User Portlet

I am a Monetary Theorist and Economist who has been teaching tertiary economics since 2004, most recently as Visiting Finance Professor at Bard College, upstate New York. Before doing my PhD I worked at the central bank of Australia, in their monetary policy department - since that time I have had a fascination with "money in society," it's plumbing and purpose.

My academic research is typically tied to monetary theory, I've written about monetary architecture and reform at the international and national level (Ussher et al 2018; Ussher 2016). These monetary reforms address the inherent inequality and instability of our monetary regime and its design failures. Their implementation would require multilateral government action, and political parties upsetting the interests of their corporate donors, and so they remain only of theoretical interest.

More recently, over the past four years I have turned my attention to monetary architecture and design at the local level, in the realm of alternative currencies, complementary currencies, even crypto currencies, created by communities, from the bottom up among like minded individuals, who want to change social and economic relations - at least between themselves (Ussher 2021). I have studied alternative monetary systems that range in size from a classroom of ten, to a few hundred members in a village, up to a nested federated community network of thousands (Ussher et al 2021) - all using an alternative currency, in addition to their country's currency.

An example in Mathematica is on the Sardex complementary currency in Sardinia.