For today's #ModWrite I'm working on Patrick Hamilton's last play, The Man Upstairs. After a failed regional theatre tour, it found a home on BBC television, giving rise to this fabulous headline in The Scotsman - which my fingers refuse to type as anything other than 'Red Meat, Jeeps and Critters'

✨ New transcript! ✨ You can now *read* as well as listen to our April 2026 episode, featuring heterodox economist Ely Fair. moneyontheleft.org/2026/04/01/p... Please share!

Modwrite Monday is here again📖What’s on your plate today? Share with us by using the hashtag #Modwrite

Modern Money & the Black University Concept

Why would you trust orthodox economists? None predicted the GFC and there explanations for economic activity are rooted in Newtonian physics. So much so money is not even defined or indexed in their textbooks. It is conservative pseudo science with historical links to fascism & white supremacy

There is a way to radically loosen Wall Street's grip on cities' finances—if we are bold enough to envision and organize for it. @greenbackbetter.bsky.social of @moneyontheleft.bsky.social helps us envision an alternative way to "rate" public bonds.

‘While the extant tuition-based model erroneously treats money a private and finite thing, […] a grant-based model for higher ed, by contrast, activates money’s proleptic and fundamentally generative character as endogenous credit.’

“Under the usual bond-market model, public investment is judged through the willingness of private investors to hold municipal debt at a given yield. The Loop points in a different direction.”

“The mysterious multiplicities of Fitzgerald’s novel constitute forms of abundance that simultaneously resist the Imagist impulse towards austere limitation and the Richterian fear of inflationary excess.”

“Interpreted through the prism of public money, Gatsby’s Impressionism encourages readers to activate and become freshly accountable to the enigmatic bonds and polyvalent potentials that make the world go round.”

Attention Film Studies folx: in our new essay, we also offer a critical reading of Hans Richter’s experimental short film, Inflation (1928).

In addition to arguing that “inflation” is a deeply misleading term, we model a practice of reading modernist texts that draws out money’s contestability as a capacious public medium of provisioning across all spheres of collective life, past & present.

Around two and a half years ago I asked @videotroph.bsky.social if he’d like to write something about #TheGreatGatsby and inflation with me. Thinking, researching, chatting about, and writing this together was a joy and I’m really proud of the result. 1/

The legal system is designed to make money appear private, scarce & bound to so-called “market forces.” Yet the Seattle Loop reveals that money is public, inexhaustible & always open to democratic innovation.

Phantom Beavers! 🦫

How stupid does the Times think its readers are? How about some more honest headlines: “Corporate America Beats War Inflation by Inflating Prices” “Firms Passing War Costs to Workers & Consumers” “Raising Prices Raises Prices”

INTRODUCING: THE SEATTLE LOOP

A lot of critical reading begins with a posited structure, mechanism, or identity that presents itself as settled, necessary, self-grounding, or complete. 1/

Pat Burtscher for Fed Chair!

We speak with Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the Open Markets Institute, about his book, Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States.

“cities should not have to organize public finance around the demand that private investors receive an additional monetary return on public investment”

UK Universities in Crisis? Time to Transform Higher Ed Finance

Hypothesis: If money is a designed human construct, then we can design experiments that test various design elements to yield alternative outcomes.

Zack Polanski’s Bold Politics Requires an Even Bolder Economic Vision: The Case for Democratic Public Finance

It’s Monday - time for another #ModWrite! Let us know what you’re working on using the hashtag 📖🌷

ANIMAL SPIRITS & PUBLIC PROMISES

How can novels help us think about money … and maybe even save the planet?

The Seattle Loop: Reclaiming the Public Interest

Really interesting and exciting proposals. Ambitious policy makers should certainly be taking this seriously.

Can cities avoid being subject to the neoliberal constraints of private debt markets in order to fund public projects? Yes—if a city's public projects are funded by public bonds that are, in turn, bought by a public bank. Here, @greenbackbetter.bsky.social anticipates and addresses key objections.

[Alt text for excerpt from @publicporpoise.bsky.social & @videotroph.bsky.social' @moneyontheleft.bsky.social piece on how to turn Seattle's municipal finance "leak" into a "loop"] --------------------- Here is how it works: 1️⃣ Seattle passes legislation, issuing debt to finance vital programs;

There’s a familiar trope in critical theory: to read, interpret, or recognize someone is paternal, phallic, even violent—a way of imposing form and displacing lived reality. 1/ 🧵

My bio for conference papers often says that I am an advocate for making digital humanities methods more inclusive and accessible. Mainly because I know that they can be incredibly useful but they intimidate me. Today I am finally "properly" advocating by organising a workshop. Link in comments...

✨ New Essay!!! ✨ Social housing? Green jobs? Municipal grocery stores? ➰ The Seattle Loop provides a new way to meet municipal needs by "looping" interest payments back into public provisions instead of into private pockets. ➰ Please read & share! 👩‍💻 🙌

Money, Modernism & Inflation in The Great Gatsby (Part 2)

Congratulations to @leastnngr.bsky.social on this fantastic essay! “Thinking queerly about price stability denaturalizes the market [… and] suggests that money itself is queer in the sense that it embodies polyvalent and contestable public structures and performances” 👏👏👏🌈🦄💸

"This essay ... argu[es] that the ontological structures of hetero-normativity & the notion of the general price are not only strikingly similar but that they reveal a deep-seated connection between these aspects of social life." 🔥 A brilliant & politically urgent essay by L. E. Steininger.🔥

Wishing everyone a lovely Easter Monday #ModWrite! 🌞🐣 Don't forget to check out #TheModernistReview60: modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/t...

"All money, without exception, is a function of political design."

Seattle friends, check this out

Would you like to know more?

Profit, in other words, depends not on sustaining collective life but on selectively degrading the very capacities that make it possible. The Seattle Loop breaks with that logic by treating money not as a proxy for extraction, but as a public instrument for mobilizing and nurturing collective life.

The neoliberal story about feasibility is upside-down. A project is deemed feasible when it can generate the monetary returns that private investors deem as credible. But those returns are frequently produced by treating our capacity and infrastructure as a cost to be cut, deferred, or degraded.

By establishing a municipal bank, Seattle can purchase its own debt and “loop” the interest back to the city instead of to private creditors.

Capacity-mogging the bondholders? Fellow kids? moneyontheleft.org/2026/04/03/h...

✨How Cities Can Evaluate Public Investment Without Bond Markets✨ In neoliberal parlance, “responsibility” means showing that private investors see public investment as credibly profitable for themselves. Alternative evaluative metrics can intervene in this. 1/ moneyontheleft.org/2026/04/03/h...

The idea that bond markets can tell us about the macroeconomic effects or material feasibility of public investment is pure neoliberal ideology.

I wrote about alternative evaluative frameworks for municipal finance that don't depend on whether private investors feel confident they can profit from the city. Give it a read, share, etc. 💟