The Security of Money

Professor Patrick Leblond will hold a lunchtime seminar on the security of money.

A complete understanding of money requires considering the security that it provides to governments. This is because money is the means with which governments can protect the state, support the economy and ensure the people’s welfare. What is money for governments and why do their decisions about its use and governance vary from one place to another as well as over time? This seminar will present an ongoing book project that argues that money plays a fundamental role in securing the state and/or its (central) government and that without a security lens it is impossible to explain key decisions that governments make about money. Analysing money in terms of the security it provides to government offers a simple, unifying yet powerful perspective to make sense of several phenomena about money: central banking, hyperinflation, monetary (dis)integration, international trade and investment, anti-money laundering and terrorism financing, economic sanctions, and central bank digital currencies. Such phenomena are usually analyzed separately, often without analysts wondering why and where they came from in the first place.