Author Govert SchullerPosted on Categories Monetary Reform
Introduction
The 2025 American Monetary Institute Conference, titled Avarice, Power, and the Future of Money, brings together some of the world’s most innovative economists, historians, journalists, legal scholars, and activists.
This seven-day online event, held September 19–28, 2025, promises not only to diagnose the deep structural crises in today’s financial and monetary systems but also to illuminate concrete paths toward a fairer, more democratic, and sustainable economy.
The presentations collectively form a sweeping narrative of how money—its creation, distribution, and control—shapes the possibilities of democracy, equality, and human flourishing.
Core Themes of the Conference
At its heart, the conference is about who controls money and to what end. For centuries, money creation has been dominated by private banks, whose profit-driven issuance of credit fuels debt, inequality, and instability. Reformers argue that money should instead be treated as a public utility, issued and managed for the common good. From this starting point, a set of interwoven themes emerges:
- The Structural Role of Finance: Many speakers trace how financial institutions extract wealth from communities, workers, and states. They emphasize the consequences of speculative finance, shadow banking, and private equity dominance.
- The Politics of Money: The relationship between monetary systems and democracy is a central concern. Who decides the rules of money creation and credit allocation? How can citizens reclaim this power?
- Inequality and Exclusion: From racial disparities in banking to mass layoffs and predatory debt structures, the conference spotlights how the financial system entrenches inequality.
- Alternatives and Reforms: Proposals range from sovereign monetary reform, public digital money and democratic monetary design, to social credit, debt jubilees, and stewardship economies.
- Historical Lessons: Several talks delve into economic practices of the ancient world and earlier U.S. monetary experiments to show that money has always been contested terrain.
Highlights from the Speakers
Kaoru Yamaguchi, developer of advanced system dynamics models, presents “Public Money: The Systems Solution”, showing through simulation how public money issuance could eliminate national debt, fund infrastructure, end banking crises, and reduce inequality—all without triggering inflation. His current work contrasts Electronic Public Money (EPM) with central bank digital currencies, highlighting their different implications for democracy and control.
David Korten, member of the Club of Rome and renowned author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning, argues that monetary reform is essential to a viable human future. He frames reform as part of a larger ecological and civilizational transformation, urging us to align money creation with the requirements of living systems rather than extractive finance.
Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money and The Quiet Coup, will show how financial systems reinforce racial and class inequality. She explains how neoliberal deregulation has gutted democratic oversight, leaving vulnerable communities exposed to systemic exclusion, while elites accumulate wealth.
Michael Hudson, one of the world’s leading heterodox economists, will take participants back to Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, and ancient Greece, showing how early societies managed debt, land tenure, and credit. He demonstrates how ancient debt cancellations were essential to sustaining social stability, and draws parallels to our own debt-laden era.
Morgan Ricks, author of The Money Problem, focuses on monetary system design. His work asks what principles should guide the architecture of money and banking, particularly when treating bank deposits as public obligations backed by the state. His approach offers pragmatic reforms that could stabilize finance without sacrificing democratic control.
Leah Downey, whose recent book is Our Money: Monetary Policy as if Democracy Matters, reframes monetary policy as a democratic question. She explores how central banks and monetary authorities, often shielded from accountability, must be reoriented to serve public deliberation and consent.
Robert Hockett, author of Making Capital Democratic, addresses the challenge of ensuring that finance serves society rather than dominating it. His talk on “Making Capital Democratic” explores how law and institutional design can align investment with shared prosperity, challenging the outsized power of capital markets.
Les Leopold, labor economist and author of Wall Street’s War on Workers, examines how mass layoffs and financial engineering devastate workers and communities. He argues that layoffs are not unfortunate byproducts but deliberate strategies engineered by Wall Street’s relentless pursuit of short-term returns.
Gretchen Morgenson, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and co-author of These are the Plunderers, investigates the rise of private equity. She shows how private equity firms strip assets, cut jobs, and undermine entire sectors, from nursing homes to retail, all while reaping enormous profits through financial engineering and shadow banking.
Richard Robbins, anthropologist and co-author of Debt as Power and An Anthropology of Money, situates the crisis in a broader cultural framework. His presentation explores how the tyranny of the rate of return has distorted human life, impoverishing communities and reducing value to financial metrics.
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect and author of Monopolized and Chain of Title, shines a light on the concentration of financial power and its impact on everyday Americans. His investigative work connects the foreclosure crisis, monopoly finance, and policy failures to systemic injustice.
Joseph Arminio, in his controversial, populist new book The Fed’s Endgame, warns of the dangers of digital currency schemes and calls for a return to public banking. While some of his rhetoric veers into conspiratorial frames, his central concern echoes a broader theme of the conference: ensuring that money serves Main Street, not Wall Street.
Nick Egnatz, author of Spaceship Earth 101, introduces newcomers to the essentials of monetary reform. With the clarity of an activist-educator, he demonstrates how money creation “out of thin air” shapes our social and ecological crises, and how publicly issued money could help us chart a sustainable path.
Bruce Woll introduces the work of David Ciepley, whose research on corporations and constitutional states reframes the corporation as a form of government in its own right. Ciepley himself will then present his vision of a stewardship economy beyond neoliberalism, where corporations are held accountable to democratic governance.
Oliver Heydorn, in Social Credit Economics, revisits an alternative tradition of reform, exploring how a national dividend and compensated price mechanisms could rebalance purchasing power and production.
Finally, John Root Jr., author of Freedom. Justice, Community, will argue for community-created credit and consent-based self-governance as tools for restoring sovereignty and abundance. His long activist career grounds his vision of grassroots monetary renewal.
A Convergence of Urgency and Possibility
Across these presentations runs a common conviction: that monetary reform is not peripheral, but central, to solving the crises of our age—from inequality and political corruption to ecological collapse. The conference situates money not as a neutral medium of exchange, but as the primary tool of sovereignty, shaping whose interests prevail in society.
At the same time, this gathering is forward-looking and solution-oriented. Whether through public money, democratic monetary design, social credit, stewardship economies, or debt relief, the speakers collectively highlight that alternatives are within reach. What unites them is the insistence that the money system must serve humanity and the planet, not the other way around.
The AMI 2025 Conference thus offers both diagnosis and hope: a recognition of the destructive power of financialized capitalism, and a blueprint for reclaiming finance as a public good, a democratic project, and a foundation for a viable human future.
You can register here.