‘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 […]
‘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 […]
‘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 […]
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 […]
2023 | ‘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 […]