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.
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.
Neutralizing the Milkshake Effect in SACT-AI Bancor/ICU Monetary Coordination
SACT-AI transforms the milkshake effect from an extractive force into a managed, symmetric flow. USD shortages are neutralized because liquidity is generated within the Bancor ledger rather than being pulled from peripheral markets.
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.
Poovey, Giddens, and Goody on the Significance of Double-Entry Book-Keeping for the Modern Economy
Poovey’s account is more deconstructive, exposing how balance rhetorically depoliticizes economic knowledge (aligning with critical histories of facticity), whereas Giddens’s is more reconstructive, treating bookkeeping as an enabling infrastructure for modernity’s dynamic time-space power without deeply interrogating its ideological masking function. Together, they illuminate how the SACT Stack’s foundational “balance” operates as both a rhetorical/epistemological achievement (Poovey) and a temporal-storage/power mechanism (Giddens), sustaining the apparent objectivity and global synchronization of spreadsheet capitalism’s endless ledgers.
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.
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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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