Dr. Steffen Murau| steffenmurau.com

2020 | ‘What is Money in a Critical Macro-Finance Framework?’ (with Tobias Pforr), Finance and Society

This article explains how analyzing the creation, distribution, and destruction of contemporary credit money is placed center-stage in the emerging field of critical macro-finance. This approach involves not only traditional forms of money but also “shadow money”—private debt instruments which are not regulated as money from a legal standpoint but in many respects are functionally equivalent to “established” forms of money. Shadow money lay at the heart of the 2007-9 Financial Crisis and continues to be one of the “hot potatoes” in the post-crisis monetary system. To connect different positions in this discourse, we propose three core criteria for defining shadow money as a baseline position for future critical macro-financial research.

Co-author:
Tobias Pforr, University of Reading

Download link:
Finance and Society

Related articles

2023 | ‘Shadow Money in the History of Monetary Thought’ (with Tobias Pforr), Review of Political Economy

Following the Global Financial Crisis, some scholars have conceptualized the credit instruments that lay at its center as “shadow money”. As this perspective seems to contradict most established monetary theories, we situate the “shadow money” […]

Learn More

2022 | ‘Rethinking Monetary Sovereignty. The Global Credit Money System and the State’ (with Jens van ‘t Klooster), Perspectives on Politics

This article proposes a conception of monetary sovereignty that recognizes the reality of today’s global credit money system. Monetary sovereignty is typically used in a ‘Westphalian’ sense that simply denotes the ability of states to […]

Learn More

2020 | ‘Private Debt as Shadow Money? Conceptual Criteria, Empirical Evaluation and Implications for Financial Stability’ (with Tobias Pforr), Private Debt Project

Some scholars have labeled the financial structures that faced a run during the 2007-9 Financial Crisis as ‘shadow banking system’ and have connected it to the emergence of new monetary instruments. This was the starting […]

Learn More