| Steve Clark |
In this piece, Steve Clark responds to Dennis Torigoe’s recent article, “The Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency.”
Thanks to Signe for raising a stimulating comment on Dennis’ piece in regard to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). I appreciate what Tom had to say and wanted to comment further.
A bifurcated agenda (MMT at home and financial imperialism abroad) would be inconsistent and morally reprehensible for any progressive, and I don’t think anyone in or around MMT takes such a position. Rather, at worst — and like Dennis (and most of us) — MMT advocates don’t have a clearly articulated plan for remaking the international financial order. They know how it works, but they don’t know how to assert popular control at that scale (currently, their focus is on gaining effective influence in sovereign states and, someday, “going global” from such new-found power bases). Rather than criticize MMT for the same shortcoming that we all share, we need to put our MMT thinking caps on, figure out the necessary “next steps,” and advocate for consistent financial restructuring across our both domestic and global economies. This might require a think tank and a legal corps, but that could set us in the right direction.
It seems to me that when our nation’s progressive wing overcomes dual power (defeats neoliberalism) in the US (that is, for now, in the Biden Administration and the Congress), all nations and people stand to benefit because the world does, in fact, have an integrated, global, financial system (and I think Dennis would agree) in which the US dollar and the US central bank (the Fed) dominate decision-making and financial power (at the IMF/BIS/SWIFT/IIF etc.).
Given this institutional domination, if/when American progressives gain the power necessary to implement a true, worker-oriented, social investment agenda in the US, we also will gain (or will be on the verge of gaining) the power to pursue a similar agenda at global scale (via the IMF, where we progressives will have just acquired dominant power, or via some new authority that we and the world create to replace the IMF).
Further, given the scale and breadth of today’s crisis, when American progressives finally break the power of finance capital in the US (winning majority control of our government), the rest of the world’s progressives (in countries everywhere) will demand we immediately break that same financial power globally as well. Having gained control of the US votes at the IMF, we will have no choice but to comply (twist my arm!).
Few American progressives have given much thought to how this “next system” of finance must operate to meet the needs of the whole world, including its impoverished nations. Obviously, “trickle down” from the US to the world doesn’t work, but, for sure, there’s no way some kind of global planned economy will be imposed. Rather, the next system — which has to carry civilization through the era of climate change impact and mitigation ahead — will be some kind of global mixed economy in which private entities and markets operate alongside public investment entities and non-market allocations, both within the world’s many nations and in transnational forms as well (corporations, global NGOs, UN-determined public investments(?), etc.).
However this next system shapes up, the world is never going back to the gold standard. It will remain on fiat currencies because that is the actual and only way, now, that nation-states and their markets can operate (if anyone can see beyond the era of fiat currencies, please let us know what that might look like!). When US progressives quash dual power and take general control of our government (sometime over the next few election cycles), the dollar will become our currency (the public’s currency!), and we can directly and forthrightly engage China, Europe, Japan, Britain — the other four IMF-approved-for-trade currencies — the Global South, and all other sovereign nations on the matter of how best to reconstruct and democratize global finance for the challenging crisis-mitigation era ahead (including, possibly, setting a new Special Drawing Rights (SDR) currency to replace the dollar as the global reserve… MMT suggests how that might be done).
I think that forging a new system of global finance is a necessary piece of this era’s struggle, an issue to be resolved sooner rather than later. MMT is empowering because it explains not only how the system works (and, as a corollary, how finance capital exploits the system for its own ends) but, also, how our nation’s democratic majority can impose its will on the system, reprioritize its investment agenda, move on to global financial reform, and, thereby, tackle all the vital problems of our time.
To me, a crucial task, now, is raising the financial consciousness of voters so elected politicians fight for popular oversight of finance in the public interest. That’s how we overcome dual power (defeat neoliberalism) and win progressive legislative majorities over the next few election cycles. Right now, the MMT folks are leading this project, but they need allies as well as broadened popular grounding and intersectional collaboration. I hope we Leftists will walk towards them, learn from them and help them see and link more effectively, beyond the financial realm.