The Citizens' Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing Our Finance

Description

This book is the first of its kind in several overlapping and rapidly developing fields that now dominate news headlines – among them the fields of crypto-currency, digital payments platforms, ‘fintech,’ and central bank digital currencies (‘CBDCs’). With crypto and fintech now threatening to transform finance in destabilizing and anti-democratic ways, and with China and other nations now digitizing their national currencies in the form of CBDCs that make the US dollar and national payments infrastructure look ever more quaint and outmoded, this book shows both why the US and other democratic commercial societies must, and how they can, democratically digitize their currencies, their national payments systems, and the authorities that respectively issue and administer them – in the US, the Federal Reserve System (‘the Fed’). Prologue: Money Without “Middlemen” Praise for The Citizens’ Ledger Contents List of Figures 1 Introduction: Money, Finance, and Production in Contemporary Commercial Republics 1.1 Money and Production, Public and Private: The Two-by-Two Matrix of Commercial Republican Economies 1.2 Ills of Financial Hybridity—And Their Possible Money-Tech Cure 1.3 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance as Our Newly Available Cure Notes 2 Money, Capital, and Investment: Fixing Some Critical Terms and Relations 2.1 Capital: A Crucial Yet Oft-Muddled Term 2.1.1 Production: What Capital Is (Ultimately) For 2.1.2 Generic Capital 2.1.3 Generic Capital in Production—Investment Capital 2.2 Investment: Antonym and Antidote to Speculation 2.2.1 Investment and Finance 2.2.2 Stratification and N-ary (a.k.a. “Meta-”) Markets 2.2.3 Intermediation, Derivation, “Financialization” 2.3 Money: From Measure to Medium—and Back 2.3.1 Paying—Including Investing 2.3.2 Accounting 2.3.3 Crediting/Debiting Notes 3 Franchise Finance: A Brief Exposition and Exposé 3.1 Hybridity in the Large: Exposition 3.2 Hybridity in Detail: Exposé 3.2.1 Credit-Money’s Endogeneity: Private Lending of Public Capital 3.2.2 Endogeneity’s Blessing—And Curse: Production and Wealth, Speculation and Recursive Collective Action Problems Notes 4 Franchise Finance: Why and How We Got Here 4.1 Why Credit and Currency 4.1.1 Credit: Production and Payment in Time 4.1.2 Currency: From Ledgers to Tokens—And Back 4.2 Why Uniformity 4.2.1 Spatial Uniformity: Payments and “Universal Equivalents” 4.2.2 Temporal Uniformity: “Sound Money” and “Elastic Currency” Notes 5 Franchise Finance: Why We Retain It—And Why We Need Not 5.1 Why We Retain It: New Facts, Old Ideas 5.2 Why We Need Not: New Facts, New Prospects 5.3 Ending Hybridity—Citizen Ledger Finance in Broad Outline Notes 6 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance: What We Now Can and Must Do 6.1 Liability-Side Reform: Reserve Accounts, Citizen Wallets, and Resident Wallets 6.1.1 What the U.S. and Others Do Now: Reserve Accounts 6.1.2 What We Must Add: Digital Citizen Wallets, Resident Wallets, and Their Common Digital Ledger 6.2 Asset-Side Reform: Digitized CB, NIC, PSF, and Other Public Issuances 6.2.1 What We Do Now: Finance Ministry Debt, Agency Debt, and (Sometimes) Other 6.2.2 What We Must Add: Digitized CB-Discounted Paper, NIC Issuances, PSF Holdings, and Other 6.3 Systemic Ramifications: Private Sector Transformation and Public Sector Consolidation 6.3.1 Private Money Capital: From Credit-Generation and -Multiplication to Honest Intermediation 6.3.2 Public Investment Capital: From Central Bank and Finance Ministry, Fiscal and Monetary, and “T-Bill,” “Fed Note,” and “Mint Coin” Separation to Digital Consolidation Notes 7 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance: Logistics and Technics 7.1 From Abstract Accounting to Concrete Logistics: Making It Happen Now 7.2 From Macro Logistics to Micro Technics: Why to Digitize Now 7.2.1 The Bright Side of the Ledger 7.2.2 The Dark Side of the Ledger Notes 8 From Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance to Citizen Fintech: Democratic Digitization and Its Possible Forms 8.1 Moneys and Payment Systems 8.2 From Payments to Moneys: Technical Options for the Democratic Digital Currency Notes 9 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance: Cavils and Competitors Notes Epilogue: From Fintech to Ourtech—And Our Finance Index