Bretton Woods, Computation, and the Road Not Taken: Reimagining Keynes’s ICU in the Age of AI
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Apr 17) Bretton Woods, Computation, and the Road Not Taken: Reimagining Keynes’s Bancor/ICU in the Age of AI. apennings.com https://apennings.com/artificial-intelligence/bretton-woods-computation-and-the-road-not-taken-reimagining-keyness-icu-in-the-age-of-ai/ Introduction The historical view of the Bretton Woods Conference often focuses on the political clash between American power (represented by Harry Dexter White) and British intellectual capital (represented […]
(SACT)AI Monetary Coordination: Bancor vs. SDRs
In the age of SACT-AI, the world now possesses the technological tools, symbolic computing, real-time telecom synchronization, and multi-agent governance, to implement a true bancor-style architecture that resolves the structural flaws embedded since Bretton Woods.
USD Liquidity: A Tiered Hierarchy Model and Implications for AI4Good and ICT4D
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Apr 12) USD Liquidity: A Tiered Hierarchy Model and Implications for AI4Good and ICT4D. apennings.com https://apennings.com/characteristics-of-digital-media/usd-liquidity-a-tiered-liquidity-hierarchy-model-and-implications-for-ai4good-and-ict4d/ Introduction The “USD” is not simply a national currency. It is a global liquidity system composed of both domestically issued US dollars and offshore Eurodollar credit created by international banks. Together, these […]
USD Shortages and Global Solutions with Bancor/ICU and (SACT)AI
A USD shortage is not a lack of physical dollars. It is a shortage of dollar-denominated balance sheet capacity in the global financial system. Global trade is primarily invoiced in USD, debt is denominated in USD, and the most efficient collateral is USD Treasuries. The numbers reveal something profound. The world does not lack liquidity, it lacks a mechanism to allocate it globally. There is enough collateral, production, and demand. But not enough coordinated balance sheet capacity.
An Inconvenient Document: The Atlantic Charter and the Origins of the UN
The Atlantic Charter was inconvenient because it set a standard the Great Powers found difficult to meet, yet it also gave the colonized world the tools to dismantle the global empires. Here is the argument for why this document was a diplomatic landmine for the very people who signed it.
Multipolar Money and the Rise of an AI-SACT Clearing Architecture
This post expands the SACT framework to include the euro, the yen, cryptocurrencies, and BRICS Pay, while keeping the focus on AI-SACT as the computational architecture of a Bancor-like clearing system.
Poovey, Giddens, and Goody on the Significance of Double-Entry Book-Keeping for the Modern Economy
Poovey’s account is more deconstructive, exposing how balance rhetorically depoliticizes economic knowledge (aligning with critical histories of facticity), whereas Giddens’s is more reconstructive, treating bookkeeping as an enabling infrastructure for modernity’s dynamic time-space power without deeply interrogating its ideological masking function. Together, they illuminate how the SACT Stack’s foundational “balance” operates as both a rhetorical/epistemological achievement (Poovey) and a temporal-storage/power mechanism (Giddens), sustaining the apparent objectivity and global synchronization of spreadsheet capitalism’s endless ledgers.
Spreadsheets and the Modern Fact made Operational
Spreadsheets are the modern fact made operational. They inherit the rhetorical power of double-entry bookkeeping, extend it through computation, and enforce it through synchronization. To understand spreadsheet capitalism, is not to reject numbers, but to remember that their authority was built, not given.
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About Me
Professor (full) at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Research Professor for Stony Brook University. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and global political economy
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anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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