Money on the Left

Billy Saas and guest-host Will Beaman speak with Money on the Left’s own Scott Ferguson about his essay, “ Endogeneity Without Exception: Modern Monetary Theory and the Promise of Heterodoxy ,” published recently in the Journal of Economic Issues.   Across the episode, Ferguson re-examines the longstanding debate between endogenous and exogenous money theorists to rethink the foundations of hetero...

In this episode of In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance , we sit down with lawyer, organizer, and policy architect Sylvia Chi to unpack the landmark passage and radical possibilities of California’s AB 857, the California Public Banking Act of 2019. The conversation opens by tracing Chi’s political trajectory, showing how her early activism during Occupy Wall Street and the resistance again...

We speak with John T. Harvey about a new article he co-wrote with Billy Saas titled, “A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory,” out this month in the September 2026 issue of the Journal of Economic Issues. Harvey is Hal Wright Professor of Economics at Texas Christian University. We discuss his recent publication in the context of his broader career in heterodox economics.  Modern Money Theory...

Victor Pickard returns to Money on the Left six years after his first appearance on the show to discuss the state of the U.S. media system under Trump 2.0. Pickard is C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication and Co-Director at the Media, Inequality & Change Center. Placing current developments in...

In this episode, hosts Tyler Suksawat, Will Beaman, and Scott Ferguson sit down with Washington State Senator Bob Hasegawa to explore his nearly two-decade campaign to establish a public bank in Washington State, launched in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street crash. The conversation situates Hasegawa’s tireless public banking advocacy within his broader political formation. Born to a Japanese Americ...

Building on the vision of Democratic Public Finance (DPF) introduced in our debut episode , hosts Will Beaman, Tyler Suksawat, and Scott Ferguson present a radical new proposal to expand sub-federal fiscal capacity: the Loop .  For decades, local governments have been disciplined by Wall Street bond markets, forced into defensive austerity, while furnishing private creditors with hundreds of milli...

This month, Scott Ferguson speaks with Mario Rendina about the politics of public employment and training in the United States as they shifted over the course of the late 20th century. Unlike our standard episodes, this conversation is an archival treat: it was originally recorded 11 years ago in 2015, three years before the Money on the Left podcast officially began. Rendina brings over thirty ye...

The Money on the Left Collective is proud to launch its new podcast series, In the Loop: Revolutionizing Public Finance , hosted by Scott Ferguson, Tyler Suksawat, and Will Beaman. In this debut episode, the hosts lay out a bold vision for Democratic Public Finance (DPF) , a paradigm shift that rejects the defensive, austerity-driven mindset of "finding the money" and instead reclaims pu...

In this episode, we speak with Walt McRee (President) and Peter Winslow (Vice President) of the Public Banking Institute (PBI) about their past and ongoing advocacy for public banking. Founded in 2011 by author Ellen Brown and a core collective of advocates, PBI aims to break the monopoly of Wall Street's private banking system by establishing a nationwide network of publicly owned, democrati...

Billy Saas and Rob Hawkes speak with Sheridan Kates, ecological economist, activist and, at present, Green Party candidate for Islington Council in North London in the May 2026 local election. (Update: Since recording, Sheridan won her seat and is now an elected Councillor.) In her academic and political work, Sheridan rejects both the economics and the language of austerity, and instead prioritis...

We speak with Ely Fair, who studies structural inequality and poverty in urban geographies from a heterodox perspective. Fair holds a Ph. D. in Economics from University of Missouri, Kansas City and is presently a visiting instructor in Economics at Knox College.  Examining the institutions responsible for social valuation, maintenance, and transformation at the neighborhood level, Fair focuses es...

For over twenty years, India’s national rural jobs program provided a legal right to work for over 265 million people--the majority of them women--serving as a vital lifeline against poverty and a global model for social security. Tragically, however, that lifeline is now being cut. In this episode, we speak with Khush Vachhrajani, writer and national coordinator at the Social Accountability Forum...

In this episode, we speak with Tyler Creighton about the ongoing struggle to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) from defunding and closure at the hands of Russell Vought in the second Trump Administration. Creighton is a lawyer at the CFPB and a member of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) , Chapter 335 . Before joining the CFPB, Creighton clerked for the Massachusetts...

Will Beaman joins Billy Saas & Scott Ferguson to discuss the enduring influence of David Graeber’s debt-centered work in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s election to Mayor of New York City. Will and Scott unpack their jointly authored essay, “ The Utopia of Refusal: David Graeber, Debt & the Left Monetary Imagination, ” which is the latest in a series of pieces by the Money on the Left Editori...

We are joined by David I. Backer, associate professor of education policy at Seton Hall University, to discuss his new book: As Public as Possible: Radical Finance for America’s Schools (The New Press, 2025). The right-wing attack on education has cut deep. In response, millions of Americans have rallied to defend their cherished public schools. Backer’s incisive book asks whether choosing between...

Billy Saas and Scott Ferguson are joined by Will Beaman to discuss Money on the Left’s framework for what we call “Democratic Public Finance” (DPF). According to this paradigm, money is public credit, a capacious tool for mobilizing everyone’s capacities to meet our needs and build a desirable future. DPF redefines politics as the process of coordinating our abundant human and material resources w...

In this episode of the Superstructure podcast, Scott Ferguson is joined by independent film scholar Jonathan Haynes to discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s acclaimed new film, One Battle After Another . The conversation centers on the film’s contribution to popular political cinema under the authoritarian violence of the second Trump administration. Scott and Jonathan affirm One Battle’s unapologeticall...

We speak with Caroline Levine, Ryan Professor of the Humanities in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, about her important book The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press, 2023). Building on the theory developed in her award-winning book, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network , Levine’s The Activist Humanist redirects the...

Money on the Left is proud to publish a remastered version of our third episode (ever!) with Fadhel Kaboub, now with a new transcript and art. Kaboub is associate professor of economics at Denison and President of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. In our conversation, Kaboub outlines a new critical approach to postcolonial political economy, arguing that re-gaining fiscal agency is...

We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “ The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection ,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists , as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an e...

In this special episode, Rob Hawkes joins Scott Ferguson and Will Beaman to discuss his new article “ (Un)conditional Openness: Towards a Neochartalist Theory of Money and Trust ,” which was recently published in Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice . The conversation traces the development of Rob’s long-standing interest in theories of trust from his doctoral research in literary studies...

Heterodox economist Jamee K. Moudud returns to Money on the Left to discuss his new book, Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez-Faire? (Routledge, 2025). The phrase “institutions matter” is a common refrain among economists, including many who have proposed progressive alternatives to free market fundamentalism. For Moudud, however, this proposition doesn't go far...

In honor of the 50th anniversary of JAWS (1975), we are proud to publish a 2020 lecture about Steven Spielberg's film by Scott Ferguson. Far from a simple celebration, the lecture critically situates JAWS as the first genuine New Hollywood blockbuster and the originator of a distinctly neoliberal aesthetic that would come to dominate Hollywood for the next five decades. Ferguson explores the...

In this episode, we share Part 2 of our coverage of The Black University & Community Currencies workshop (Click here for Part 1). Held April 25, 2025 on the campus of Morehouse College, the workshop fostered dialogue between students, faculty, and activists about the radical possibilities of public money for higher education, broadly, and for communities at and around Morehouse, specifically....

We speak with Lauren Arrington about her forthcoming book on women artists in the Federal Arts Project. The Great Depression rendered 140,000 women and girls across the United States homeless. In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed 8.5 million people over the course of eight years. Soon, the WPA instituted a landmark ruling forbidding sexua...