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.
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.
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.
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.
Spreadsheet Knowledge and Production of the “Modern Fact”
Poovey’s book provides a critical background and framework for understanding how certain forms of knowledge became authoritative and seemingly “objective.” She argued that the rise of double-entry bookkeeping and statistical sciences in the early modern period was not merely a technical advancement but a profound epistemological shift. These systems created a new way of seeing and organizing the world through numerical representation, presenting complex realities as quantifiable and manageable facts.
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 […]
Tokenization of Gold in Blockchained Spreadsheet Capitalism
In spreadsheet capitalism, tokenized gold becomes a substituted signifier for the financialized metal. Vaulted bullion becomes a tradable token represented in a spreadsheet cell. Gold becomes a computable variable (risk metrics, yield structures, algorithmic trading inputs) and a synchronized signal in the global financial grid. Real-time ledger entries are harmonized with financial terminals and portfolio dashboards.
Situating Gold in the Substitution-Computational-Telecom Stack of Global Finance
This post explains that in the modern financial system, gold no longer functions as a currency but as a powerful symbolic asset within the dollar-anchored framework of “spreadsheet capitalism.” Its physical form is replaced by the digital symbol XAUUSD, which represents abstract concepts like “safe-haven,” “inflation hedge,” and “geopolitical insurance.” This symbol is integrated into the global economy through a Semiotic-Computational-Telecom (SCT) stack.
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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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