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 heterodox economic analysis and politics. While orthodox economists understand money to be largely “exogenous,” rendering it external, scarce, and uncontestable, heterodox traditions celebrate money’s “endogeneity,” insisting that monetary forms are fundamentally social, institutional, and generative. Still, Ferguson argues, heterodox economists in Post-Keynesian and related traditions consistently slip into exogenous assumptions that distort political economic analysis and undercut money’s capacities to provide for all. Identifying endogeneity primarily with volatile private markets and treating revenue and debt service constraints as external, fatalistic limits, heterodoxy often naturalizes the very capitalist narratives of scarcity it seeks to overcome.

The conversation turns next to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). By extending endogeneity to public finance, MMT recasts money as a fundamentally generative and contestable public utility, which remains irreducible to private markets. This school arguably goes furthest to correct the exogenous assumptions in heterodox theory, Ferguson claims, only to introduce new exogeneities into its approach. Such exogeneities come to the fore principally in MMT’s opposition between “monetary sovereigns” that issue money and “currency users” that merely recycle funds that sovereigns issue. In contrast, Ferguson recommends replacing the zero-sum language of monetary sovereignty with more fruitful terms like “agency,” “capacity,” “power,” “authority,” “capability,” “care,” “sustainability” and “resilience.”

Ultimately, Ferguson contends that, despite powerful political, legal, and ideological constraints, all institutions and actors play meaningful roles in monetary generation, rather than functioning as mere recyclers of scarce funds. By embracing endogeneity without exception, he concludes, we open up vital, yet formerly repressed horizons for public provisioning, social experimentation, and anti-imperialist reparation.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 against the Dakota Access Pipeline developed into a structural critique of modern public finance. Witnessing public tax dollars continuously invested in mega-banks that bankroll the fossil fuel industry, Chi turned toward public banking as a practical mechanism for municipal divestment and reinvestment, reimagining finance not as an engine of extractive accumulation, but as a public utility serving social and environmental justice.

From there, we examine the legal and legislative construction of AB 857. Chi walks us through the strategic compromises demanded by Sacramento, offering a candid post-mortem on what it took to get the framework signed into law. Getting into the policy weeds, we challenge conventional regulatory orthodoxies around FDIC insurance, analyzing how federal deposit insurance often functions less as an objective financial necessity for public depositories than as an ideological safety stamp and political alibi for risk-averse lawmakers. Chi outlines a democratic counter-model to this dilemma: the potential for an interstate deposit insurance institution designed explicitly to shelter and federate a nationwide public banking network.

Broadening the scope to current regional efforts, we discuss the multi-municipality coalition pushing forward the East Bay Public Bank, while dissecting the aggressive misdirection deployed by corporate banking lobbies. In particular, we expose how commercial banking associations routinely deny the existence of banking deserts and underbanked communities to block democratic alternatives, and we examine the urgent need for public banking infrastructure to safely bank California’s cash-heavy cannabis industry, a sector systematically shut out by Wall Street. We conclude with a look at Chi’s present role as Senior Counsel for Public Grids, discussing how community organizing and public power expertise are uniting across the country to build a clean, publicly owned energy future.

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Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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 (MMT) (otherwise known as Modern Monetary Theory) is a heterodox macroeconomic school of thought that recognizes currency-issuing governments cannot run out of the money they create. Because the state issues the currency and requires taxes to be paid in that unit of account, it is never revenue-constrained. Instead, public spending is bound only by real productive capacity and available resources (labor, technology, materials), with inflation—not solvency—serving as the true economic limit.

In “A Rhetorical History of Modern Money Theory,” Saas and Harvey trace how MMT emerged not merely as a set of first principles, balance-sheet descriptions, and policy prescriptions, but also as a deliberate discursive and rhetorical intervention against dominant neoclassical paradigms and institutions. Orthodox economics relies heavily on moralizing metaphors of household frugality, naturalized market scarcity, and the false specter of government insolvency to enforce fiscal austerity. In response, MMT theorists developed new vocabularies, pedagogies, and public-facing rhetorical strategies to demystify money as a creature of law and public governance, demonstrating how public finance can be reclaimed for democratic purpose.

Throughout our conversation, Harvey reflects on the communicative struggles of heterodox economists, the pedagogical challenges of unseating entrenched neoclassical assumptions, the relationship between Post-Keynesian and Institutionalist traditions, and what a rhetorical history reveals about the future of political economy and public provisioning.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 broad historical context, Pickard situates today’s media crisis within a century-long struggle to establish and maintain genuine public media against the overpowering dominance and relentless pushback of private corporate media.

Drawing on his recent writing and policy interventions, Pickard breaks down three distinct layers of media capture: capitalistic, oligarchic, and authoritarian. Crucially, our conversation stresses how the foundational layer—the capitalistic privatization of news and communication as market commodities rather than vital public goods—directly conditions and enables the other two. As long as media institutions remain captured by capitalist imperatives, treating political information as a vehicle for private control and exploitation, attempts to counter oligarchic consolidation or authoritarian coercion will fail to address the root causes of our institutional breakdown.

During our discussion, we explore the history of the struggle to build public media in the United States, from early twentieth-century regulatory choices that privatized the public airwaves to the gradual weakening of public-interest protections and the chronic underfunding of public broadcasting. Against this hyper-commercialized landscape, we insist upon the necessity of fighting for democratic, diverse, and locally sensitive public media infrastructures. Rather than relying on broken advertising models or corporate philanthropy, we explore what it would mean to construct non-capitalist, community-governed media systems designed from the bottom up to serve local publics.

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 American family that suffered forced incarceration by the U.S. government during World War II, Hasegawa went on to enter the trades and join the Teamsters during a historic turning point for organized labor. As a leader in the rank-and-file movement to democratize the union and eradicate systemic corruption, Hasegawa was elected to union leadership in the Teamsters’ first-ever democratic vote, only to subsequently witness a disappointing return to corruption enabled by the Clinton administration. This early crucible in rank-and-file organizing and institutional power profoundly shaped his career in the Washington State House and Senate, grounding his legislative focus on labor rights, racial justice, and public accountability.

Dedicating the core of the discussion to the mechanics and necessity of public finance, Hasegawa articulates why public banks are vital tools for democratizing money, keeping public revenues working for local communities, and serving as a countercyclical buffer during market downturns. In a fascinating historical turn, Hasegawa walks through the founding of the Bank of North Dakota over a century ago, revealing how the agrarian movement behind the bank actually drew inspiration from progressive public ownership projects underway in Seattle at the time. This historical connection links the century-old legacy of the Bank of North Dakota directly back to Washington State, demonstrating that the current movement for public banking in Washington is coming full circle to its original inspiration. Finally, Hasegawa frames public banking as a truly global movement, exploring how different public financial structures around the world—such as Germany’s municipal Sparkassen system—can learn from one another, cooperate, and move in international solidarity to build an equitable, democratically governed financial architecture.

Check out the Substack for the Washington State Public Banking Workgroup currently chaired by Senator Hasegawa.

See here for the 2026 SB 5754 Work Session and Public Testimony for Hasegawa's public banking legislation. 

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Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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 millions of dollars per year. The Loop breaks this poisonous cycle by authorizing a government-owned public bank to purchase municipal bonds directly from a state, county, or city. In turn, the bank can immediately deposit interest payments back into the government’s general fund, in effect, stopping the leak to Wall Street by establishing a distinctly public loop.

By internalizing debt service, the Loop transforms an extractive cost into a self-replenishing public fund, capturing interest payments to fund housing, transit, care infrastructure, and the arts. The result empowers cities to evaluate public investment based on real social and ecological capacity rather than bond market discipline. Drawing on our recent writings and coalition work around the Seattle Loop, our hosts explain how such daring innovations in DPF stand to reclaim municipal finance as a powerful instrument for democratic agency and collective care.

Related Reading & Resources

• Reclaiming the Public Interest: Cities Should Sell Municipal Bonds to Their Own Public Banks
• Out of the Shadows: Public Banking for Municipal Finance
• The Seattle Loop: Reclaiming the Public Interest
• Zooming In on the Loop
• How Cities Can Evaluate Public Investment Without Bond Markets

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Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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 years of hands-on experience working within municipal government in Tampa Bay, Florida—specifically within Hillsborough County. Grounded in his extensive career as a local administrator, Rendina walks us through the decades he spent supervising county initiatives, sketching out how local experimentation actively moved with and against broad macroeconomic shifts at the federal level.

As Rendina explains, local administrators routinely interpreted federal laws regulating public employment and training rather than passively accepting top-down mandates as fixed or uncontestable. Despite federal directives to prioritize private-sector placement, Rendina and his colleagues routinely found creative ways to bolster and expand public employment—whether by baking future public employment contracts into library building projects or dynamically staffing their own municipal offices.

Throughout the interview, Rendina's testimony tacitly underscores a core Money on the Left lesson: we must not underestimate the institutional and communal capacities that regional governments always-already have at their disposal. While pro-social change requires funding, local institutions can actively leverage their crediting powers and existing infrastructure to mobilize and value local communities.

Ultimately, the conversation maps a troubling yet instructive historical trajectory from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society to Bill Clinton’s notorious "end to welfare as we know it." While the federal government never fully committed to a well-compensated, non-exclusive public job guarantee during this era, Rendina's account highlights genuine pro-social advances we can still learn from today. Crucially, it recounts how Reaganite and Clintonian neoliberalism systematically undercut these endeavors over time, defunding public training programs and increasingly privatizing their leadership, operations, and aims.

Conducted with an eye toward future struggles for a federal Job Guarantee grounded in an inalienable right to work, this interview provides a vital archive from which to advance modern movements for public provisioning.

Additional Resources:

• The Full, Raw Audio: Listen to the complete, unedited 2015 recording on our SoundCloud.
• Conference Presentation: Watch Mario Rendina's presentation delivered at the inaugural Money on the Left Conference at the University of South Florida in 2018.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 public finance as a problem of legal, social, and democratic design. By wresting control of public resources from Wall Street, shadow banking, and both neoliberal and authoritarian governance, DPF seeks to protect local communities from federal sabotage and end the false trade-offs that misrecognize collective capacities, while pitting public interests against one another. 

The episode culminates by introducing what we at MotL call "the Loop"—a generative fiscal framework that utilizes a city-owned public bank to internalize municipal debt, capture interest revenues that would otherwise leak to private creditors, and reinvest that wealth back into local infrastructure. Highlighting the ongoing successes and momentum of building a broad-based coalition around the Seattle Loop, the hosts demonstrate how diverse advocacy sectors—including labor, housing, and the arts—can be woven into a self-replenishing, mutually reinforcing network that transforms public finance into a powerful instrument for the people and the planet.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Original music by Josh Klinghoffer 

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, democratically accountable banks. Through this work, PBI seeks to foster a wide-spread monetary and banking system that operates explicitly in the public interest, treating credit as a vital public utility rather than a vehicle for private extraction. 

If private mega-banks are legally bound to maximize short-term returns for external shareholders, McRee and Winslow explain, then public banks operate under a legal mandate to generate shared prosperity, measuring fiscal success in terms of community participation, well-being, and resilience. During our conversation, we discuss the history of the PBI, the myriad projects that public banks can finance, diverse models for establishing public banks, and the organization’s efforts to serve as a catalyst for the growing public banking movement across the United States. 

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Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

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 prioritises democratic, inclusive, and participatory institution building. Sheridan’s activism extends into a commitment to public economics education via her work with Modern Money Lab UK, which held a series of public workshops in London and then a 2-day anti-austerity conference in Bristol in 2025. As a signatory to the Greens Organise ‘Pledge to Oppose Austerity in Local Government’, Sheridan both welcomes the gathering momentum behind campaigns for a UK wealth tax and argues that they do not go far enough. Amidst a new wave of excitement surrounding green politics in the UK, especially since Zack Polanski’s election as Green Party Leader in September 2025, Sheridan looks to a future where our economies are redesigned democratically to put people and the planet before profit.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com