The Three-Layer USD as the Primary Global Financial Infrastructure
This article expands on the argument that the “USD” is the combination of the US dollar and Eurodollars, which includes the petrodollars, recognizing that the US Federal Reserve is still the primary regulator of the global currency.
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.
SACT-AI’s Reinforcement Learning for Realization of Keynes’s Bancor/ICU Proposal at Bretton Woods
Q-learning is the primary policy-optimization engine for a SACT-AI Bancor/ICU because the problem is best framed as learning the value of discrete, rule-based adjustment actions in a high-stakes, partially observable environment with abundant historical data. PPO offers superior stability and is better suited for continuous control sub-problems, but its on-policy nature and lower sample efficiency make it secondary. In Global Spreadsheet Capitalism, the combination of Q-learning’s value-driven symmetry with PPO’s fine-tuning capability creates the most robust, auditable, and adaptive engine for realizing Keynes’s vision of a computable, multipolar monetary order.
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.
XRP and Spreadsheet Logic Organizing a New Stage of Global Financial Coordination
Within a broader SACT-based coordination system, Treasury-backed stablecoins could supply globally trusted digital dollars while the XRP Ledger provides one of several high-speed settlement infrastructures through which those dollars circulate.
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.
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
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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