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.
The USD System at the Center of China’s Global Engine
The strategic question today is what China would lose if global dollar liquidity became substantially less available. China could continue trading through the renminbi, CIPS, bilateral currency arrangements, and other alternatives, but replacing the dollar requires replacing an enormous coordination infrastructure, not merely introducing another currency.
The USD as the World’s “Exorbitant Privilege”
The modern dollar (USD) is no longer simply a domestic American currency. It is a globally distributed financial network.
Why SACT Logic is the Operational Core of Tokenization
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 31) Why SACT Logic is the Operational Core of Tokenization. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/digital-monetarism/why-sact-logic-is-the-operational-core-of-tokenization/ Introduction Last summer, I was reviewing a paper on digital spreadsheets and time-space power that had been rejected by a journal and decided a term I used, “substitution,” needed elaboration. It led to my conceptualization, […]
The $100 Trillion Debt Era: MMT as Permission, SACT as Engine
Spreadsheet logic and the SACT stack provide the operational engine. By substituting physical matter into digital signifiers, abstracting heterogenous noise into clean taxonomies, computing complex supply-chain logic, and synchronizing market states across global networks, SACT converts the chaotic, messy physical universe into a organized matrix of purchasable products. Without the SACT translation layer, MMT’s sovereign dollars float as useless signifiers; with it, sovereign money becomes an operative tool capable of re-engineering the physical world.
How Developing Countries Will Access US Stablecoins
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 28) How Developing Countries Will Access US Stablecoins. apennings.com https://apennings.com/uncategorized/how-developing-countries-will-access-us-stablecoins/ Introduction This post covers topics that my students and I have been addressing in a course called EST 230 – Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for Sustainable Development that I have been teaching for the last six […]
The $100 Trillion Question: Treasury-Backed Digital Dollars and a Democratic Political Economy
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jul 27) The $100 Trillion Question: Treasury-Backed Digital Dollars and a Democratic Political Economy. apennings.com https://apennings.com/global-e-commerce/the-100-trillion-question-treasury-backed-digital-dollars-and-a-democratic-political-economy/ Introduction As the United States national debt accelerates past historical milestones, traditional economic orthodoxy, “goldbugs,” and manipulative politicians continue to issue dire warnings of imminent fiscal insolvency, surging bond yields, and currency […]
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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@gmail.com
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anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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