Bretton Woods, Computation, and the Road Not Taken: Reimagining Keynes’s ICU in the Age of AI
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Apr 17) Bretton Woods, Computation, and the Road Not Taken: Reimagining Keynes’s Bancor/ICU in the Age of AI. apennings.com https://apennings.com/artificial-intelligence/bretton-woods-computation-and-the-road-not-taken-reimagining-keyness-icu-in-the-age-of-ai/ Introduction The historical view of the Bretton Woods Conference often focuses on the political clash between American power (represented by Harry Dexter White) and British intellectual capital (represented […]
(SACT)AI Monetary Coordination: Bancor vs. SDRs
In the age of SACT-AI, the world now possesses the technological tools, symbolic computing, real-time telecom synchronization, and multi-agent governance, to implement a true bancor-style architecture that resolves the structural flaws embedded since Bretton Woods.
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.
The Global “Balance Sheet” in Spreadsheet Capitalism
Spreadsheet capitalism builds a global balance sheet by transforming the world into a synchronized, computable set of claims. Through substitution, abstraction, symbolic computing, and telecommunications grids, it creates a system in which liquidity governs outcomes and balance sheets define possibility.
The SACT Attack: How Spreadsheet Capitalism Conquered the World
Once Substitution is complete, the other layers of SACT can take over. You cannot apply Abstraction (comparing unlike things), Symbolic Computing (formulas), or Telecommunications (speed) to a physical house. But you can apply all of them to the token of the house sitting in a spreadsheet cell.
Telecom Synchronization in Spreadsheet Capitalism
Telecom provides the connectivity through which the abstractions of finance become actionable and enforceable. Spreadsheet capitalism’s synchronization logic operates through its three stratified but interdependent layers: physical, network, and value-added, which provide the architecture of global monetary coordination.
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 […]
Equilibrium and the Turn from Political Economy to Economics
This post looks at a historical turn from political economy to “economics” when the concept of partial equilibrium analysis transformed economics from logical reasoning, historical analysis, and philosophical arguments into a neutral science that could be represented in graphs, equations, and supply-demand modeling with mathematical connections. This shift marked the decline of classical political economy (which focused on broad social and political factors) and the rise of modern economics, centered on mathematical modeling and marginal analysis.
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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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