Date of Award

5-2025

Access Control

Open Access

Degree Name

Applied Economics, M.A.

Department

Economics and Finance

Advisor

Victor Kasper Jr., Ph.D.

Department Home page

https://suny.buffalostate.edu/programs/applied-economics

First Reader

Victor Kasper Jr., Ph.D.

Second Reader

Joelle J. Leclaire, Ph.D.

Third Reader

Tae-Hee Jo, Ph.D.

Abstract

The ramifications of the 2007-08 financial crisis, the later Covid-19 pandemic, and the technological developments surrounding cryptocurrencies and digital ledgers have led to increasingly explicit political views on banking apart from dominant mainstream economic narratives. As such, a widening range of authors from varying perspectives have sought to contribute a “programmatic vision” to the set of changes they assert as necessary in the current financial system. Saule T. Omarova’s (2021) controversial article, “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” and the resulting political reaction to its goal of advancing such a programmatic vision in order to contribute to the debate of the future of finance in a democratic society, calls into question the standards of systemic or even revolutionary change.

This thesis seeks to use Marx’s writings and the subsequent history of Marxism’s role as political “program builders” to provide a framework by which to properly understand and critique the article. It defines the historical program and argues that it has a notion of political tasks born directly from developments in banking. Within these developments lie not just its imminent problems but materials for its solution. This provides a valuable way of not just understanding specific prescriptive proposals but the vision of systemic financial change itself.

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