The Hangman’s Rope: How the USSR Created the Eurodollar Market That Later Strangled It
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, May 17) The Hangman’s Rope: How the USSR Created the Eurodollar Market That Later Strangled It. apennings.com https://apennings.com/dystopian-economies/the-hangmans-rope-how-the-ussr-created-the-eurodollar-market-that-later-strangled-it/ “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” – Attributed to Vladimir Lenin Introduction The “Third World Debt Crisis” of the 1980s was a decisive […]
From Gold to Grid and the “Information Standard” to the SACT-AI Engine
The blog post explores the transition of the global monetary order from the physical gold standard of Bretton Woods to Walter Wriston’s “Information Standard,” and finally to the proposed SACT-AI (Substitution, Abstraction, Computing, and Telecommunications) framework. It argues that money has transitioned into “Spreadsheet Capitalism,” where national economies are managed and disciplined by digital grids.
The Ghost in the Grid: Interpretants and Calculable Traces in Spreadsheet Capitalism
The spreadsheet, as a computational medium, transforms heterogeneous material realities into standardized symbolic inscriptions. To understand this transformation, semiotic theory offers two powerful but distinct conceptual tools: Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the interpretant and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the trace. While Peirce emphasizes the generative continuity of meaning through interpretive mediation, Derrida foregrounds the structural absence and deferral that inhabit all signification. Taken together, these frameworks illuminate how the numbers and letters populating financial spreadsheets function as representations of the messy, contingent world.
Protected: Spreadsheet Organization Precedes Production
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
The SACT Attack: How Spreadsheet Capitalism Conquered the World
Once Substitution is complete, the other layers of SACT can take over. You cannot apply Abstraction (comparing unlike things), Symbolic Computing (formulas), or Telecommunications (speed) to a physical house. But you can apply all of them to the token of the house sitting in a spreadsheet cell.
Will BRICS Effectively Tokenize Rare Earth Elements to Back a New Currency?
Rose Mason in Medium makes a compelling plea for the tokenization of Rare Earth Elements (REEs) currently in high demand around the world. From another angle, Cyrus Janssen presents an intriguing but ultimately flawed argument that the BRICS+ countries will use REEs to back a new currency to challenge the US dollar.[1] This post examines […]
USD Centrality and Network Effects in the Global Economy
When we say the USD/eurodollar is a cell at the center of the global spreadsheet, we mean every balance sheet in the world, whether in New York, London, Shanghai, or São Paulo, has at least one column denominated in USD. A loan in yen, a bond in euros, or a derivative in pesos ultimately references the USD cell through conversions, swaps, or collateral rules.
Equilibrium and the Turn from Political Economy to Economics
This post looks at a historical turn from political economy to “economics” when the concept of partial equilibrium analysis transformed economics from logical reasoning, historical analysis, and philosophical arguments into a neutral science that could be represented in graphs, equations, and supply-demand modeling with mathematical connections. This shift marked the decline of classical political economy (which focused on broad social and political factors) and the rise of modern economics, centered on mathematical modeling and marginal analysis.
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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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