Prof. Dr. Steffen Murau
International Money and Finance · Emmy Noether Research Group Leader
He is Co-Director of the Global Climate Forum in Berlin, where he heads the Macro-Financial Governance Process and has led the Emmy Noether research group OBFA-TRANSFORM, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), since 2023. The group passed its interim evaluation positively in October 2025. Since 2026, he has been Honorary Professor at the School of Public Affairs of Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, linked to the newly founded Leuphana Center for Cooperative Security (LCCS). He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Monetary and Economic Department of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and teaches Master seminars at Freie Universität Berlin.
Previously, he held positions at LMU München, the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam. He holds a PhD in International Political Economy from City, University of London (2017), a Magister Artium from LMU München (2012), and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from LMU München (2011). In 2015, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Research themes
The political economy of the modern credit money system
Private Credit Money Accommodation
Private credit money accommodation is my theory of how private money becomes public money. Bank notes, bank deposits, and repos all started as private credit money and were taken under the state’s protection in crises. Stablecoins may be next. The state is a late adopter of money rather than its creator.
Offshore Dollar System
The Offshore Dollar System is my account of today’s international monetary system. It is not a system of national currencies but a largely privatized payment system built on US dollars created outside the United States and backstopped by the Federal Reserve. This makes access to dollars a matter of geoeconomics and security.
European Monetary Union
My research on the European Monetary Union maps the euro area as a web of interlocking balance sheets. It shows how crises since 2008 have transformed Europe’s monetary and fiscal architecture, from the TARGET system and repo markets to EU fiscal agencies, and why the euro remains embedded in the Offshore Dollar System.
Financing Large-Scale Transformations
Wars, reconstruction, and the green transition all require financing on a massive scale. My research, carried out in the Emmy Noether group OBFA-TRANSFORM, studies how states organize it through off-balance-sheet fiscal agencies, from the Mefo bills of the 1930s to today’s development banks and special funds.
GEGI Studies
A series of studies that represents the Eurozone in today's Offshore US-Dollar System as a hierarchical web of interlocking balance sheets. Published by the Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) at the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center of Boston University.
Affiliations
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