![]() And so there’s an interesting political dynamic between the MMT movement and the sort of… what would you call those? What do you call those guys? Like the sort of… And actually, I remember actually once going into the MMT conference, and some of those anti-fractional reserve people turned up at the MMT conference as well. They also made a board game about the evils of bank creation of money. They were trying to create this fully backed bank. And we’ve kind of, I think it failed, it hadn’t managed to get a banking license, but there was quite an interesting effort. And actually, the guys who arranged the conference had tried to start the first full reserve bank in the Netherlands. So yeah, the guys who got me there are kind of in the middle of that world. So there’s also this kind of crossover between the anti-bank creation of money, people with this sort of crypto currency, Bitcoin people. And so I think that Netherlands scene I was… I had new people in that scene, and also new people in the crypto scene. ![]() There’s groups like ons geld, which campaign against banks being able to create money. And so I think that’s quite a sort of strong tradition in the Netherlands. A lot of the anti-fractional reserve banking, sometimes an anti-credit creation of money people like that sort of one tradition and monetary reform. William Saas : So how’d you end up in the Netherlands at that conference, talking to the “gold bugs” and sharing your market grievances?īrett Scott : Yeah, so actually in monetary reform circles, there’s a bunch of different traditions, as I’m sure you guys have come across. And that’s how I ended up at the MMT conference. And then she said, “hey, come to this event that we’re doing”. And right in the front row was Stephanie Kelton, who had also been invited to this since the first time, I guess, she had seen me and then we spoke over dinner. But how this machine had stopped me from engaging in a market transaction. So I decided to start talking about this on stage. I had very low blood sugar, partly because I’d actually been blocked from buying a Coca-Cola from this cashless vending machine that refused to take my card. And I ended up on this stage and I was super jet lagged. So it has this long tradition of liberal economic thinkers.Īnd anyway, I ended up at this conference, one of these Dutch managed monetary reform people, some of whom were quite right-wing. And I think the Netherlands in general has this vibe, which is… it’s one of the first capitalist trading nations. And I don’t know how much time you guys have spent in the Netherlands scene, but there’s actually quite a long tradition of this quite conservative monetary reform people there. And it was run by these… I want to say quite libertarian Dutch monetary reformers. I was invited to another conference in Delft in the Netherlands. It’s actually quite a funny story about how I ended up at the conference. Could you share a bit about how you ended up at that MMT conference and maybe catch us up on what you’ve been up to since then?īrett Scott : Sure thing. And before that you worked in finance and had been writing about money and crypto for a while. Last time we saw you was at the first international MMT conference at UMKC in 2017. William Saas: It’s wonderful to have you. William Saas : Brett Scott, welcome to Money on the Left.īrett Scott : Good to be here. The following was transcribed by Mercedes Ohlen and has been lightly edited for clarity. We also discuss how awareness of the principles of monetary design clarifies the need for physical cash and the perils of privatized and surveilled forms of digital money. Scott’s own comparison of financial operations with the functioning of the central nervous system prompts further discussion of the temporal and physical realities of modern money. Through our conversation we explore the possibilities and limitations of different metaphoric frameworks for understanding money, paying special attention to the pitfalls of figuring money as blood-like fluidity. A committed advocate for financial heterodoxy, Scott grounds his perspicuous critique of “cloudmoney”–the conjoined efforts and outcomes of Big Finance and Big Tech’s drive to go “cashless”– in his anthropological training and work as financial derivatives trader in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. Brett Scott joins Money on the Left to discuss his recently published book Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets (Harper-Collins 2022).
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