Robert C. Hockett – författare

Climate scientists have determined that we must act now to prevent an irreversible and catastrophic climatic tipping point, beyond which neither our own nor many other species can be assumed likely to survive. On the way to that bleak ending, moreover, extreme socio-economic injustice and associated political breakdown—now well underway in nations already hard-hit by environmental crisis—can be expected to hasten as well.

The time has thus come to plan carefully, thoroughly, and on a scale commensurate with the crisis we face. This book, written by one of the key architects of the Green New Deal and prefaced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez''s former Chief of Staff, indicates how to structure Green New Deal finance in a manner that advances the cross-cutting goals of maximum financial and economic inclusion, maximally democratic decision-making, and an appropriate division of roles both among all levels of government and among public and private sector decision-makers.

Integrating into one complete and coherent financial architecture such bold ideas as a ''People''s Fed,'' an interdepartmental National Investment Council, integrated state and regional public banks, a Democratic Digital Dollar and digital Taxpayer Savings and Transaction Accounts made part of the monetary policy transmission belt, and an economy-wide Price Stabilization Fund, this book is critical reading for policymakers and citizens looking for a fresh path forward towards a revived and sustainable, progressive and productive America.

This book is the first of its kind in several overlapping and rapidly developing fields that now dominate news headlines – among them the fields of crypto-currency, digital payments platforms, ‘fintech,’ and central bank digital currencies (‘CBDCs’). With crypto and fintech now threatening to transform finance in destabilizing and anti-democratic ways, and with China and other nations now digitizing their national currencies in the form of CBDCs that make the US dollar and national payments infrastructure look ever more quaint and outmoded, this book shows both why the US and other democratic commercial societies must, and how they can, democratically digitize their currencies, their national payments systems, and the authorities that respectively issue and administer them – in the US, the Federal Reserve System (‘the Fed’).

This book provides insight into the history, goals, and potential of the Federal Reserve System (Fed). Synthesizing into a unified vision research and reflections developed over 15 years in the academy and at banking institutions, Robert C. Hockett recovers the sensible founding vision of the early 20th century Fed and updates it to solve the new challenges of the 21st century, especially as America now strives to recover its lost productive preeminence worldwide after decades of "outsourcing" and consequent "deindustrialization."

The book presents both the original 1913 Fed and Hockett''s modern restored Fed as a unique public/private and federal/local partnership specifically inspired by German industrial development banking and adapted to continent-spanning American conditions. It shows that the original Fed''s focus on endogenous money and productive (not speculative) credit allocation was sound and effective as far as it went, while its ignoring exogenous sources of monetary disturbance prevented its properly handling the bubble and bust of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The reaction to that error after the mid-1930s, the book shows, fell into the opposite error, pretending that monetary aggregates could be adequately modulated without being forthrightly allocated in productive rather than speculative directions. A "Goldilocks Fed" must both productively allocate endogenous money and sensibly modulate exogenous money - twin prerequisites to both productive investment and financial stability. Hockett illustrates how the twelve regional Federal Reserve District Banks were founded for just these purposes and can be revitalized to achieve them anew.