Independence from What? (Just Money). This is a really cool piece.

“discuss more fundamental constitutional questions of how we can make central banks more democratic internally and at once more independent, by redefining independence as not against democracy but rather against the executive and financial markets.“

Delegating Money Power

Does delegation increase efficiency or simply avoid responsibility to handle things democratically?

“…I wonder whether debates over the institutional design of central banks hinge more than we commonly think on prior debates about the nature of money and what we might call “money power”, as well as the specific role of private banks in money creation.” vs administrative law theory.

The power to make money, and the power to decide who gets to make money, is one of the most awesome powers of the modern world. A central bank tasked with managing the amount of credit in a system in which most credit is, in fact, created by private banks faces a peculiar set of constraints that make it uniquely vulnerable to elaborate forms of more or less overt blackmailing. This poses challenges that are distinct from other administrative powers, and the resulting questions concerning the banking system as a provider of credit seem to point us instead toward the political theory of, what Chiara Cordelli has recently called, the privatized state.

Constitutions and Democracy

“If our concern is with better decisions and more just distributive outcomes, why not organize central banks more democratically internally by, for example, ensuring that various segments of society—not least labor alongside capital—are equally represented?”

“we can place central banks on a more democratic footings that would operate independently from the rest of the existing political system. This holds open the promise that central banking can be at once more democratic and yet independent.”

Independence from Finance

But is it possible to reconceptualize independence itself? Instead of assuming that the primary source of interference against which central banks have to be insulated consists in elected officials or the public at large, there are a number of obvious forces that are just as possibly distortive and corruptive, if not more so.