USAID, ICT4D, and the Geopolitics of Treasury-Backed Liquidity for Tier 4 and 5 Countries.
While publicly framed as a consumer-protection milestone, the macro-political economy of the GENIUS Act functions as a powerful mechanism for sovereign debt management. By legally legitimizing dollar-pegged stablecoins as safe cash equivalents, the US government has effectively engineered a global, decentralized distribution engine for its own national deficit.
Designing a Global AI Engine for Monetary Coordination
AI should not be viewed simply as another analytical tool. Its larger role is to become coordination intelligence. Traditional spreadsheets computed formulas written by human analysts. AI continuously evaluates millions of relationships simultaneously, identifying emerging imbalances, forecasting liquidity needs, and recommending adjustments as conditions change.
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.
LSEG Workspace as the Central Spreadsheet Grid for Eurodollars
LSEG Workspace is a giant live spreadsheet that organizes the eurodollar system into cells and formulas. Treasuries and Fed rates are the anchor cells. Repo, FX swaps, and offshore deposits are formula-driven references.
Reprogramming Spreadsheet Capitalism for Climate Resilience
In the framework of spreadsheet capitalism, capital no longer exists solely as a tangible asset, productive relation, or factor of industrial production—it is reconstituted as a symbolic, programmable logic embedded in and animated by digital spreadsheets. Drawing on a semiotic-computational framework, this transformation reveals how capital is not simply represented in spreadsheets but reborn through symbolic substitution, abstract modeling, and procedural calculation.
Stablecoins, Blockchains, and the Semiotic-Telecom-Computational Stack of Spreadsheet Capitalism
This post continues the spreadsheet capitalism framework, focusing on crypto stablecoins as a further manifestation of the semiotic-symbolic gridmatic technologies that synthesize writing-as-substitution with computation-as-symbolic-action. Yet, unlike Excel and other spreadsheets, crypto blockchains add irreversibility, temporal structure, and global accessibility. It is a semiotic-computational system with historical memory and real-time synchronization, providing the international grid […]
Spreadsheet Formulas and the Temporal Imperatives of the Leveraged Buyout Economy
The IBM PC and its compatibles (Compaq, Dell, DEC Rainbow 100), powered by Intel’s microprocessors, provided the hardware platform for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet to thrive in the 1980s. The spreadsheet’s features, combined with Intel’s 8088’s processing power, made it a versatile tool for financial professionals. This post analyzes the digital spreadsheet’s capability to use […]
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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
You can reach me at:
anthony.pennings@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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