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…
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…
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…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
A Dvar Torah on the Subject of Democratic Public Finance
By Anna Minsky The following speech was read on March 28th at a progressive New York City synagogue, a guest sermon by one of the congregants. In the Jewish tradition, each week we read one part (a “parsha”) of the Torah (the first five books of the bible) aloud in Hebrew. Then someone, often a…
Reparative Internationalism
Toward an International Democratic Public Finance Framework By Will Beaman The liberal international order faces a crisis of legitimacy, and the struggle to define its aftermath is already being organized through competing visions of global order. In the present turn, the far right has seized that terrain to stage a false choice: either accept imperial…
Animal Spirits and Public Promises: Phantom Beavers and the Politics of Monetary Design
By Rob Hawkes There is a spectre haunting Nigel Farage. The spectre of a beaver. On 11 March 2026, the Bank of England announced that, following a public consultation, its next series of banknotes will feature images of the UK’s wildlife in place of historical figures, which have adorned our currency since the 1970s. Mr.…
The Ontology of the Monetary Image: Référance and Reconstruction
By Will Beaman Money is often introduced in critical theory as a problem. It appears as the medium that makes unlike things commensurable by reducing them to sameness, the abstraction that removes social life from the conditions that give it substance, or the sign that circulates by displacing the relations on which it depends. In…
Fiscal Chronotopes: #ZcavengerHunt, the Zetro Card, and the New Finance Franchise
By Will Beaman This essay is lightly adapted from a talk delivered at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association conference. It contributes to a growing body of endogenous money theorization that we at Money on the Left call Democratic Public Finance (DPF). DPF begins from the distributed and publicly mediated character of political-economic life, approaching…
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About the Vertical
Our vertical publishes essays on critical theory, media culture & aesthetics that are committed to unconditional inclusion and intersectional politics.