The Monetary Machine

For decades, monetary reserves have been growing much more quickly than the economy. In spite of this expansion, which has its own dynamic, there are not enough funds available for productive investments and public goods, to expand digital and analogue infrastructures, to prepare for climate change, or to overcome pandemics and economic crises. Could it be that these financial difficulties are not a matter of destiny but something that has come about due to a blatant misunderstanding? The economic sociologist Aaron Sahr subjects our financial reason to a critique, demonstrating that money is not simply an innocent technology required to run markets – an ideology that is entrenched in the independence of the reserve bank and the debt cap – but a political institution. By viewing business as a legitimate matrix of debt, he is able to pointedly describe the operating problems of the monetary machine: completely privatized, our money produces wealth for a select few instead of prosperity for all, and destabilizes itself as well as economic and social frameworks. According to Sahr, the only way out of the manifold crises of the present is by taking the modern money machine out of private hands.