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The excerpt identifies and summarizes intelligibly an important, if not the most important, drive of America’s contemporary political economy. The passage is from a 1969 report, titled “Basic Options in International Monetary Affairs,” which was issued by an interdepartmental committee chaired by the then Under-Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Volcker. Initiated at the New York Fed, and later groomed as a protege of David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan and of Robert Roosa at the US Treasury, Volcker joined the Nixon executive in 1969. Appointed Fed Chairman by Carter in 1979, he would go on to become Reagan’s money czar until 1987. The hagiography celebrates Volcker’s tenure at the Federal Reserve as that of a titanic St. George who rose to technocratic glory for slaying the dragon of America’s “Great Inflation” (1965–1980). From this study’s standpoint, it is of no consequence, however, whether Volcker has indeed been “the greatest chairman the Fed has ever had,”2 as claimed by his mentor, Roosa, or rather a “poor and wretched [bureaucrat who] never [knew] where he stood on any issue,” as believed by his colleague and erstwhile Federal Reserve chief Arthur Burns.3 Advertence to Volcker’s bi-partisan career is only pertinent in that it betokens the continuity that contradistinguishes US international monetary policy in its pursuit of world hegemony. The strategy, the drive, is always the same; therefore, the color of the personalities, affiliations, and administrations devoted to implementing it is fundamentally irrelevant.

The Nazi economic recovery, achieved between 1933 and 1938, displayed striking features of brilliant economic overhauling of a capitalist machine that had been plagued by a prolonged crisis. The means employed to effect the recovery appear to follow a Malthusian exercise in the rehabilitation of the function of effective demand: the Nazis, prompted by expediency and necessity, took remedial action that was very much in consonance with the canons of classical political economy. The succinct analysis of such an exercise in the context of the strong governmental regimentation of the Third Reich may provide insight into the nature and future of the capitalist regime, in the light of the fact that its principles, business and philosophical, and its implications for the world at large, so far, have not shown a marked departure from the way in which they were understood by the spirit of the 1930s, in Germany, as well as abroad.

During the first decades of the 20th century, German Reformer Silvio Gesell (1862‐1930) championed with a certain success the reforming wave of the epoch by complementing ingenious solutions to some of the most important economic issues of his time with theoretical insights that were as radical as they were penetrating. The purpose of this paper is to offer an introduction to such intuitions, whose validity had been recognized even by a few distinguished academics of the 1930s, but which, owing to the extreme complications that eventually mired German intellectual production in its quasi‐entirety before WWII, failed to preserve the deserved consideration, however slight, they had earned when first formulated. A reappraisal of Gesell's contributions, considering the importance of his main themes, may be worthwhile, all the more so as these deal with questions unsolved to this day.

There are two sides to the lending of money: the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’. The microeconomic side comprises various routines performed by bankers in assessing the profitability of an investment. The macroeconomic side reflects the impact of such institutional banking routines on the rest of the economy. This chapter examines the repercussions of a few generally accepted bank precepts on the overall dynamics of the economic system by unearthing the monetary theory of Silvio Gesell and applying it to three important ‘macro’ scenarios: Schumpeterian innovation, Veblen's absentee ownership and technically productive investment, and Malthus's theory of market gluts.

Keynes' allegedly revolutionary theory of money was in truth inspired, if not borrowed, from the early intuitions of a German social reformer by the name of Silvio Gesell, a forgotten figure traditionally classed amongst the anarchist dissenters of the early XXth century. This paper explores this connection and thereby attempts to re-establish some balance in the book of intellectual paternity, by laying emphasis on the original monetary themes of Gesell, and on the Keynesian recasting of those self-same themes into the 1936 classic, The General Theory. It is here argued that Keynes appropriated Gesell's insights into the nature of money and interest, and stripped them of their radical implications, so as to fashion an explanation of the crisis that would pose no threat to the foundations of the capitalist order.