It’s time to talk about women’s economics with attitude. It’s time to laugh at what is often absurd and call out what is dangerous. By focusing on voices not typically part of mainstream man-to-man economic discourse, Women Unscrewing Screwnomics will bring you news of hopeful and practical changes and celebrate an economy waged as life—not as war.
The New York Times published an article late last month titled, “Wall Street is Minting Easy Money for Risky Loans. What Could Go Wrong?” The key word here is: “minting.”
Why? Three days earlier, we had learned from The Washington Post how a “strategic Bitcoin reserve” would work. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, is being easily minted too. Unlike our government-backed dollars, crypto is privately created. There are now over 20,000 different cryptocurrencies worldwide. Easy-peasy—they’re what your mom might call, too good to be true.
The Post’s article recapped how President-elect Donald Trump, who once poo-pooed Bitcoin for being “based on thin air,” had recently claimed it was “going to the moon.” He wants to make sure the U.S. leads the way. So Trump is now entertaining the idea of the U.S. government purchasing Bitcoin and holding it in reserve. What does that mean?
To help back up our U.S. dollars right now, we hold stockpiles of reserve foreign currency, Treasury bills, gold and even medical equipment and oil reserves. We, in fact, already hold about $20 billion in cryptocurrency, thanks to past criminal investigations.
Globally, crypto is a preferred currency for fraud and illicit exchanges among crooks.
Typically, the U.S., over time, sells off many of its held assets. But Trump’s idea is different: He wants U.S. taxpayers to purchase Bitcoin, then hold it in reserve for the long-term. The notion is that it will skyrocket in value, and in time we’ll be sitting on a coin pile fantastically richer. This ignores the zigzag history of cryptocurrency’s prices, as volatile and nutty as the tulip bulb craze was to Dutch speculators in 1634. That ended in a dramatic collapse in 1637.
Tulip mania is considered the first big “asset bubble.” That means the price had nothing to do with real value; it was caused by the popular delusion of getting rich quick. Instead, its boom-to-crash in just three years dealt a real blow to commerce. A similar herd mentality led to the 2008 global mortgage crisis, although Wall Street’s complicity in selling investors “AAA-rated” securities rooted in mortgage fraud caused way more financial damage than tulips ever could.
Privately minted currencies are related to private equity and its newest cousin, private credit. The key word here is “Private.”
In the past, I’ve written about the economic damage that “private equity” has done, drawing on the work of many others who have rightly named it “pirate equity.” (See Ms. magazine’s “Private Equity Firms Profit Off the Backs of Working Women and Families.” See also An Economy of Our Own’s woman-centered video, Private Equity’s “Secret Plunder: What It Is And Why You Don’t Know About It.”)
Private equity firms sometimes have advisors registered with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), but the companies themselves are not regulated. They create “limited partnership agreements” with large investors looking for higher returns, most notably including the pensions of public employees and unions. Private equity partnerships have purchased hospitals and nursing homes, retail businesses, insurance companies and mobile home parks—and then loaded purchased properties with debt, cutting assets like employees, or selling off their real estate and cutting quality while raising prices. They’ve hollowed out whole sections of the U.S. economy.
“Private credit” is the latest deal-making brainchild of this private (read “secret” and “unregulated”) global world of mostly male money. As the Times reported, private equity is newly branching out into private credit, making risky loans to risky businesses. Using similar partnership agreements, they pile up similar big investment money to back loans that Wall Street’s big banks wouldn’t or couldn’t do.
You see, banks have “depositors,” and those are protected by pesky government regulations. New private credit loans and details of their agreements’ terms are known only to the private parties signing their signatures. That doesn’t mean all parties understand the terms.
If that sounds familiar, this is a lot like the complex, competing, and very private deals of 2007-2008’s collateralized debt obligations and other “derivatives” that I wrote about in another recent column, “How Derivatives Blew Up the Economy—and Just Might Again.” Here too, I drew on the expertise of wiser money wizards, most importantly Brooksley Born. Her story should be required reading for any woman questioning our bro-dominated money world, interested only in dominating more.
If I had to sum up all the bros’ private capital and their money’s uses and actions, I’d call it an economy waged as war, but without honorable Geneva rules. Their generals, by most reports pretty sketchy, generally seem to have something to prove about manly largeness and size.
So back to that key word I started with: “minting.”
Using plastic cards today, few Americans pay attention to old paper U.S. dollars. Up at the top it reads: “A Federal Reserve Note.” A note is an invoice, an IOU—the reason we call it a dollar bill. Federal Reserve notes are minted as debt. The same is true for your plastic debit and credit cards, only with more fees added on. Without the loans owned by private fortunes, without our mounting private and public bonds and debts, Americans would be without any currency at all.
The privatization of our nation’s currency as “debt dollars” came about in 1913 when the Federal Reserve Act became law. Creation of a central bank and the privatization of our nation’s currency took years of organizing and lobbying by J.P. Morgan, then the richest man in the world. His connections to global private wealth were camouflaged by the words “federal” and “reserve.” His invention was neither.
Creating a dozen Federal Reserve Banks backed by the government essentially empowered the nation’s largest private banks, like J.P. Morgan Chase, to oversee and regulate smaller banks in their region. The Federal Reserve Act granted private fortunes invested in private banks (and now private equity and private creditors) the privilege of minting currency on their books, by means of their loans.
Private profits result from loans’ added-on interest, thought to be the engine that drives the economy, never mind we debtors involved. The Act was intended to stop frequent bank failures, and it mostly did—by loaning banks money at a discount.
During our latest 2007-2008 financial crisis, the British economist Mary Mellor, author of Debt or Democracy (Pluto Press, London, 2016) reported that the world’s governments pumped huge discounted amounts of money into their banking sectors. Public tax dollars saved them from collapsing after buying too many over-valued “tulips.”
By 2009, US Federal Reserve loans to the banking system totaled $10.5 trillion; by 2012 the Federal Reserve had allocated as much as $29 trillion in loans and “various other forms” to the banking sector, almost two times the US GDP.
Mellor’s basic point is a simple one. Why, if central banks alone like our Federal Reserve, hold the privilege of creating money, why such generosity for private banks and none for the public?
“This question is central to the choice between debt and democracy,” she says.
Profit from interest paid on debts created by private loans helps explain how today’s richest man, South African U.S. immigrant, Elon Musk—without doing a thing except jumping up on stage to expose his belly button—possesses a fortune growing without effort. Economist Robert Reich, in his Coffee Klatch on Dec. 21, pointed to Musk’s outsized riches, which allowed his $227 million investment in Trump’s 2024 election. It had grown by another $170 billion by December 20, when he tried to shut down the government.
When America’s only path to creating wealth is increasing private and public debt, we can’t help but bankrupt costly but essential enterprises like Earth’s diverse ecosystems, our families, and communities. We can’t afford dollars to invest in sustaining those free-est of all enterprises, so long as private billionaires’ interests and connections outweigh our shared public ones.
We could choose to issue public dollars. Our nation has in the past. Legislators of our lifetime have proposed it. But change is unlikely to happen until more Americans understand debt dollars and the risky boom of their private minting.
Women are already organizing to educate themselves about the nature of the social technology we call money. A committee of the U.S. chapter of Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom, Women, Money & Democracy, and the nonprofit The Alliance for Just Money have produced an accessible YouTube recording called The Future in Our Pockets. It is narrated and illustrated by three remarkable women talking in plain language—unlike the sleep-inducing words Federal Reserve head Jerome Powell.
Mary Sanderson grew up on a Wisconsin farm where she says she learned from her dad that money, like fertilizer, is no good until it’s spread around. Virginia Hammon is the author of Wheels of Commerce: Money Circulates and U.S. Money: What Is it? Why We Must Change. Lucille Eckrich, an associate professor emeritus at Illinois State University, has been active in the American Monetary Institute since 2005. Like most women, this trio can’t claim to be economists—but they set us a brilliant example, shedding light on money creation, its different types, the dangers of unending growth, and monetary ties to inflation, booms, and busts.
The new year in 2025 promises to illuminate U.S. currency whether we like it or not. Its history, definitions and relevance for women is an important subject to return to. What have different currencies meant for us? What will it take to create a more hopeful dollar outlook? Any future for our pockets, beyond the crumbs privately minted debt dollars now allow, will only be possible when more women decide to stop enduring the reek of money secrets right under our noses.
