‘State Finance Beyond the Core Budget. Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies in Germany’s Fiscal Ecosystem’ (with Gregor Laudage, Armin Haas, and Andrei Guter-Sandu)
The state as a financial actor is commonly imagined to be a unitary entity that interacts with the wider financial system via its core budget operated by the treasury that generates inflows via taxes and […]
‘Locked Into Complexity. Path Dependency and German Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies’ (with Monica DiLeo, Andrei Guter-Sandu, and Armin Haas)
The political science literature has long turned its attention to fiscal governance as a core site of political contestation. Typically conceived of as legislative bodies battling it out over the level and distribution of spending […]
‘Decoding Dollar Dominance: The Global Credit View on the Monetary System in International Political Economy’ (with Herman Mark Schwartz)
This article contrasts the Sovereign Currency View (SCV) and the Global Credit View (GCV) on the monetary system in International Political Economy (IPE) regarding four crucial assumptions: endogenous credit creation versus transaction costs and loanable […]
‘A Feature, Not a Bug. The US Dollar in the European Monetary Union’ (with Torsten Ehlers)
The European Monetary Union (EMU) is often seen as an attempt to shield Europe from USD dominance. However, as BIS data shows, the USD’s volume and share in EMU cross-border payments has been constantly rising […]
‘Re-assessing Fragmentation of the Euro Area Banking System. Offshore Channels for Cross-Border Banking Activities’ (with Torsten Ehlers)
It is an established assessment that since the Eurocrisis, the Euro area banking system has been fragmented. Representing the Eurozone’s monetary architecture as a web of interlocking balance sheets, we carve out four different types […]
‘Primary Dealers in the Offshore US-Dollar System. Intermediating Treasury and Central Bank Balance Sheets’ (with Will Bateman)
This study analyzes the Primary Dealer model for the issuance and distribution of sovereign debt as a distinctive feature of today’s international monetary system, the Offshore US-Dollar System. Primary dealers are a group of private […]
‘Transformation of the Eurozone Architecture. On Crises and Institutional Change in the Offshore US-Dollar System’ (with Alexandru-Stefan Goghie, Matteo Giordano and Friederike Reimer)
The Eurocrisis was a make-it-or-break-it moment for the EMU with a profound impact on the transformation of the Eurozone architecture. However, its underlying macro-financial causes remain insufficiently understood. While dominant narratives emphasize excessive sovereign debt […]
‘The Transformation of South Africa’s Monetary Architecture, 1983–2024. A Report for South Africa’s National Planning Commission’ (with Mark Swilling)
This report studies the transformation of South Africa’s monetary architecture—understood as a complex web of balance sheets that interlock via different credit instruments—from 1983 to 2024. The purpose of this investigation is to provide a […]
‘All Quiet on the Fiscal Front? Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies in the German War Economy, 1914–1918’ (with Armin Haas, Andrei Guter-Sandu, and Olan McEvoy)
It is an established narrative in the literature that the German Empire financed World War I through an extensive issuance of sovereign debt with support of the central bank, the Reichsbank. Indeed, the sovereign debt […]
‘Stranded Assets and War Finance. Lessons for Managing Balance Sheet Contraction in Modern Monetary Architectures’ (with Armin Haas, Verena Gradinger, and Andrei Guter-Sandu)
While the concept of asset stranding has become a common place in the literature on the Green Transition, there is a lack of historical case studies that investigate at a large-scale level through which mechanisms […]
‘The Mefo Operation. A Macro-Financial Analysis of Hjalmar Schacht’s Shadow Money Scheme’ (with Armin Haas, Friederike Reimer, and Andrei Guter-Sandu)
In the summer of 1931, Germany faced the nadir of the Great Depression. After the Machtergreifung of the Nazis in 1933, Hjalmar Schacht was appointed president of the Reichsbank and invented the “Mefo operation” to […]
‘Hidden Balance Sheets of War. The Exchange Equalisation Account as a British Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agency, 1932-1945’ (with Andrei Guter-Sandu, Verena Gradinger, and Olan McEvoy)
This paper examines the UK’s Exchange Equalisation Account (EEA) as a foundational but overlooked case of sovereign financial engineering through an off-balance-sheet fiscal agency (OBFA). Established in 1932 following Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard, […]
‘Financing the New Britain. Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agencies in the UK’s Post-War Political Economy, 1945–1970’ (with Olan McEvoy, Moritz Kapff, and Andrei Guter-Sandu)
Following the Second World War, the United Kingdom faced a reconstruction challenge of mammoth proportions – approximately 30% of its housing stock and much of its infrastructure was damaged or destroyed, its industries were unable […]
2025 | ‘Encumbered Security? Vertical and Horizontal Repos in the Euro Area and Their Inherent Ambiguity’ (with Alexandru-Stefan Goghie and Matteo Giordano), Journal of Financial Regulation
Despite the paramount centrality of repurchase agreements (repos) in today’s market-based finance regime, both conceptual and empirical questions about European repo markets are insufficiently explored as contradictory legal and accounting treatments make their on-balance-sheet representation […]
2025 | ‘Rethinking Currency Internationalisation. Offshore Money Creation and the EU’s Monetary Governance’ (with Jens van ‘t Klooster), Journal of European Public Policy
Internationalisation of the euro has for decades eluded EU policymakers. In this article, we develop a novel explanation of the subordinate position of the single currency. To this end, we build on the state of […]
2025 | ‘Schrödinger’s Off-Balance-Sheet Fiscal Agency. The Recovery and Resilience Facility and the Limits to Incremental Fiscal Integration in Europe’ (with Friederike Reimer, Andrei Guter-Sandu, and Armin Haas), Journal of European Integration
The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), introduced as the EU’s main macro-financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is an off-balance-sheet fiscal agency (OBFA) that has been hailed as Europe’s Hamiltonian moment and raised great expectations […]
2024 | ‘Green Macro-Financial Governance in the European Monetary Architecture. Assessing the Capacity to Finance the Net-Zero Transition’ (with Andrei Guter-Sandu and Armin Haas), Competition & Change
The Green Transition to net-zero carbon emissions in Europe requires massive financing efforts, with estimates of 620 billion EUR annually, but the headwinds are substantive. Central banks seem overstretched and busy tightening to combat inflation; treasuries are […]
2024 | ‘Towards a Public Sustainable Finance Paradigm for the Green Transition’ (with Philipp Golka and Jan-Erik Thie), Finance & Society
Sustainable finance is often discussed as a solution to the climate crisis, but its impacts are limited. We introduce the concept of “public sustainable finance,” in which the state has a central role to play […]
2023 | ‘Forging Monetary Unification through Novation. The TARGET System and the Politics of Central Banking in Europe’ (with Matteo Giordano), Socio-Economic Review
When Economic and Monetary Union became effective in January 1999, it remained unclear what accounting treatment to choose for claims and obligations that the Eurosystem’s National Central Banks (NCBs) incur against each other in the […]
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” […]