Legal and Regulatory Restrictions on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) demonstrates that sovereign currency issuers like the United States face real resource constraints rather than nominal revenue limits, spending money into existence through reserve credits while utilizing taxation and bond sales to manage inflation, steer capital, and regulate interest rates (Kelton, 2020; Mosler, 1994). However, despite this operational reality, the US political economy remains legally bound to debt issuance through an entrenched statutory apparatus—including the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Treasury-Federal Reserve Accord of 1951, and Title 31 of the US Code—which bars direct debt monetization and mandates that outlays from the Treasury General Account be matched by collected taxes or open-market Treasury auctions. Consequently, expanding federal spending to address critical public challenges like climate resilience and social welfare requires not only changing the public orthodoxy equating sovereign finance with household budgets, but also actively dismantling the legislative barriers that compel public investment to masquerade as commercial debt.
The Cost of Fragmentation: What We Lose When Multilateralism Gives Way to Multipolarity
Multipolarity concerns the distribution of power among states; multilateralism concerns the institutional mechanisms through which states coordinate. A world can therefore be multipolar and still be strongly multilateral. The danger is not multipolarity itself. The danger is allowing political multipolarity to become institutional fragmentation.
Spreadsheet Logic as the Architecture of Perpetual Financial Innovation
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 22) Spreadsheet Logic as the Architecture of Perpetual Financial Innovation. apennings.com https://apennings.com/technologies-of-meaning/spreadsheet-logic-as-the-architecture-of-perpetual-financial-innovation/ Introduction One of the overlooked revolutions in modern finance was not the invention of a new financial instrument but the emergence of a new computational grammar. Beginning with VisiCalc in 1979 and continuing through andLotus […]
Literature Review on Global US Dollar Shortages and the Performativity of the USD Standard
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, July 02) Literature Review on Global US Dollar Shortages and the Performativity of the USD Standard. apennings.com https://apennings.com/global-e-commerce/literature-review-on-global-usd-shortages-and-the-performativity-of-the-usd-standard/ The limit of a society’s wealth is ultimately determined by the structural limits of its accounting grammar. – ChatGPT [1] Introduction The argument that the global economy suffers from a […]
Digital Disruption in the Film Industry – Part 5: Generative AI Platforms for Video Synthesis
Cinema is shifting from industrial production, to computational synthesis. The camera is no longer the exclusive machine of cinema. Increasingly, the model is.
The Global Spreadsheet Goes Distributed: Blockchain, USD Liquidity, and Time-Space Power
Blockchain creates a new form of time-space power that is globally distributed, computationally recursive, continuously synchronized, and increasingly programmable.
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 […]
Petrodollars, Shock Therapy, and the Emergence of Global Spreadsheet Logic
The 1980s debt crisis was therefore not simply the failure of development economics. It was the birth of global spreadsheet capitalism, a system whose logic continues to structure the world economy today, and whose next phase may culminate in AI-mediated planetary monetary coordination.
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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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