Beyond the China Price: Can Democrats Shape a New Industrial Strategy for the AI World?
The age of cheap Chinese labor may be ending, but the age of cheap goods is not necessarily ending with it. Rather, the source of affordability is shifting from human labor to machine intelligence. China could easily stay in the game. The next chapter of globalization may therefore be defined not by where factories are located, but by how effectively computation itself becomes a factor of production.
When the Fed Speaks, Global Spreadsheets Reformulate the Future
The modern world economy operates as a synchronized symbolic computation system. A rate cut, therefore, triggers not a single reaction but billions of linked recalculations occurring simultaneously across financial terminals such as the Bloomberg Terminal, BlackRock’s Aladdin, LSEG’s Workspace, and the Wind Information Terminal. The moment the announcement appears, spreadsheet logic activates globally.
Stablecoins, SACT-AI, and the Future of Global Liquidity for Sustainable Development
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Apr 28) Stablecoins, SACT-AI, and the Future of Global Liquidity for Sustainable Development. apennings.com https://apennings.com/political-economy-of-media/stablecoins-sact-ai-and-the-future-of-global-liquidity-for-sustainable-development/ Introduction The impending implementation of Treasury-backed stablecoins suggests a the onset of a profound shift in the architecture of global finance. What appears, at first glance, to be a technical innovation in digital […]
When Treasuries Went Digital and Built the Global USD System
The transformation of US Treasuries from paper to electronic form enabled scaling global liquidity, coordinating financial markets, and sustaining the vast network of dollar-based transactions that define today’s world economy.
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.
The Global “Balance Sheet” in Spreadsheet Capitalism
Spreadsheet capitalism builds a global balance sheet by transforming the world into a synchronized, computable set of claims. Through substitution, abstraction, symbolic computing, and telecommunications grids, it creates a system in which liquidity governs outcomes and balance sheets define possibility.
Protected: Spreadsheet Organization Precedes Production
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
Reviewing the New Deal’s Global Political Economy Framework and Its Current Challenges
This blog post argues for reclaiming January 6th as the anniversary of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech (1941) rather than the date of the Capitol attack. The post traces the arc from FDR’s “Global New Deal” to the modern digital financial order.
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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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