The following interview was originally published by Integral Leadership Review (Volume X, No. 2, March 2010).
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How Money Changes the World: An interview with author and integral economist Jordan MacLeod.
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ILR: Tell us about your process for writing New Currency.
JM: Well, it’s been a work in progress for a few years, but it really wasn’t until the onset of the financial crisis and other geopolitical factors that really provided the context and impetus to finish the book.
ILR: What other geopolitical factors are you speaking of?
JM: Well, the most significant was learning that Iran had mastered the ability to detonate missiles at high altitudes from (commercial) naval vessels. The only plausible purpose for such capability is launching electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks by detonating nuclear warheads at high altitudes overseas.
ILR: How is this connected to economics and money?
JM: Problems like Iran and North Korea are wicked in nature. Tyrants with nuclear weapons—I mean, people with an active disdain for their own people, let alone for Western civilization—it just doesn’t get any tougher than that. I certainly do not envy any world leader charged with protecting his or her own people and then having to face regimes with no interest in integrity or negotiating a reasonable outcome. The alternatives are limited if not bleak in both cases. Read more »
Yesterday, McKinsey & Co published several excellent articles on currency on their What Matters site. Jeffrey Garten’s piece Toward a Post-Dollar World is particularly insightful. Here, Garten argues that the end of the Dollar’s reign is not a question of if but when and calls for a proactive approach by government, the corporate sector and academia to consider alternatives and make purposeful decisions. The big question for all of us, he argues, is the same as the one posed in New Currency: “what kind of monetary system will best serve the world given deep-seated changes in the balance of economic power, and what process can be followed to develop it?”
“There is a huge research agenda for universities and think tanks,” says Garten. “A world in which the dollar has lost a good deal of its strength will have profound impact on geopolitics, the global economy, and global trade and finance. It will mark the end of the American Empire and usher in something as yet undefined. Little thinking has been done on what all this will mean, and how it is best handled. It’s time that changed.” We couldn’t agree more.
The following article originally appeared in the Spring/Summer 2009 edition of Kosmos Journal.
Beyond Bailouts: How a Circulation Charge Can Help Save and Transform Global Finance
By Jordan Bruce MacLeod
An Earth Shaking Wake-up Call
The global financial crisis has created tremendous uncertainty about the future prospects of human society. Very few people saw it coming and even fewer, if any, can say with much degree of certainty what will happen next. National governments are currently injecting trillions of dollars into their financial systems and the broader economy simply to cushion the fall of equity prices, home values and employment rates. Several countries have already sought emergency support from the IMF and World Bank and several more may require extensive assistance down the road. Yet these international institutions were neither designed nor equipped to deal with crises of this magnitude.
Adding to our woes are the persistence of monumental global challenges such as terrorism, environmental degradation and climate change, which all must be confronted head on in the very near future. Given their worsening trajectory, one may now look back and realize that these problems were never going to be resolved from within the parameters of a financial system so conducive to myopic decision-making and growth for growth’s sake. Considering the awesome complexity of global challenges and the urgency with which scientists proclaim that humanity must change course immediately, then perhaps we will come to view this financial crisis as an Earth-shaking wake-up call and timely opportunity to align global systems and institutions with global challenges and complexities for the first time. Read more »
Jordan MacLeod
Book Reviews, Economic Transformation, Global Finance, Growth | admin | 
May 4, 2010 1:21 pm | 
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