may leverage future taxes as credit to create more public banks. The federal requirement for Tier 1 capital is met at each step, but the actual source is the anticipated taxes revenues. Hence, even though state and municipal legislation is never at total liberty to restructure monetary rules, it can effectively establish the strategic legal scaffolding necessary to expand the boundaries of public finance over the long term.

When it comes to maintaining capital requirements, meanwhile, the Seattle Loop departs from the reactive logic of private banking. Rather than viewing the bank as a mere vehicle for attracting private investors or balancing risk against maximized yields, we approach the Seattle Loop as an actively constructed system of public coordination. We can strengthen this system and insulate it from the volatility of private markets by requiring partner community lenders to open and maintain deposit accounts within Seattle’s public bank. This creates a symbiotic effect wherein the public bank serves as a stable foundation for the entire local financial ecosystem.

The partnership model allows the Seattle Municipal Bank to pursue projects that are currently beyond the reach of smaller, mission-driven lenders. Through participation lending, the bank can supplement loans for critical public works, such as low-income housing development. If a developer requires $50 million for a housing project but a local credit union only has the balance sheet capacity for $10 million, the municipal bank can purchase the remaining $40 million of the loan. This is not a theoretical novelty; it is a proven model of public coordination successfully utilized by the Bank of North Dakota—which is primarily a wholesale lender to other banks—for over a century to anchor regional development.

To safeguard the long-term vitality of the public bank, we can also augment its capital base by instituting a policy of retained earnings. In mandating that a small portion of the bank’s net interest income remain within the institution rather than being fully remitted to the general fund, we establish an autocatalytic growth curve for public credit. In technical terms, these retained profits build up the bank’s Tier 1 capital—the core, loss-absorbing equity that serves as a primary regulatory buffer.

Because banking operates on the logic of leverage, this public accumulation of capital has a disproportionate impact on the city’s provisioning power. Given that the minimum Tier 1 capital ratio is typically set at 6%, every dollar retained by the bank potentially unlocks over sixteen dollars in new lending capacity. Committing to this steady internal capitalization, the Seattle Municipal Bank does not only maintain its solvency, but also structurally expands the horizons of what the city can afford to build, fund, and sustain.

The bank further strengthens its capital base by integrating the city’s broader economic transactions into its circuit. For example, city contractors can be auto-enrolled to receive funds—from grants to large-scale construction payments—directly into Seattle Municipal Bank accounts. While contractors remain free to move their funds at any time, the Loop Bank can offer unique institutional benefits and seamless integration that incentivize them to remain within the public circuit.

The Seattle Municipal Bank can extend this invitation to the city’s most vital resource: its employees. If the city invites public sector workers to hold payroll accounts directly with the public bank or its partner banks, it can offer exclusive financial services and benefits tailored to the needs of public servants. This transforms payroll from a seemingly neutral administrative task into an active tool for expanding the fiscal reach of the public bank, ensuring that Seattle’s wealth continues to circulate in the interest of those who make the city run.

Finally, the Seattle Loop achieves a structural advantage regarding fiscal retention that private intermediaries simply cannot match: immunity from federal taxation. While private commercial banks are subject to federal corporate taxes—representing a steady loss in municipal wealth—public banks operate as tax-exempt governmental entities. Therefore, the Loop does more than shield the city from Wall Street’s extractive fees; it ensures that the surplus generated by public credit remains entirely within the local circuit. This effectively closes a major valve of fiscal siphoning, retaining every dollar of generated value to support the city’s own provisioning.

Settling In: Building Reserves & Internalizing the Clearing Process

To operate as a viable financial institution, the Seattle Municipal Bank must participate in the complex infrastructure of interbank settlement. This process is mediated by reserves—the specialized, high-powered money that banks use to clear and settle obligations with one another. Unlike the commercial bank deposits used by the public for daily transactions, reserves exist as digital entries on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve, serving as the ultimate medium for the final settlement of payments.

Only the Fed has the authority to issue and destroy these reserves, whether through routine open-market operations and repurchase agreements or via emergency lending facilities and large-scale asset purchases during periods of systemic crisis. Critically, these reserves are not redeemable outside of the central bank circuit; they are a wholesale instrument for institutional settlement, not a retail medium for public commerce. One cannot use reserves to purchase a cup of coffee or a car. Instead, they function as the specialized money, which banks use to cancel out debts with one another as their customers transfer and transact between financial institutions.

In the current financial landscape, every time a check is cleared or a wire is sent between different institutions, a corresponding volume of reserves must move across the central bank’s ledger to satisfy the debt. For most municipal entities, the requirement to maintain and manage these balances has long been framed as an insurmountable barrier to entry into the specialized world of chartered banking and interbank settlement, often resulting in a costly and forced reliance on large private correspondent banks to handle the technical plumbing of settlement. With the design of the Seattle Municipal Bank, however, we build our own public system of liquidity, enabling the city to insulate itself from the extractive pressures of the settlement circuit, while also meeting ongoing reserve requirements.

One of the most common technical objections to our proposal is the problem of reserve acquisition. Critics ask how a new public bank can possibly compete in the interbank market without a pre-existing stock of Fed funds. Our answer is simple: reserves follow deposits. When the City of Seattle transfers its holdings out of private accounts and into its own municipal bank, the banking system mechanically expedites that move by transferring the corresponding reserves across the Fed’s ledger. In this light, the problem of reserve acquisition disappears. The city’s deposits furnish the very liquidity needed to settle the city’s payments.

While acquiring initial reserves is a mechanical byproduct of capitalization, maintaining them is a separate operational challenge. To see how this works, consider a simplified scenario: the City of Seattle receives a $10 million deposit from a private institution. In the interbank system, this deposit is accompanied by a transfer of $10 million in reserves. So far, the bank is flush. However, if the city then sells $10 million of its bonds to its own bank, it creates $10 million in new deposits. The moment the city attempts to spend that credit at vendors who bank in the private sector, the Seattle Municipal Bank must have enough reserves on hand to clear the payment. In this sense, reserves are the exit fee for transactions leaving the public circuit.

Still, a critical point remains: any payment clearing within the public-to-public system requires no reserves at all. When the city transfers funds between departments or pays an employee who also banks with the Seattle Municipal Bank, the transaction is settled via a simple ledger update—pure municipal bookkeeping. This allows for the creation of a relatively insulated, high-volume system of payment clearing, which lessens the demand for the Seattle Municipal Bank to keep up with settlements in the Fed funds market.  

That said, the Seattle Loop’s capacity for internal settlement reaches its full, transformative scale only through the project we have previously championed: a comprehensive digital public payment infrastructure. By establishing a municipal payment utility—akin to a “Public Venmo” or “Seattle Square”—the city will broker both free and surveillance-free transactions that circumvent exploitative credit card companies and tech oligarchies.

Imagine a digital municipal wallet that serves as the primary interface for civic life: your ORCA card, your library card, and your portal for utility payments and local event tickets, all integrated into a singular, public circuit. As payments circulate and clear within this internal system, the exit fee of private reserves effectively vanishes. This infrastructure is particularly vital for rewarding care work, as it allows the city to directly recognize and pay public service workers tending to our community. At its core, however, creating a digital public payment system expands the city’s internal clearing capacity, diminishing the burdens involved in attracting and maintaining reserves in the Fed funds system.

The Seattle Loop ensures that fiscal expansion is no longer tethered to the liquidity bottlenecks of the private market, but is instead limited only by our collective capacity to provision for the public good.

Conclusion: The Future is Fiscal Resilience

By zooming in on the technical foundations of the Seattle Loop, we see that capitalization and reserves are not mere obstacles to be overcome, but the very instruments of a new municipal financial architecture. Once this architecture is in place, the Seattle Loop functions as a vital automatic stabilizer for the regional economy.

Unlike private commercial banks, which are structurally compelled toward pro-cyclicality—lending aggressively during booms and retreating during busts—the Seattle Loop operates under a mandate of counter-cyclical investment. During economic downturns, when private credit freezes, the city can strategically expand its lending capacity, acting as a public credit guarantee that maintains the city’s future wellbeing when the present is uncertain or unstable.

As part of this mandate for counter-cyclical investment, the Seattle Loop can endow the city with a powerful tool for public refinancing. The public bank can systematically retire the city’s extractive legacies by purchasing older, high-interest loans currently held by private institutions. It can also extend refinancing options to non-profits and community organizations that have long been burdened by predatory private debt.

In the final analysis, what all such possibilities demonstrate is that the Seattle Loop is not merely technically feasible. It is an active and generative construction that supplies the city with maximal fiscal resilience. By re-engineering the city’s financial plumbing into a permanent infrastructure of social and environmental stewardship, the Loop guarantees that Seattle’s wealth is never again treated as a compliant subsidy for Wall Street, but is rather deployed as a powerful tool for a just and plentiful tomorrow.

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