The Feasibility Loop: When the Market Has No Idea
By Will Beaman Proposals for public banking are typically met with a predictable set of feasibility concerns: whether sufficient capital can be assembled, whether deposits can be secured, and whether the institution can achieve the regulatory legitimacy required to begin operating. Once these terms are set, everything else follows. The public bank must prove itself…
The Seattle Loop: Reclaiming the Public Interest
By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson A palpable, but indecisive enthusiasm permeated a recent Seattle arts forum, revealing a city desperate for a future that no one quite knows how to build, let alone finance. Despite the proliferation of sticky notes with compelling schemes, as Amanda Manitach describes in The Stranger, the arts roundtable lacked…
How Cities Can Evaluate Public Investment Without Bond Markets
By Will Beaman A series of recent articles from Money on the Left has argued that cities can sell municipal bonds to their own public banks, reclaiming public finance from private bond markets and expanding their fiscal capacity in the process. The Seattle Loop develops this approach in a more specific direction. It proposes that…
Introducing: The Seattle Loop
We are thrilled to share a sneak peek at the Seattle Loop, a fiscal strategy for generating public money for urgent needs in and beyond the city of Seattle. The Strategy: By establishing a municipal bank, Seattle can purchase its own debt and “loop” the interest back to the city instead of to private creditors. In addition to providing residents…
Out of the Shadows: Public Banking for Municipal Finance
By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson Editor’s Note: The following essay, originally published on March 3, 2026, offers a foundational theoretical framework for what has since been concretized as The Seattle Loop. The Seattle Loop is a fiscal strategy that utilizes municipal banking to purchase city debt, “looping” interest payments back into public provisions like…
Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks
By Tyler Suksawat & Scott Ferguson Editor’s Note: The following essay, originally published on February 22, 2026, offers a foundational theoretical framework for what has since been concretized as The Seattle Loop. The Seattle Loop is a fiscal strategy that utilizes municipal banking to purchase city debt, “looping” interest payments back into public provisions like…
Beyond Loans: The Public Grant-Making BankÂ
By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective Public banking has been gaining traction for years, driven by a growing recognition that our current financial system often fails to serve the public good. The Bank of North Dakota has operated successfully for over a century, and states like New York have recently seen legislation proposed…
Democratic Public Finance
Billy Saas and Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance” (DPF). According to this paradigm, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future. DPF redefines politics as the process…
Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City
Summary This document elaborates an emerging economic paradigm that is already latent in Zohran Mamdani’s plans and practices. The paradigm, which we call Democratic Public Finance (DPF), reframes money as an inexhaustible and malleable public institution. According to DPF, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and…
The Case for Fiscal Insurgency
by Will Beaman A common refrain keeps surfacing among prominent journalists- and commentators-in-digital-exile on BlueSky. Commenting on the emergence of yet another shadowy centrist think tank, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie observes: “Trump’s numbers are tanking and there is a palpable desire in the electorate for a real alternative and yet the only money…
Why Credit’s Due: Reclaiming Pride in Boro
By Rob Hawkes and Robyn Ollett The summer of 2025, like the summer of 2024 before it, has been one of heightened tensions surrounding the issues of race and immigration in the UK. This year, Union Flags and St George’s Crosses have adorned innumerable lamp posts, motorway bridges, roundabouts, and zebra crossings – ostensibly as…
Zohran’s #ZcavengerHunt was a Rehearsal
by Will Beaman What yesterday’s New York City #ZcavengerHunt made visible is a coalition rehearsing public works before even winning the general election. It was not just people spending time together. With simple, posted invitations carried on cards, the campaign coordinated routes, rooms, roles, and care so that participation became possible and clear. That is…
How the Zetro Card Can Save NYC (Really)
by the Money on the Left Editorial Collective A domestic occupation is currently being staged in the United States. National guard units have been deployed to Washington, D.C., with similar moves signaled for Chicago and New York. The script pairs visible deployments with their fiscal equivalent: threats of impoundment, selective audits, procurement slow-walks, and last…
Tax the Rich Campaigns Need Coalition Credits
By the Money on the Left Editorial Collective As Zohran Mamdani and allied progressives turn a campaign victory into governing capacity, the primary weapons used against them will be fiscal. Centrist state legislators—already hostile to progressive tax policy—will be doubly pressured by a Trump White House threatening to impound funds and condition support for core…
Blue Bonds: Duck or Rabbit?
Chronicle of a Summer by Will Beaman We are living through a strange reversal of the monetary story many of us have spent the last decade telling. Modern Monetary Theory helped a broader public see that the federal government—the so-called “monetary sovereign”—does not fund itself like a household and should not be bullied by austerity…
Coalition as Credit
Reading the Mamdani-Lander-Warren Coalition as a Credit Event by Will Beaman How do you keep governing when opponents try to stage a fiscal loss? In New York, that will be the fight: not just what to do, but how it will be underwritten as Albany and national actors slow-walk budgets until the calendar finishes them…
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