Pennings, A.J. (2026, Oct 10) The Four-Layer USD as the Primary Global Financial Infrastructure. apennings.com https://apennings.com/democratic-political-economies/the-four-layer-usd-as-the-primary-global-financial-infrastructure/

Introduction

This article is a reworking of a previous post marking the three-layer USD infrastructure, and suggesting the fourth. It makes one particular distinction central. The USD is both a domestic US dollar monetary system and a global Eurodollar financial infrastructure. Its domestic foundation rests on constitutional fiscal authority, Treasury operations, commercial-bank money creation, and Federal Reserve settlement. The global reach of the USD depends on offshore dollar credit, trade and commodity markets (Petrodollars), international investment, and increasingly, Treasury-backed stablecoins.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is added to this version for an important fiscal perspective that eludes most economic discussion. It contends that a government that issues its own nonconvertible fiat currency and borrows in that currency is not financially constrained in the same way as a household, business, or foreign-currency borrower.

But the capacity to authorize dollar spending is not the same as the capacity to create real resources, nor does domestic money creation automatically ensure that enough dollars reach international borrowers, importers, businesses, and households. Global dollar shortages can persist even as the United States supplies liquidity through trade, investment, foreign aid, and military expenditure.

Constitutional Money, Global Dollar Liquidity, and the MMT Question

The US dollar is more than the currency used by Americans to pay taxes, purchase goods, and settle debts. It is also the central monetary infrastructure of the global economy. International banks create dollar-denominated credit, companies borrow dollars to finance trade and investment, commodity markets use dollars as a common unit of account, central banks hold US Treasury securities as reserves, and payment networks move dollar claims across borders. A growing digital layer now allows Treasury-backed stablecoins to circulate through blockchain-based payment systems and digital wallets.

Understanding this infrastructure requires distinguishing the dollar’s domestic foundation from its international circulation. The domestic system rests on the constitutional authority of Congress, federal fiscal operations, commercial-bank money creation, and the Federal Reserve’s role in monetary policy and settlement. The global system extends beyond US territory through offshore dollar banking, international financial markets, commodity revenues, and digital payment instruments. Together they are the primary infusers of global monetary liquidity.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) adds a crucial dimension to this analysis. It emphasizes the monetary and fiscal capacities of a government that issues its own fiat currency and borrows in that currency. Such a government does not face the same financial constraints as a household, business, or country that must obtain a foreign currency before meeting obligations denominated in it.

Yet the ability to create domestic currency does not automatically guarantee adequate global liquidity. Dollars must still reach the institutions, countries, firms, and households that need them, at the right time, through financial systems capable of delivering and settling payments.

The global economy consequently faces a paradox. The dollar is abundant in some financial centers and scarce in others. Large offshore dollar markets coexist with countries whose banks, businesses, and governments struggle to obtain affordable dollar funding.

Meanwhile, global trade, investment, energy transitions, digital infrastructure, and development needs continue to expand. The question is not simply whether the world has enough money in aggregate. It is whether the monetary and financial architecture can generate, distribute, and sustain the liquidity required for productive economic and financial activity without creating destabilizing inflation, leverage, or financial dependency.

The four-layer USD model developed here and consisting of domestic US dollars, Eurodollars, petrodollars, and Treasury-backed stablecoins, provides a framework for examining this problem.

(Layer 1) The Domestic US Dollar — Constitutional Authority, Federal Spending, and the Banking System

The foundation of the US dollar system begins with the constitutional authority of the United States government to raise revenue, borrow, and spend money to provision its activities. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress powers to tax, borrow on the credit of the United States, regulate commerce, and coin money and regulate its value.

Article I, Section 9 establishes an important fiscal constraint: money cannot be drawn from the Treasury without appropriations made by law. These provisions establish the legal framework within which the federal government authorizes and finances public activity. They do not, by themselves, prescribe every feature of modern monetary operations. – The Constitution of the United States.

Congress authorizes federal spending through legislation and appropriations. The Treasury executes payments, manages federal receipts, and issues Treasury securities under statutory authority. When the federal government purchases goods and services, pays employees, supports households, or funds infrastructure, its spending introduces dollar balances into the economy. Taxes, Treasury-security sales, and other fiscal operations influence the distribution of those balances and the composition of private-sector financial assets.

This constitutional and fiscal foundation matters because the dollar is not simply a commodity that the United States must obtain before it can govern. The federal government operates within a legal and institutional monetary system in which the dollar is the unit of account for taxes, public expenditure, Treasury obligations, and a vast range of private contracts. The federal government’s ability to authorize spending is therefore fundamental to the domestic provision of money and the purchase of public services.

The second institutional foundation is the US banking system. Commercial banks create deposit money when they extend loans and make payments on behalf of borrowers. Their ability to do so is constrained by capital requirements, liquidity needs, creditworthiness, regulation, funding costs, demand for loans, and the availability of profitable lending opportunities. Bank lending does not require a one-for-one transfer of pre-existing Federal Reserve reserves at the moment a loan is originated, although banks must manage their subsequent payment and settlement obligations.

The Federal Reserve was established by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 to provide a more flexible and stable monetary and financial system. Its responsibilities include monetary policy (interest rates, reserve ratios, quantitative easing, etc.), bank supervision, financial stability, and the operation of important payment and settlement arrangements through Fedwire.

Over time, the Fed became the central institution anchoring the domestic dollar’s monetary conditions and providing settlement balances to eligible financial institutions. Its influence over banking is extensive, but it does not exercise exclusive control over every bank. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, state regulators, and other authorities also have supervisory responsibilities. – Federal Reserve Board.

The domestic dollar therefore rests on several connected but distinct powers. Congress establishes the legal authority for appropriated expenditure, taxation, and borrowing. The Treasury administers the federal government’s payments and issues public debt through public auctions. Commercial banks create deposit money through lending. The Federal Reserve supplies central-bank settlement assets and influences overall monetary and credit conditions.

These functions are institutionally related, but they should not be collapsed into a claim that Congress, the Treasury, commercial banks, and the Fed all create money in the same way. But for our purposes, they do contribute to the provision of the USD.

US Treasury securities connect this domestic architecture to the global economy. Besides financing federal borrowing, they serve as highly traded financial assets, and provide collateral in many markets (especially in Eurodollar lending). They function also as reserve assets for central banks and other institutions. The Treasury market’s scale and liquidity help make the dollar attractive for international saving, borrowing, and settlement. The domestic monetary system is consequently the foundation of a much larger financial network.

Modern Monetary Theory Challenges “Household Economics” and the Need for Adequate Liquidity

MMT provides a useful perspective on the relationship between public spending, monetary sovereignty, and economic capacity. In broad terms, it argues that a government issuing its own nonconvertible currency and borrowing in that currency is not financially constrained in the same way as a household, or a government that must acquire a foreign currency to pay its debts.

For the US federal government, the central constraints to monetary liquidity are political and economic, not simply whether it can find dollars in the private sector. These limitations include statutory and political arrangements, concerns about inflation, prospects for productive capacity, available labor, and materials. Exchange-rate effects of MMT permissioned spending, and the consequences of its overall spending choices are not immune to scrutiny.

This perspective changes how we interpret the relationship between money and prosperity. Public spending can mobilize underused labor and productive resources, finance infrastructure, support research, and sustain demand during economic downturns.

But creating more US dollars cannot automatically produce more electricity, skilled workers, semiconductors, housing, food, or transport capacity. When nominal demand grows faster than the economy’s ability to supply goods and services, inflationary pressure can result. The challenge is therefore to align monetary and fiscal capacity with the resources needed to turn spending into real economic output.

MMT also highlights an important distinction between the United States and countries that borrow in dollars but issue their own currencies. A country that does not issue the currency in which its external debts are denominated may need to earn dollars through exports, attract investment, use reserves, borrow internationally, or obtain official assistance. It cannot simply create the dollars required to settle those obligations. Even countries with monetary sovereignty face constraints from imported energy, food, technology, foreign debt, and exchange-rate depreciation.

For the United States, the capacity to issue dollar-denominated obligations supports the domestic financial system and contributes to the supply of assets sought around the world. Yet the global need for dollars is not identical to the domestic need for money. International dollar liquidity is also generated through commercial-bank lending, offshore deposits, securities markets, repo transactions, foreign-exchange swaps, and other credit relationships. Much of this activity takes place outside the direct reach of ordinary US domestic monetary operations.

The resulting policy problem is twofold. The United States needs to maintain sufficient domestic liquidity to support employment, production, investment, and financial stability. The international system also needs channels through which dollar liquidity can reach viable borrowers and payment systems outside the United States. MMT helps clarify the fiscal capacity of a sovereign currency issuer, but it does not by itself provide a complete institutional design for distributing dollar liquidity across the world.

This distinction matters because a shortage of dollars is not always a shortage of money in the abstract. It may be a shortage of dollar-denominated credit, collateral, foreign-exchange funding, access to payment systems, or central-bank backstops. It may also be a shortage of affordable credit for countries and institutions that lack access to the deepest dollar markets.

(Layer 2) The Eurodollar System — The Global Dollar-Credit Engine

The Eurodollar system consists broadly of dollar-denominated deposits, loans, and other financial claims booked outside the United States. Despite the name, it is not limited to Europe. It developed as international banks and firms used dollar deposits and lending arrangements outside the US domestic banking system, and it grew into a global network of wholesale funding and credit creation.

This offshore system is not merely a distribution channel that passes along dollars previously created by the Federal Reserve. Banks outside the United States can create dollar-denominated deposits by lending, generating new private credit and corresponding liabilities. They also obtain and redistribute dollar funding through interbank markets, securities, repurchase agreements, and foreign-exchange swaps. These activities can expand the international supply of dollar-denominated credit well beyond the stock of US banknotes or the balances held directly at the Federal Reserve.

It is important, however, to distinguish dollar-denominated credit from central-bank money. Offshore banks can create dollar liabilities and credit, but they cannot create Federal Reserve reserve balances. Most of their payment obligations must ultimately be settled through arrangements that connect them to dollar-clearing institutions and central-bank money. The Eurodollar network therefore creates a large international credit layer while often depending on the wider dollar settlement infrastructure.

The scale of this network is substantial. The Bank for International Settlements reported that, by the end of 2023, non-US banks had combined dollar liabilities of approximately $21 trillion, with additional off-balance-sheet dollar obligations through foreign-exchange swaps estimated at roughly twice that amount. Much of this activity was recorded outside the United States, where access to Federal Reserve liquidity is more limited. These figures demonstrate the difference between the domestic monetary base and the much larger international network of dollar-denominated claims. BIS, 2024.

This is why the global dollar system cannot be understood simply by counting physical currency, bank reserves, or Treasury securities. A substantial share of international commerce depends on credit relationships and financial contracts that promise dollar payment in the future. Banks and firms use these arrangements to finance imports, manage currency exposure, purchase assets, and maintain working capital.

The system’s strength is also a source of vulnerability. In periods of stress, banks and investors may attempt to obtain dollars simultaneously, while lenders become more cautious and collateral requirements tighten. Foreign-exchange swap costs can rise, short-term funding can become difficult to roll over, and institutions may sell assets to obtain dollars.

The 2008 financial crisis and the March 2020 market turmoil illustrated how a shortage and global scramble for dollar funding can affect institutions and businesses far beyond the United States. The BIS has documented both the scale of offshore dollar funding and the role of central-bank swap lines in easing such pressures. BIS, 2020.

The Federal Reserve’s dollar swap lines with selected foreign central banks provide an important backstop. Through these arrangements, the Fed supplies dollars to a foreign central bank, which can then lend them to eligible institutions in its jurisdiction. These facilities have helped stabilize dollar funding markets during periods of financial stress.

They are not, however, a universal global lending facility. Access is selective, and swap lines are principally designed to address funding-market dysfunction rather than to finance long-term development or persistent balance-of-payments needs. – Federal Reserve, Central Bank Liquidity Swaps.

The Eurodollar system thus occupies a pivotal position. It expands the global availability of dollar credit, supports trade and investment, and allows international finance to operate at a scale that domestic cash and reserves alone could not support. But it also creates a persistent mismatch between the worldwide demand for dollar liabilities and the uneven ability of institutions to obtain reliable dollar funding.

(Layer 3) The Petrodollar System — Energy Trade and the Recycling of Surpluses

The petrodollar system is best understood as a historically important component of the broader Eurodollar system, rather than a completely separate currency or payment network. Oil has commonly been priced and traded in US dollars, and USD revenues earned by energy exporters have often been recycled into bank deposits, Treasury securities, and other dollar-denominated assets.

The oil shocks of the 1970s helped intensify this process. OPEC energy exporters accumulated large dollar surpluses, while banks and financial markets turned those funds into loans and investments around the world, leading to the “Third World Debt Crisis.” The recycling of energy revenues reinforced the use of dollars in international finance and strengthened demand for dollar assets.

The broader significance of the petrodollar emergence is that commodity markets can generate recurring demand for a common unit of account and settlement. Energy importers need access to the currency in which oil and other commodities are priced. Exporters, in turn, need mechanisms for holding, investing, or spending their revenues. Dollar-based financial markets connect these needs, allowing energy trade to feed into the wider global dollar-credit system.

But the recycling process does not guarantee that dollars will reach every country that needs them. Surplus revenues may be invested in liquid financial assets rather than directed toward productive investment in poorer economies. Private investors may prefer established markets with strong institutions, reliable infrastructure, and lower perceived risks. Countries with limited creditworthiness may remain excluded even when global pools of dollar savings are large.

Nor does the petrodollar mechanism eliminate the need for adequate liquidity in the future. The transition toward renewable energy, the electrification of transport, the construction of data centers, and the expansion of digital networks require large investments in both established and developing economies. These projects need reliable funding, access to imported equipment, and financial systems capable of connecting capital to local productive capacity.

The policy question is therefore not merely how to preserve dollar invoicing in energy markets. It is how to ensure that the international financial system can recycle savings and create credit in ways that support broad-based development, energy security, and productive investment.

Why Global Dollar Shortages Persist

The US dollar has many channels through which it can enter the world economy. These include buying imports, foreign direct investment (FDI), international Eurodollar lending, overseas military expenditure, foreign aid, and private financial lending. Yet these flows do not operate as a coordinated mechanism for meeting the global demand for dollar liquidity. Their purposes differ, their destinations are uneven, and their timing does not necessarily match the needs of borrowers or importers.

A clarification is necessary concerning trade balances. The United States has generally run a trade deficit in recent decades, not a sustained trade surplus. A US trade deficit can supply the rest of the world with net dollar claims through U.S. purchases of foreign goods and services, while a trade surplus would, other things equal, tend to reduce the net flow of dollars associated with trade. But neither trade balance alone determines the availability of dollar funding. Capital flows, bank credit, asset purchases, financial contracts, and the recycling of revenues can expand or contract dollar liquidity independently of trade flows.

Foreign direct investment is also an imperfect mechanism for meeting global liquidity needs. FDI can build factories, infrastructure, and productive capacity, but it tends to concentrate in markets and sectors where investors expect adequate returns and manageable risks. It does not necessarily provide the working capital or short-term foreign-exchange funding needed by smaller firms, public utilities, importers, or local financial institutions.

Foreign aid serves particular development and humanitarian objectives, but its scale, eligibility rules, political priorities, and administrative cycles limit its ability to act as a general-purpose global liquidity facility. U.S. military expenditure abroad creates dollar payments and supports some local economic activity, but it is directed toward defense and strategic objectives rather than toward a comprehensive program of global economic provisioning. Neither aid nor military spending is designed to ensure that every productive enterprise can obtain the dollars required for imports, investment, or debt service.

The same is true of private financial markets. Dollar credit is created when banks and investors see acceptable returns and risks. When risks rise, credit can contract precisely when liquidity is most needed. A country may have viable development projects but insufficient collateral, limited access to correspondent banks, expensive dollar borrowing, or inadequate foreign-exchange reserves. A business may have customers and productive opportunities but still be unable to pay an overseas supplier in dollars.

This is the structural paradox of a global currency system organized around a national monetary authority and decentralized private credit creation. The United States can authorize federal spending and the Federal Reserve can provide dollar settlement liquidity under its legal authorities. Offshore banks can create dollar-denominated credit. Yet no single mechanism automatically ensures that dollar liquidity will be available at affordable rates to all countries and institutions whose productive activity could benefit from it.

The BIS has emphasized that the global reach of the dollar brings efficiency and funding advantages, while also transmitting financial stress across borders. It has also noted that central-bank swap lines, though important, do not replace the longer-term financing required for balance-of-payments support and development. BIS, 2020.

Global prosperity therefore generates a recurring demand for additional monetary and financial capacity. As international trade, production, energy systems, infrastructure, and digital services expand, the need for working capital, credit, settlement assets, and reliable payment systems expands as well. The challenge is not to create unlimited money without regard to consequences. It is to build institutions that can supply sufficient liquidity while distinguishing productive investment from speculative leverage and managing the risks of inflation, currency mismatch, and financial instability.

(Layer 4) Treasury-Backed Stablecoins — Extending the Dollar into Digital Payment Networks

Treasury-backed payment stablecoins represent a newer layer of the dollar’s global infrastructure using blockchains and versions of cryptocurrency exchanges. They are designed to maintain a stable value relative to the US dollar and are generally supported by reserves consisting of cash, bank deposits, short-term US Treasury securities, or other permitted liquid assets under the applicable regulatory framework.

Unlike traditional bank deposits, stablecoins can move through blockchain-based networks and digital wallets that operate continuously, including outside conventional banking hours. They can facilitate cross-border payments, remittances, digital commerce, and on-chain settlement. For people and businesses with limited access to conventional dollar banking, they may provide another route to holding and transferring dollar-denominated value.

The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established a federal framework for payment stablecoins, including requirements concerning permitted issuers, reserve backing, and oversight.

The legal treatment of stablecoins must still be distinguished from the treatment of other digital assets and financial products. The separate market-structure legislation commonly referred to as the CLARITY Act has followed its own legislative path, and its status should be checked against current congressional records before any claim is made that it has become law. The regulatory framework for stablecoins should therefore be described by reference to enacted provisions rather than treating every proposed digital-asset rule as settled.

Treasury-backed stablecoins can extend the dollar’s reach, but they do not create an independent source of unlimited dollar wealth. When a stablecoin is issued against reserves, the holder receives a transferable digital claim backed by assets held under the issuer’s arrangements. The stablecoin may make dollar value easier to move, but its reliability depends on the quality and liquidity of reserves, redemption arrangements, issuer governance, custody, operational security, and the legal rights of holders.

Stablecoins also do not automatically solve the problem of global dollar shortages. A wallet can make dollars easier to receive and send, but it cannot by itself ensure that a user has sufficient income, that a local business can obtain trade credit, that a bank can access wholesale dollar funding, or that a country can pay for imported energy and equipment. Nor can a digital token substitute for electricity, broadband, identity systems, financial literacy, consumer protection, or trusted local institutions.

The Federal Reserve, Treasury, banking regulators, and other authorities have distinct roles in the wider regulatory landscape. The Fed anchors monetary conditions, supervises certain institutions, operates payment and settlement systems, and can provide liquidity under its statutory authorities. The Treasury has responsibilities relating to federal debt management, sanctions, and financial policy. FinCEN and other authorities address anti-money-laundering and related obligations, while the agencies responsible for stablecoin supervision depend on the statutory framework and issuer category. Regulation of the dollar system is therefore distributed across institutions, even though the Federal Reserve occupies a central monetary role.

For the United States, regulated stablecoins may reinforce demand for short-term Treasury securities and extend the use of dollar-denominated payments into new digital markets. For users abroad, they may lower some transaction costs and improve access to dollar-based transfers. But the broader effect will depend on how stablecoin issuers interact with banks, exchanges, payment providers, local currencies, and existing financial regulation.

The development challenge is to ensure that digital dollar access supports productive participation rather than merely deepening dependence on foreign currency. In countries with unstable domestic currencies or limited banking access, dollar stablecoins may be useful for saving and payments. At the same time, widespread use can complicate domestic monetary policy, accelerate currency substitution, expose users to issuer and platform risks, and increase the influence of US financial rules beyond U.S. territory.

Stablecoins should therefore be understood as a new payment and settlement layer within the dollar system—not as a complete solution to the problem of global liquidity.

The Four Layers as a Single Financial Infrastructure

The four layers are distinct but interconnected. The domestic US dollar provides the constitutional, fiscal, banking, and central-bank foundation. The Eurodollar system expands dollar-denominated credit through offshore banking and wholesale markets. The petrodollar system reinforces Eurodollar use through commodity invoicing in USD and the recycling of energy revenues. Treasury-backed stablecoins extend dollar-denominated claims into blockchain-based payment networks and digital wallets.

Together, these layers illustrate how the dollar functions as both a national currency and a global financial infrastructure. Its international role is sustained not simply by the US government’s capacity to issue liabilities, but by the network of institutions, markets, contracts, payment systems, and collateral arrangements that make those liabilities useful to users around the world.

This infrastructure produces considerable advantages. A common unit of account reduces the costs of pricing and comparing goods, assets, and liabilities. Deep Treasury markets provide a widely used reserve and collateral asset. International banks and firms can draw on a large network of dollar funding. Digital payment systems may reduce some frictions in transferring dollar value across borders. These benefits help explain why the dollar remains central even as governments and institutions explore alternatives.

But the same infrastructure creates a global dependency. Dollar liquidity is supplied through mechanisms that respond to profitability, risk, regulation, monetary policy, and geopolitical relationships. The system can be highly liquid at its center while remaining inaccessible or expensive for users at its periphery. A global currency can be abundant in wholesale financial markets yet scarce in the places where it is needed to finance productive activity.

This is the point at which MMT, global banking, and development policy converge. The ability to create a currency is not identical to the ability to make that currency available where it can support production and human welfare. Nor is adequate liquidity merely a matter of increasing the stock of money. It requires channels that connect financing to resources, credit to viable projects, payment systems to local economies, and investment to productive capacity.

MMT and the Global Responsibility to Supply Liquidity

MMT is most directly concerned with the fiscal and monetary capacities of sovereign currency issuers. Applied to the United States, it emphasizes that federal spending is not financially equivalent to household spending, because the federal government operates within a monetary system centered on its own unit of account. That capacity can be used to support employment, infrastructure, research, public services, and the productive resources needed for long-term prosperity.

The global implications are more complicated. The United States issues the dollar, but much of the world’s dollar-denominated credit is created by private institutions outside the United States. Countries that need dollars to service external debt or purchase essential imports cannot simply issue them in the way the U.S. government issues dollar obligations. They must obtain dollars through trade, investment, borrowing, reserves, official support, or access to international credit markets.

Consequently, the global economy needs both adequate domestic monetary capacity in individual countries and dependable arrangements for international liquidity. Countries that issue their own currencies need room to mobilize domestic resources without being forced into unnecessary austerity by an overly narrow conception of government finance. At the same time, they need access to the foreign currency required for critical imports and external obligations. The United States, as issuer of the principal global funding currency, has a distinctive capacity to influence the conditions under which that international liquidity is supplied.

This does not mean that the U.S. government should attempt to satisfy every global dollar demand through unlimited issuance. Dollar creation without regard to productive capacity, inflation, exchange rates, financial stability, and the distribution of resources can produce serious harms. Nor does every request for dollar credit represent a socially valuable use of resources. The objective should be adequate, reliable, and appropriately governed liquidity—not an indiscriminate expansion of nominal claims.

The distinction also clarifies the limitations of trade, FDI, aid, and military expenditure as sources of international liquidity. These channels serve important purposes, but none is designed to function as a universal mechanism for financing global prosperity. Private credit expands and contracts with risk appetite. Aid follows political and programmatic priorities. Investment gravitates toward expected returns. Trade balances reflect the interaction of saving, investment, spending, and exchange rates rather than a coordinated plan for meeting global dollar demand.

A more resilient international system would combine deep private markets with stronger financial safety nets, more accessible trade finance, better regional payment arrangements, and development institutions capable of supporting productive investment. Central-bank swap lines can help manage short-term market dysfunction, but they are selective and are not substitutes for long-term development finance. Stablecoins can improve some payment functions, but they cannot replace infrastructure investment or institutional capacity. National monetary sovereignty can create room for domestic development, but it cannot eliminate the constraints imposed by foreign-currency obligations and imported resources.

The underlying issue is how to align monetary capacity with productive capacity. The world needs enough liquidity to support expanding economic activity, but it also needs institutional mechanisms that direct that liquidity toward energy, transport, communications, health, education, housing, and the productive systems on which prosperity depends.

From Dollar Liquidity to Global Prosperity

The four-layer dollar system provides a useful starting point for this task because it reveals where liquidity is created, where it circulates, and where it becomes difficult to obtain. It also shows why digital payment innovations alone cannot resolve global inequality. A country may gain access to dollar stablecoins without gaining the electricity, broadband, data infrastructure, skilled workforce, or institutional capability needed to turn that access into sustained development.

This is especially important in the age of artificial intelligence. Productive AI systems require more than financing or access to models. They depend on energy, computing infrastructure, reliable networks, data, technical expertise, and organizations capable of applying computation to real problems. Dollar liquidity can help finance these assets, but only if financial and development systems connect capital to the people and institutions able to build and use them.

The central policy question is therefore not simply whether the world needs more dollars. It is whether the global financial architecture can convert available monetary capacity into productive investment and human capability. The United States has an unusual capacity to influence the dollar system because its currency is central to global banking, finance, trade, and reserves. That position provides benefits to the United States, but it also creates responsibilities for the stability of the infrastructure on which so much international activity depends.

A more adequate global liquidity system would recognize the difference between money creation and real resource creation, between private credit expansion and public provisioning, and between access to a digital dollar and the capacity to use it productively. It would preserve the benefits of deep and liquid dollar markets while reducing the vulnerability of countries and institutions that lack dependable access to dollar funding.

The ultimate challenge is not to replace the dollar simply because it is dominant, nor to assume that dollar dominance guarantees universal prosperity. It is to ensure that monetary and financial infrastructure can support the productive capacity of an expanding world economy. The dollar system’s future will depend not only on how much liquidity it can generate, but on how effectively that liquidity can be distributed, governed, and converted into the resources and capabilities that people need.

References

Bank for International Settlements. (2020). Global banks’ dollar funding needs and central bank swap lines. BIS Bulletin No. 27. https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull27.htm
Bank for International Settlements. (2020). US dollar funding: An international perspective. Committee on the Global Financial System, CGFS Papers No. 65. https://www.bis.org/publ/cgfs65.htm
Bank for International Settlements. (2020). A monetary lifeline: Central banks’ crisis response. In BIS Annual Economic Report 2020.
Bank for International Settlements. (2024). International finance through the lens of BIS statistics: The global reach of currencies. BIS Quarterly Review.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (n.d.). Frequently asked questions.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (n.d.). Central bank liquidity swaps.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2021). Financial stability report: Funding risk.
Congress of the United States. (1913). Federal Reserve Act.
Congress of the United States. (2025). Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act, Pub. L. No. 119-27.
McGuire, P., & von Peter, G. (2009). The US dollar shortage in global banking and the international policy response.
Bank for International Settlements Working Paper No. 291.
McLeay, M., Radia, A., & Thomas, R. (2014). Money creation in the modern economy. Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 54(1), 14–27.
National Archives. (n.d.). The Constitution of the United States: A transcription.

Section 2 builds directly on the four-layer USD framework by examining how the benefits and constraints of global dollar liquidity differ across the five tiers. The key distinction is that access to dollars is not the same as the capacity to convert dollar liquidity into AI infrastructure, productive investment, and human development. The chart’s five tiers make that distinction concrete: each occupies a different position in the dollar system and faces different barriers to turning financial access into ICT4D and AI4Good outcomes.

Section 2: The Five Tiers of Global USD Liquidity — Spreadsheet Logic and AI4D

The four-layer model explains how the dollar operates as a domestic currency and a global financial infrastructure. But access to that infrastructure is distributed unevenly. The United States issues the dollar and anchors its domestic monetary system through Congress’s fiscal authority, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the U.S. banking system. Beyond the United States, international banks create dollar-denominated credit, surplus economies accumulate dollar assets, emerging economies rely on a mixture of external funding and domestic financial systems, and low-access economies may encounter dollars primarily through remittances, mobile money, and stablecoins.

These differences matter for artificial intelligence and development because financial access alone does not determine a country’s technological capabilities. Countries also need the computational infrastructure, data systems, energy, connectivity, software, skills, and organizational capacity required to convert financial resources into productive activity.

Spreadsheet logic provides a useful way to understand this conversion. From Excel and Google Sheets to Bloomberg and LSEG terminals, financial databases, portfolio-management systems, and AI platforms, spreadsheets and related computational tools organize information into categories, connect variables, calculate relationships, model scenarios, and support decisions. Their importance differs across the five tiers, reflecting each tier’s access to dollar liquidity and its capacity to apply computation to economic and social problems.

The five tiers are therefore not simply a hierarchy of wealth or financial inclusion. They represent different positions within the global dollar system and different capacities to turn capital into computational capability and development outcomes.

Tier 1: The U.S. Core — Treasury and Federal Reserve Liquidity, Advanced Financial Systems, and Frontier AI

The United States occupies the foundational position in the global dollar system because it issues the currency in which much international trade, finance, and borrowing is conducted. Its domestic monetary architecture rests on congressional fiscal authority, Treasury operations, commercial-bank money creation, and the Federal Reserve’s role in monetary policy and central-bank settlement. Deep Treasury markets, sophisticated capital markets, and extensive financial infrastructure reinforce the international demand for dollar-denominated assets.

The United States also has comparatively strong access to advanced computing, cloud services, semiconductors, energy infrastructure, research institutions, and frontier AI models. Its financial and technological systems reinforce one another: capital can finance data centers and chip development, computational infrastructure supports financial innovation, and financial platforms help allocate investment across a wide range of industries.

Spreadsheet logic is deeply embedded in this position. Bloomberg and LSEG terminals provide financial information and market access; Excel supports financial modeling and analysis; Aladdin and related portfolio systems support risk management and investment decisions; and AI increasingly augments forecasting, research, and operational workflows. Together, these systems help transform capital into computation and computation into frontier AI capabilities.

Modern Monetary Theory adds a fiscal dimension to this position. Because the U.S. federal government issues obligations denominated in its own currency, it has monetary and fiscal capacities unavailable to governments that must first obtain dollars to meet dollar-denominated obligations. However, this does not eliminate legal and political constraints or the real limits imposed by inflation, labor, energy, materials, and productive capacity. The practical question is whether public and private investment mobilizes the resources needed to sustain technological leadership and broad-based prosperity.

For ICT4D and AI4Good, Tier 1 has the capacity to develop frontier AI, export cloud and financial services, supply advanced chips and software, and influence technical standards. Its challenge is to ensure that the benefits of its financial and computational leadership extend beyond its own economy. Since the United States anchors the global dollar system, its monetary, fiscal, and regulatory choices can affect the funding conditions under which other countries invest in infrastructure and technology.

Tier 2: Global Financial Hubs — Eurodollar Funding and Computational Financial Intermediation

Tier 2 consists of international financial hubs and institutions deeply connected to the offshore dollar system. These institutions support global trade, investment, foreign-exchange transactions, securities markets, and cross-border credit. Their importance lies not simply in transferring dollars from one country to another, but in creating and intermediating dollar-denominated credit through lending, deposits, wholesale funding, repo, derivatives, and related financial arrangements.

The Eurodollar system is consequently a major source of international dollar liquidity. Offshore banks can create dollar-denominated deposits when they lend, although they cannot create Federal Reserve reserve balances. Their capacity to expand credit depends on funding conditions, credit demand, regulation, collateral, and the ability to settle dollar obligations through the wider financial system.

Spreadsheet logic in Tier 2 is organized around terminals, databases, quantitative models, and portfolio-management systems. These tools integrate market data, calculate exposures, price assets, assess risk, manage portfolios, and coordinate financial transactions. AI can extend these capabilities through document analysis, fraud detection, customer services, forecasting, and automated operational workflows.

The result is an advanced layer of financial intermediation combined with AI-enabled services. Global hubs can export financial expertise, fintech, e-commerce infrastructure, and digital services to other regions. They can also channel funding toward businesses and governments that lack direct access to the deepest U.S. markets.

But this role is vulnerable to dollar-funding contractions. When dollar funding becomes more expensive or difficult to obtain, financial institutions may reduce lending, tighten collateral requirements, and withdraw from riskier markets. The resulting contraction can affect emerging economies even when their underlying development projects remain viable.

For ICT4D and AI4Good, Tier 2’s central task is to connect the capacity of international financial markets with productive investment across a broader range of borrowers. Its spreadsheet and AI systems should not only improve trading and portfolio management; they can also help evaluate infrastructure projects, manage financial risk, and support more accessible digital financial services.

Tier 3: Surplus Exporters — Converting Reserves and Export Dollars into AI Capacity

Tier 3 includes economies that accumulate foreign-exchange reserves, Treasury holdings, and export revenues. These countries obtain dollars through international economic activity rather than issuing the dollar themselves. Their reserves provide a buffer against external shocks, support international payments, and create opportunities for investment.

Yet financial reserves do not automatically translate into technological independence. An economy may hold substantial dollar assets while depending on imported semiconductors, advanced software, cloud services, and specialized equipment. Its ability to build AI capacity depends on how effectively it converts financial resources into domestic energy, manufacturing, research, data centers, and technical skills.

Spreadsheet logic in Tier 3 combines national financial modeling with tools such as Excel, China’s Wind financial information platform, and global market systems. These tools support reserve management, export analysis, investment planning, industrial policy, and financial risk assessment. AI can further assist in evaluating infrastructure investment, optimizing supply chains, forecasting demand, and managing energy and manufacturing systems.

For ICT4D and AI4Good, the priority is to convert reserves and export earnings into productive infrastructure and domestic AI capacity. This may include advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, high-capacity networks, data centers, research institutions, and technical education. Surplus economies can also finance regional development through trade, investment, and financial cooperation.

The key issue is not simply the amount of money accumulated. It is whether financial wealth supports a durable expansion of productive and computational capacity. Tier 3 succeeds when its reserves become more than a store of financial value—when they help build the infrastructure, expertise, and institutions needed to sustain technological development.

Tier 4: Emerging Economies — Stablecoins, Mobile Finance, and Selective AI Adoption

Tier 4 economies participate in international trade and finance but often face more volatile access to dollars. Their firms and households may use remittances, mobile money, fintech platforms, and occasional offshore dollar funding to participate in digital markets. Dollar-linked stablecoins may provide an additional way to receive payments, transfer funds, and hold dollar-denominated value.

However, stablecoins do not eliminate currency risk, external debt burdens, or the possibility of sudden stops in capital flows. Nor do they automatically provide the energy, broadband, data centers, computing resources, and technical expertise needed for large-scale AI deployment.

Spreadsheet logic in Tier 4 is often organized around Excel or Google Sheets, fintech databases, enterprise software, and cloud-based financial tools. These systems can support accounting, credit assessment, inventory management, remittance services, small-business operations, and financial planning. AI can build on these foundations through applications in agriculture, health, education, logistics, and public administration.

The most promising ICT4D outcomes may involve selective rather than comprehensive AI adoption. Small and medium-sized enterprises can use AI-enabled services to improve productivity; agricultural systems can use forecasting and advisory tools; healthcare providers can extend information and administrative capacity; and fintech platforms can improve access to financial services.

The central challenge is conversion. Emerging economies need to transform intermittent or costly dollar access into reliable infrastructure, local skills, and organizations capable of using digital tools productively. That requires investment in energy and broadband, appropriate regulation, domestic technical capacity, and financing arrangements that reduce excessive dependence on short-term external funding.

Tier 5: Low-Access Economies — Basic Spreadsheet Logic, Mobile and Cloud Tools, and Localized AI

Tier 5 includes economies and communities with limited direct access to international dollar funding and significant constraints in electricity, broadband, computing, data, skills, and institutional capacity. For these users, mobile money and stablecoins may improve access to digital payments, especially where conventional banking is costly, geographically limited, or difficult to access.

But financial access is only one part of the development problem. A mobile wallet does not provide reliable electricity, broadband, local computing, or the technical capacity to build and maintain digital services. Without these foundations, access to dollars may improve transactions without substantially expanding local productive capability.

Spreadsheet logic at this tier is more basic and practical. Simple spreadsheets, mobile applications, cloud tools, and accessible databases can support household budgets, small-business accounts, agricultural records, inventory management, local health administration, and community projects. These systems may not resemble the advanced modeling platforms used in global financial centers, but they perform a crucial function: organizing information so that people and institutions can make more reliable decisions.

AI4D strategies should build on these foundations. Localized AI tools may support agricultural information, health services, education, language access, disaster preparedness, and public administration. Mobile connectivity and satellite services can help reach remote areas, while open-source and smaller AI models may offer more affordable options than relying exclusively on large, energy-intensive frontier systems.

The priority is foundational digital resilience: electricity, broadband, mobile finance, affordable cloud access, technical skills, appropriate safeguards, and institutions capable of using technology to address local needs. Stablecoins may help with remittances and payments, but they cannot substitute for the underlying infrastructure that makes digital development sustainable.

Spreadsheet Logic as the Bridge Between Dollar Liquidity and AI4D

Across all five tiers, spreadsheet logic provides a bridge between financial resources and computational action. At the core, financial capital is organized through data, models, databases, and software systems that support calculation and decision-making. The sophistication of these systems varies by tier, but the underlying task remains similar: turning information into decisions and decisions into action.

In Tier 1, this bridge supports frontier financial and AI systems. In Tier 2, it supports international financial intermediation and AI-enabled services. In Tier 3, it helps convert reserves and export earnings into investment and industrial capability. In Tier 4, it supports fintech, small-business productivity, and selective AI adoption. In Tier 5, basic spreadsheets and mobile tools can strengthen local decision-making and prepare the ground for more advanced digital applications.

This framework also clarifies why the global dollar system cannot be evaluated only by the quantity of money or the number of digital wallets in circulation. A country may have access to stablecoins without having sufficient broadband or computing power. It may attract dollar investment without developing domestic technological capabilities. It may accumulate reserves without converting them into productive infrastructure.

The central development question is therefore: How effectively can each tier convert dollar and stablecoin access into computational capacity, productive investment, and human development?

A more inclusive global financial architecture would connect the dollar system’s liquidity and settlement capacity to the infrastructure and skills required for AI4D. That does not mean treating stablecoins as a universal remedy or assuming that every economy should reproduce the same technological model. It means recognizing that payment access, financial intermediation, spreadsheet logic, AI infrastructure, and human capability are connected stages in the development process.

The ultimate measure of success is not simply how far the dollar circulates or how quickly financial transactions settle. It is whether the infrastructure built around the dollar helps more countries turn financial access into reliable computation, productive capacity, and improvements in human welfare.

References

Bank for International Settlements. (2020). US dollar funding: An international perspective. Committee on the Global Financial System, CGFS Papers No. 65. https://www.bis.org/publ/cgfs65.htm
Bank for International Settlements. (2020). Global banks’ dollar funding needs and central bank swap lines. BIS Bulletin No. 27.
Bank for International Settlements. (2024). International finance through the lens of BIS statistics: The global reach of currencies. BIS Quarterly Review.
Kelton, S. (2020). The Deficit Myth: Modern monetary theory and the birth of the people’s economy. PublicAffairs.
MacKenzie, D. (2006). An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. MIT Press.
McGuire, P., & von Peter, G. (2009). The US dollar shortage in global banking and the international policy response (BIS Working Papers No. 291). Bank for International Settlements.
McLeay, M., Radia, A., & Thomas, R. (2014). Money creation in the modern economy. Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, 54(1), 14–27.
Pozsar, Z., Adrian, T., Ashcraft, A., & Boesky, H. (2010). Shadow banking (Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report No. 458). Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Rose, J., & Pennings, A. J. (2022). Knowledge, decisions, and norms: The role of spreadsheets in organizational life. Information, 13(2), Article 46. https://doi.org/10.3390/info13020046
Toupin, S., & Siad, S. (2025). Artificial intelligence for development (AI4D): A contested notion. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241304678
World Bank. (2022). The Global Findex Database 2021: Financial inclusion, digital payments, and resilience in the age of COVID-19. World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1897-4
International Telecommunication Union. (2024). Facts and figures 2024. https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2024/
International Monetary Fund. (2025). Currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves (COFER). https://data.imf.org/COFER

In-Text Citations for Section 2

Tier 1 — The U.S. Core: The constitutional and institutional foundations of federal spending and money creation can be supported by the U.S. Constitution, the Federal Reserve Act, and McLeay, Radia, and Thomas (2014). The distinction between monetary capacity and real resource constraints can be supported by Kelton (2020).
Tier 2 — Global Financial Hubs: The role of offshore dollar credit, international banking, and dollar-funding shortages can be supported by McGuire and von Peter (2009), the Bank for International Settlements (2020, 2024), and Pozsar et al. (2010).
Tier 3 — Surplus Exporters: The relationship between dollar reserves, international finance, and the global reach of currencies can be supported by the Bank for International Settlements (2024) and the International Monetary Fund (2025).
Tier 4 — Emerging Economies: The potential of digital financial services, mobile money, and digital inclusion can be supported by the World Bank (2022) and the International Telecommunication Union (2024). For AI adoption and development constraints, cite Toupin and Siad (2025).
Tier 5 — Low-Access Economies: The importance of connectivity, digital infrastructure, and foundational capacity can be supported by the International Telecommunication Union (2024), the World Bank (2022), and Toupin and Siad (2025).
Spreadsheet Logic as the Bridge: The role of financial models and computational tools in markets can be supported by MacKenzie (2006) and Rose and Pennings (2022). These sources help connect the use of spreadsheets and financial models to organizational decisions and the performance of economic systems.
MMT and Global Liquidity: The distinction between sovereign-currency capacity and real-resource constraints can be supported by Kelton (2020). For the international dollar system, combine this with McGuire and von Peter (2009) and the Bank for International Settlements (2020, 2024). MMT’s account of domestic fiscal capacity should not be treated as a complete explanation of offshore dollar-credit creation or international dollar shortages.

Notes

[1]
[2] For further regulatory context, consult the current text and legislative status of any subsequent digital-asset market-structure legislation, as well as applicable Treasury, Federal Reserve, FinCEN, and other agency rules. The GENIUS Act is an enacted statute; proposed or separately considered legislation should not be treated as law unless enacted.
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© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice. AI is often used, and results are thoroughly interrogated. Links are used for some citations. Views are my own and do not express the stances of my employers, past or present.

---

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

Category: artificial intelligence, blockchain, democratic political economies, geopolitical risk, public administration
Tags: eurodollars > MMT > Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) > Stablecoins > USD infrastructure

Show-Biz 2: Financial Media and the Digital Spreadsheet Made Socially Visible

Posted on | October 5, 2026 | No Comments

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2026, Oct 06) Show-Biz 2: Financial Media and the Digital Spreadsheet Made Socially Visible. apennings.com https://apennings.com/political-economy-of-media/show-biz-2-financial-media-and-digital-spreadsheet-made-socially-visible/

Introduction

Financial television looks like journalism, but much of its visual content and grammar comes from another medium: the logic of the digital spreadsheet. The familiar financial-news screen, with its rows of prices, scrolling tickers, percentage changes, market indexes, currency values, commodity prices, bond yields, and constantly updating charts, is not simply a way to record and report economic events. It is a public interface to a computational representation of financial reality.

This is what I call “Show-Biz,” the process by which computational representations of markets are reformatted as public spectacle. This is my second post on the Show-Biz topic, although I also point to my work on the television anchor, who “anchors” meaning in the broadcast as instrumental in my formulation of the related issues. This is one of the major topics in my Visual Rhetoric and IT course.[1]

The term Show-Biz is deliberately provocative. Financial news is certainly news, but it is also performance. Markets are turned into a continuously updated visual spectacle in which numbers move across the screen while anchors, analysts and guests (traders, CEOs, interpret their significance. The audience does not encounter “the market” directly. It encounters a mediated, computationally constructed version of the market — and that mediation has a history that runs from the spreadsheet cell to the AI agent.[2]

The Broadcast Spreadsheet

The basic spreadsheet converts economic information into rows, columns, cells and formulas. Financial television performs a similar operation, but turns the spreadsheet into a broadcast interface. The screen may display:

Dow Jones 51,xxx +0.4%
S&P 500 7,xxx ?0.2%
Nasdaq 27,xxx +0.7%
Gold $4,xxx +1.1%
Brent $9x.xx ?0.6%
U.S. 10-Year 4.xx%

The viewer is seeing a table, even when it does not look like one. Prices are substituted for objects. Indexes become summary variables. Percentages become measures of change. Colors and arrows encode direction. Charts display trajectories across time. The screen therefore transforms a heterogeneous financial world into a standardized computational surface, an organized system of relationships in which a market index aggregates hundreds of securities into a single number, a percentage change compresses movement into a standardized measure, and a yield represents a relationship between price, income and maturity.

This representation is connected to a deeper technological infrastructure. Financial broadcasters receive market information through data feeds, APIs, exchange connections and commercial financial-data providers. These systems continuously transmit prices, trades, indexes, foreign-exchange rates, bond yields and other measurements into databases and production systems. The broadcaster then selects, formats, aggregates and visualizes those data for viewers.

The pipeline runs from market activity -> data feed -> database/API -> computational transformation -> graphics system -> television screen -> audience interpretation.

The television screen sits at the end of a computational chain. What appears to be an immediate view of the market is the result of multiple layers of mediation. The stock exchange produces transactions; the data infrastructure represents them; software organizes them; algorithms calculate changes; graphics systems render the results; journalists and analysts interpret them; the audience sees the final representation. Financial Show-Biz is therefore not simply reporting economic reality but producing a particular representation of it for public consumption.

Real-Time Recalculation

The spreadsheet introduced a form of recalculable time. When an input changes, dependent values can be recalculated. Financial television turns that computational temporality into a visual experience. The audience watches the spreadsheet change in real time — the ticker moves, the index rises, the percentage changes, the chart redraws itself, the bond yield shifts. The market appears to exist as a continuous present, not as an event that happens and is subsequently reported but as a live spreadsheet in which the event and its representation approach simultaneity.

This explains why financial television can feel compulsively immediate. The screen continuously tells viewers that something has changed and that the meaning of everything connected to it may have changed as well. A new inflation number changes interest-rate expectations, which change bond prices, which alter yields, which change equity valuations, which affect currency movements, which affect commodity prices, which affect inflation expectations. Each new input potentially propagates through a network of dependent variables. This is spreadsheet logic experienced as television.

Representation Becomes Reality

Donald MacKenzie argues that financial models can help shape markets rather than merely describe them — a model can influence trading practices because market participants act on its representations. Show-Biz introduces another layer: market participants are not the only people responding to financial representations. The public encounters markets primarily through media representations and interpretations. The S&P 500 on a screen becomes “the market.” A futures contract becomes an indicator of what the market “expects.” A Treasury yield becomes a signal about the economy. A market correction becomes a narrative event. The representation begins to acquire social reality.

Mary Poovey‘s history of quantification is relevant here. Numerical representation acquires authority partly because numbers appear objective and impersonal, even though they are produced through systems of selection, classification and interpretation. A number on the screen looks definitive, but every number has a history. Someone decided what to measure, defined the category, selected the time interval, designed the index, built the feed, chose which number to display, and framed it with a headline. The audience encounters the result as if it were simply “what the market is doing.”

This does not mean financial media deceives its audience. The data are often real, the prices are real and the market movements are real. The issue is more subtle. Every representation selects a reality. The viewer sees the Dow but not the thousands of individual transactions behind it; a Treasury yield but not the global network of banks, funds, dealers, collateral arrangements and algorithms that help produce it; the dollar price but not the Eurodollar liabilities and offshore balance sheets that help sustain dollar liquidity; a stablecoin’s $1.00 value but not the Treasury bills, cash equivalents, custodians, compliance systems and redemption mechanisms behind it. The spreadsheet logic is hidden because its outputs look natural.

Show-Biz as Remediation

Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation, the process by which media continually refashion earlier media forms, is useful here. Financial television remediates the newspaper financial table, the ticker tape, the brokerage quote board, the spreadsheet, the terminal and the trading screen. In the process, the private computational environment of the analyst becomes a public spectacle. The spreadsheet becomes broadcast. The dashboard becomes entertainment. The financial terminal becomes television. The table becomes narrative.

The result is a compression of computational complexity into narrative spectacle. A trading desk may have dozens of screens displaying thousands of variables. Television compresses that enormous informational environment into a manageable visual grammar: a few indexes, several prices, a chart, an analyst and a headline. Statements like “Markets are mixed,” “Stocks rally,” “Investors flee risk,” or “Markets digest the Fed” convert enormous computational systems into stories that can be understood within seconds.

This is especially important in the international dollar system. The five-tier structure of global dollar liquidity analyzes countries according to Eurodollar markets, Treasury auctions, correspondent banking, repo markets, foreign-exchange swaps, and institutional portfolio systems that are largely invisible to ordinary users. They encounter it through representations: a Bloomberg screen showing the Treasury yield, a television network displaying the dollar index, a financial website showing the price of crude oil, a mobile application showing the exchange rate, a stablecoin wallet displaying a dollar balance. Each is another interface onto the same financial infrastructure. The dollar therefore has a media layer: it is not enough for dollars to circulate; their prices, yields, risks and relationships must be continuously represented and communicated.

This suggests a hierarchy of financial computation:

Aladdin / institutional risk management systems
Bloomberg / LSEG / Wind financial-data trading environments
Excel / spreadsheets / analytical models
Financial television and digital news
Public perception of markets

The levels are not identical, and information does not necessarily flow in a simple one-way direction. But they participate in a common computational ecology. Financial Show-Biz is the popular interface to spreadsheet capitalism.

USD, Stablecoins, AI, and Operative Mediation

Stablecoins introduce a transformation because they turn the representation of money into a directly transferable digital object. Financial television shows the price of the dollar. A spreadsheet calculates its value within a financial model. A financial platform manages its exposure. A stablecoin represents dollar-denominated value as a digital token that can circulate through a payment network. The progression is remarkable: display -> calculate -> manage -> transfer.

AI potentially adds another stage. An AI system can interpret financial information, compare scenarios, calculate implications and increasingly participate in studio workflows. The conventional spreadsheet waits for a user. The financial terminal increasingly assists the user. The AI system can potentially formulate the question, retrieve the relevant data, construct the analysis, explain the result and recommend or execute a next step. The interface shifts from “Here is the data” to “Here is what the system thinks the data means and what could be done about it.”

Show-Biz traditionally separates representation from action. Television tells us what markets are doing; the viewer then decides what to do. AI narrows that separation. The system can move from observing the market to interpreting it, from interpretation toward recommendation, and potentially from recommendation toward execution. The computational financial screen becomes more operative.

The trajectory can therefore be written as:

represent -> calculate -> communicate -> transfer -> act.

At every stage, economic reality becomes more thoroughly represented as computational information. And at every stage, that information becomes more capable of organizing behavior. The spreadsheet established a computational relationship among variables. Financial information systems connected those calculations to markets. Financial television made the resulting representations socially visible. Stablecoins turn some financial representations into portable digital assets. AI increasingly makes the computational system capable of interpreting and acting upon its own representations.

The Spreadsheet Has Escaped

The importance of financial Show-Biz extends beyond finance. Modern society increasingly experiences complex systems through dashboards: the economy through indexes, weather through numerical forecasts, public health through statistics, elections through polling charts, transportation through maps and arrival times, business through performance dashboards, personal finance through balances and scores, ourselves through metrics. The spreadsheet has escaped the spreadsheet application. Its fundamental grammar — cells, categories, variables, formulas, aggregation, recalculation and visualization — has become one of the dominant ways modern society represents complex reality.

Financial television makes this transformation especially visible because it turns spreadsheet logic into a broadcast spectacle. The market is no longer merely something that happens. It is something that is computed, represented, transmitted, interpreted and increasingly acted upon in real time. The most important thing happening on the financial-news screen may not be the numbers themselves. It is the fact that society has learned to experience economic reality as a spreadsheet in motion.

References

Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press.
MacKenzie, D. (2006). An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets. MIT Press.
Poovey, M. (1998). A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. University of Chicago Press.

Notes

[1] In this post I turn back to my earlier writing on Show-Biz and the way it remediates the computer and the digital spreadsheet. Financial Show-Biz is the public-facing remediation of spreadsheet logic. Excel makes economic relationships computational; Bloomberg/LSEG/Wind/Aladdin institutionalize those relationships; financial television makes selected computational outputs socially visible.
[2] I did a lot of media work in my graduate school days and when I moved to New Zealand. I would have liked to have directed a football game or a political convention. I want to thank Patricia Amaral for the technical skills and Michael A. Shapiro for the intellectual skills to do the type of analysis needed for Show-Biz.

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Not to be considered financial advice. AI is often used, and results are thoroughly interrogated. Links are used for some citations. Views are my own and do not express the stances of my employers, past or present.

---

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

stablecoins make financial representations transferable; and AI increasingly makes them operative. That gives you a continuous media history from the spreadsheet cell to the AI agent.

The Show Biz concept becomes especially interesting when financial media itself is treated as a spreadsheet interface: a broadcast version of the computational representations already used by traders, analysts, portfolio managers, and financial institutions. “Show-Biz” then names the process by which this computational representation is reformatted as public spectacle.

Category: digital media economics, digital media management, financial news, financial technology, journalism, political economy of media, smart new deal, sustainable development, technologies of meaning, visual literacy and rhetoric

Show-Biz 3: The Anchor and Broadcast Journalism’s Spreadsheet Logic

Posted on | October 4, 2026 | No Comments

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2026, Oct 05) Show-Biz 3: The Anchor and Broadcast Journalism’s Spreadsheet Logic. apennings.com https://apennings.com/meaningful_play/show-biz-3-the-anchor-and-the-broadcast-journalisms-spreadsheet-logic/

Introduction

If the spreadsheet makes markets computational, the financial-news anchor makes those computations socially legible. The anchor is not merely a reader of headlines. In financial television, the anchor is the human interface to the broadcast spreadsheet. He, she, or it (AI) performs the conversion of the continuous stream of prices, tickers, indexes, yields, and charts into narrative meaning a viewer can understand, remember, and act upon.

Unlike print journalism, where disembodied letters of information suggest an objective third person, the televisual anchor is intimate and direct. The camera addresses the viewer face-to-face. The anchor looks into the lens, speaks in the second person, and creates a relationship that print cannot replicate. This intimacy matters because financial television presents data that is inherently unstable — prices flash, tickers scroll, charts redraw, percentages shift. The anchor is the stabilizing presence across this volatility.

The word “anchor” is not metaphorical by accident. A ship’s anchor is a heavy object attached to a chain, used to moor a vessel to the bottom of a body of water. The news anchor performs the same function for meaning. The anchor does not permanently fix meaning, but temporarily stabilizes it long enough for the viewer to understand the market as a story.

The anchor emphasizes what matters, what can be dismissed, and what connects to what. A 200-point drop in the Dow becomes “a rough day on Wall Street.” A yield-curve inversion becomes “a recession warning.” A tech rally becomes “AI optimism.” The floating signifiers of market data are moored, however briefly, to narrative anchors that give them social meaning.

Anchoring Spreadsheet Time

Financial television, as I have argued, turns spreadsheet logic into a real-time visual experience. The audience watches the spreadsheet recalculate continuously. But continuous recalculation produces a problem. If everything is always changing, what is worth attending to?

The anchor solves this problem. The anchor decides which movements matter and which can be ignored. A 0.3% move in the S&P 500 may be significant if the anchor frames it as a reaction to an inflation report, or it may be dismissed as “choppy trading” if the anchor chooses a different frame. The anchor’s authority to make these selections — to assign significance to some numbers and not others — is precisely what makes the broadcast spreadsheet navigable for a public audience.

This is also why the anchor’s credibility is not incidental but structural. The anchor trades in the currency of assurance and credibility. Groomed and conditioned into the voice of authority, the anchor must be trustworthy, well-groomed, appropriately dressed, and present the manners appropriate to entering a viewer’s home or office.[1]

But credibility in financial news is not merely cosmetic. The anchor is translating abstract, technical, high-speed computational data for viewers who cannot verify the infrastructure behind it — the exchanges, the data feeds, the algorithms, the clearing systems, the offshore dollar markets. The viewer trusts the anchor because the viewer has no other access to the computational substrate. The anchor’s credibility is therefore a proxy for trust in the entire financial-data pipeline.

Empirical Rhetoric

When the anchor reads the news, computer graphics are not decorative. They provide empirical rhetoric, a visual warrant for the anchor’s claims. A chart of a company’s share price tracked over the last month gives an empirical dimension to the anchor’s argument about that company’s relative strength or weakness. A yield curve displayed on screen authorizes the anchor’s statement about recession risk. A heat map of sector performance visually confirms the claim that “tech is leading the market.”

The chart does not merely illustrate the story; it authorizes the story. The combination of anchor and graphic creates a composite rhetoric. The anchor supplies narrative and interpretation, while the spreadsheet-derived visual supplies empirical weight. The viewer sees a number, hears a story about it, and accepts both as a unified account of “what the market is doing.” This is Show-Biz in its most precise sense. It dramatizes computational finance for a mass audience, with the anchor as the dramaturgical center and the spreadsheet outputs as the staging.

The Hyper-Real Globe

The anchor also pulls the viewer into a hyper-real globe of financial surveillance. Because surveillance of the world is one of the key functions of mass media, the financial-news viewer is transported across the global economy—peeking in on Treasury auctions in Washington, currency moves in Tokyo, oil prices in London, factory data in Shanghai, and central-bank decisions in Frankfurt. The anchor’s guided tour brings the viewer into the sphere of global finance.

This matters because most of what the anchor surveys is invisible in daily life. Ordinary viewers do not directly observe Eurodollar markets, repo operations, correspondent banking flows, or sovereign-debt auctions. They encounter these through the anchor’s mediation. The anchor links the world to its representation. They operate between the computational infrastructure of global finance and the viewer’s understanding of economic reality. The anchor is the point where the spreadsheet meets the social.

The Synthetic Anchor

The question “What makes the news anchor?” becomes urgent when AI enters the financial-media environment. If the anchor’s function is to stabilize computational outputs into socially legible meaning — to read, interpret, narrate, and prioritize market data — then an AI system could in principle perform that function. An AI anchor can conceivably retrieve real-time market data, construct a narrative frame, generate a verbal summary, display supporting graphics, and deliver the result through a synthetic voice and face.[2]

Several financial-media organizations have already experimented with AI-generated presenters. The technical pipeline is straightforward: market data feeds into a large language model, which produces a script, which is rendered by a text-to-speech system and performed by a synthetic avatar. The anchor becomes a computer graphic, an avatar in a metaverse environment, as I noted in the original version of this analysis.

But the traditional anchor’s authority depends on more than data processing. It depends on embodiment, presence, voice, manners, social trust, and the accumulated credibility of a career. The anchor is a guest in the viewer’s home, and guests are admitted on terms that include appearance, demeanor, and the capacity for light banter — for laughing, joking, and including the viewer vicariously in a community.

Whether a synthetic anchor can perform these functions convincingly enough to sustain the trust that financial interpretation requires remains an open question. The risk is that the AI anchor may be technically fluent but socially inert — capable of reading the spreadsheet but incapable of anchoring its meaning in the social fabric that gives the broadcast its authority.

The Anchor in the Show-Biz Trajectory

The anchor is therefore the interpretive layer. Without the anchor, the financial-news screen is a wall of numbers. With the anchor, it becomes a story about markets, about risk, about the economy, about the world. The anchor is what converts computational output into social reality. It is the anchor’s credibility — their embodied authority, their voice, their presence — that authorizes that conversion.

Financial data is the moving sea. The anchor moors attention and meaning to it, however temporarily, so that the viewer can navigate in calm or rough waters.

References

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Cook, Patrick J. Rev. of Remediation by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (December 1999). 14 January 2001.
Morse, M. (1986). “The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition.” In T. Modleski (Ed.), Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Indiana University Press.
Pennings, A. J. (2018, May 8). Anchoring Television News. apennings.com.
Pennings, A.J. (2021, Jun 08). Show-Biz: The Televisual Re-mediation of the Modern Global Economy. apennings.com

Notes

[1] I am indebted to Margaret Morse’s (1986) essay, “The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition.” Her work provided the initial intellectual underpinning to my entire line of thinking on the financial news anchor.
[2] I originally raised the significance of the AI anchor in Pennings, A. J. (2018, May 8). ibid. The original post noted that “Examining the news anchor from the perspective of AI is useful because it raises the question, ‘What makes the news anchor?’ Addressing this question allows for the denotative analysis of the news anchor and the reconstruction of the anchor with digital components, like constructing an avatar in a metaverse environment.”

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© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice. AI is often used, and results are thoroughly interrogated. Links are used for some citations. Views are my own and do not express the stances of my employers, past or present.

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

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How USD Infrastructure Became the West’s Sanctions Engine

Posted on | October 4, 2026 | No Comments

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2026, Oct 04) How USD Infrastructure Became the West’s Sanctions Engine. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/how-usd-infrastructure-became-the-wests-sanctions-engine/

Introduction

The USD global infrastructure, encompassing onshore US dollars and the offshore Eurodollar market, remains the central organizing pillar of global commerce and finance. Its success stems not from coercion but from immense liquidity, deep capital markets, and settlement efficiency that make alternative systems economically inferior.[1] This dominance has powered the greatest era of cross-border trade expansion in history, with China, Germany, and the Gulf states among its principal beneficiaries.

Yet weaponizing the dollar has introduced systemic tension. By turning financial plumbing into an instrument of statecraft, the West has incentivized surplus-exporting powers to experiment with non-dollar bilateral clearing and decentralized alternatives. The result is a structural bargain: embrace the dollar and prosper from its liquidity, or challenge the system and risk being sidelined from international commerce.

How USD Sanctions Work

Sanctions have a long history, but after the Cold War, US sanctions increasingly shifted from country-wide trade embargoes to targeted financial restrictions against specific governments, banks, firms, individuals, terrorist groups, and proliferation networks. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) became the principal administrator of asset freezes, transaction bans, licensing, and sanctions-list implementation, while Commerce Department export controls became a separate but closely linked channel. OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) framework made listed persons and entities effectively untouchable. US persons are generally prohibited from transacting with them, and any US-based assets are frozen.

The post-9/11 period accelerated this shift as the “war on terror” took hold. Treasury imposed sanctions as a “tool of first resort” against terrorism, weapons proliferation, corruption, cyber threats, and hostile state conduct, designating thousands of individuals and entities across these categories. The toolkit reached its fullest expression against Russia, escalating across three phases. After the 2012 Magnitsky Act, sanctions were limited to individual visa bans and asset freezes targeting human-rights abusers.

Following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the G7 and its allies expanded to sectoral measures — restricting financing for Russia’s largest banks, energy companies, and defense firms, with over 650 individuals, entities, and vessels designated.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, sanctions became truly systemic as US sanctions targeted all five of Russia’s largest banks and restricted roughly 80% of Russian banking-sector assets, with several major banks fully blocked while others faced correspondent-account or debt/equity restrictions.

– Approximately $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves were immobilized;
– Several of Russia’s largest banks were removed from SWIFT;
– A comprehensive technology export-control regime with extraterritorial reach was imposed;
– A G7 oil price cap was set at $60 per barrel; and
– New investment was banned, with professional-services restrictions introduced, later expanded, and coordinated with more than 30 countries, especially on export controls. Over 2,500 Russia-related targets were added to the SDN list by the one-year mark.

This sanctions architecture operates through four interlocking layers.

1. Disconnection from the Messaging Layer (SWIFT)

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a Belgian cooperative that transmits standardized cross-border payment instructions between banks. It is messaging, not settlement — it does not move money itself. Disconnecting major Russian banks from SWIFT cut off their access to standardized payment messaging, making cross-border transactions slower, costlier, and more opaque. When Iran and Russia faced SWIFT disconnections, affected banks were forced to resort to less efficient bilateral channels, reducing their global financial integration.

2. Ejection from Dollar Clearing (CHIPS and Fedwire)

Most cross-border dollar transactions ultimately settle through the US banking system, specifically via the Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS), a private large-value dollar clearing and settlement system operated by The Clearing House, or the Federal Reserve’s Fedwire, a real-time gross settlement system. US sanctions require financial institutions and payment-system participants to block or reject transactions linked to sanctioned entities.

Once a foreign bank loses its correspondent banking relationship with a US institution — whether through OFAC’s correspondent-account prohibitions or the risk of secondary sanctions — its ability to settle in dollars diminishes regardless of where its counterparties are located. During sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector, for example, US measures restricted PDVSA’s access to dollar revenues and US-linked accounts.

3. Sovereign Asset Freezes (The Immobilization of FX Reserves)

Many countries hold foreign currency reserves, mainly dollars, but some euros, and a few other currencies deposited in foreign central banks or international accounts. Freezing these reserves means a country can no longer use them to support its currency or finance imports. The most radical deployment of this leverage was the immobilization of roughly $300 billion in Bank of Russia foreign exchange reserves held across Western central banks and clearing institutions, mostly in Europe. This move challenged long-standing assumptions about the safety of sovereign reserves held in Western jurisdictions, proving that accumulating dollar and euro reserves offers no financial cushion during a direct geopolitical confrontation with the currency’s issuers.

In 2021, the US also froze about $7 billion in Afghan central bank assets held in the United States, largely at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, following the Taliban takeover, restricting the group’s access to international funds. These freezes cut at the heart of a nation’s financial stability and international credibility.

4. Secondary Enforcement and the Weaponization of Intermediaries

Secondary sanctions are a powerful tool in the Western arsenal. Under OFAC regulations, non-US banks operating in third-party jurisdictions, including Turkey, the UAE, or China, face a binary choice. They can facilitate transactions with sanctioned Russian entities and risk being cut off from the US financial system entirely, or comply with Washington’s directives.

Because losing dollar clearing access is effectively a death sentence for an internationally active bank, foreign commercial institutions routinely comply with US sanctions, enforcing Western foreign policy goals thousands of miles from Washington. This extraterritorial reach means that even entities with no direct US nexus are pulled into the sanctions web.

The Paradox of the Dollar Order

The weaponization of the dollar has produced a paradox. The same infrastructure that makes the dollar indispensable — its liquidity, legal predictability, and settlement efficiency — is the infrastructure that makes sanctions so devastating. By turning this plumbing into an instrument of statecraft, the West has created a powerful incentive for surplus-exporting powers to seek alternatives.

Forums such as BRICS have amplified calls for “de-dollarization,” and China has developed alternative payment infrastructure such as CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System), a yuan-denominated clearing network. mBridge, a multi-CBDC wholesale cross-border settlement project was designed to operate without USD intermediaries.

These alternatives still fall far short of the USD system’s depth, legal predictability, and friction-free liquidity. CIPS remains much smaller than SWIFT and is constrained by the yuan’s limited internationalization and China’s capital controls. It is primarily an RMB infrastructure, and not a full replacement for dollar clearing. mBridge, while technologically promising, has limited participant coverage and no track record in crisis conditions. The dollar’s network effects, the fact that everyone uses it because everyone else uses it, creates a high barrier to displacement.

The structural bargain persists. Countries can embrace the dollar and prosper from its liquidity, or challenge the system and risk being sidelined from global settlement rails. The West’s sanctions engine has demonstrated, through the Russia case, that the dollar can be weaponized with devastating effect. But each use of that weapon risks eroding the trust that underpins the system, giving rivals a reason to build alternatives, even if those alternatives remain, for now, economically inferior.

References

Bank for International Settlements. (2025). OTC foreign exchange turnover in April 2025. BIS
CRS, “U.S. Sanctions on Russia.” (R45415)
CRS, “Russia’s War on Ukraine: Financial and Trade Sanctions” (IF12062)
CNAS, “Sanctions by the Numbers: 2022 Year in Review.”
International Monetary Fund. (2025). Patterns of invoicing currency in global trade in a fragmenting world economy (Working Paper No. 2025/178). IMF Working Paper
International Monetary Fund. (2025). Understanding stablecoins (Departmental Paper No. 25/09). IMF Departmental Paper
International Monetary Fund. (2026). Global financial stability report: Capital flows to emerging markets: The role of global nonbank investors. IMF Global Financial Stability Report
International Monetary Fund. (2026). Currency composition of official foreign exchange reserves (COFER). IMF Data
U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2022). Treasury prohibits transactions with Central Bank of Russia and imposes sanctions on key sources of Russia’s wealth. U.S. Treasury
U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2026). Treasury seeks public comment on GENIUS Act proposed rulemaking. U.S. Treasury
U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2026). Treasury proposes rule to implement the GENIUS Act’s requirements to counter illicit finance. U.S. Treasury
European Commission. (2026). Solidarity with Ukraine: Sanctions and immobilised Russian assets. European Commission
European Union. (2026). EU sanctions against Russia: Questions and answers. Council of the European Union
Office of Foreign Assets Control. (2026). Russian harmful foreign activities sanctions. OFAC
SWIFT. (2022). SWIFT and sanctions. SWIFT

Notes
[1] According to the last meeting of the BRICS bloc in September 2026, the group has explicitly moved away from launching a single, unified currency. Instead, they are aggressively pursuing alternative financial infrastructure, technological infosystems, and trade frameworks designed to sidestep the US dollar (USD) and the Western-led SWIFT messaging network.
[2]
AI Prompt(s) Explore my notes and take the argument for a blog post stronger that the USD (US dollar +Eurodollar) is an exorbitant benefit for the world’s countries. This is primarily because of the increased liquidity and lower transaction costs, with the exception of the poorest countries that suffer from the perception of high risk (tier 4 and 5). But the countries that benefit do run the risk of going against the US, which has enough ability to exclude them from this exorbitant benefit. For example Russia. Elaborate on the USD’s benefits and describe the tools the US and the West has to impose sanctions that restrict their access to the USD infrastructure. Elaborate on whether the introduction of US treasury pegged stablecoins will relieve or exacerbate the benefits and problems associated with USD.

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© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Not to be considered financial advice. AI is often used, and results are thoroughly interrogated. Links are used for some citations. Views are my own and do not express the stances of my employers, past or present.

---

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea and a Research Professor for Stony Brook University. He teaches AI and broadband policy. From 2002-2012 he taught digital economics and information systems management at New York University. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in Korea.

Category: financial technology, food policy and security, geopolitical risk, how IT came to rule the world
Tags: Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) > OFAC's Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) > Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) > Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)

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