Stored Labor: Money, Power, and the Making of the American Economy | Stored Labor

About this work: This is a comprehensive examination of the nature of money, the history of economic systems, and three centuries of American economic development. It proceeds from a single organizing question: if money represents stored labor -- a transferable claim on the productive activity of other human beings -- then its distribution is not a technical matter but a political one. The design of monetary institutions, the rules of trade, and the governance of inequality are choices, made by identifiable actors, with predictable winners and losers.

The work is organized in eight parts, each available as individual chapters. The argument is cumulative -- later parts build on earlier ones -- but each chapter is also written to stand on its own.

The Nature of Money

Barter myths, stored labor, commodity money, coinage, paper currency, and credit. What money actually is, and why that matters.

Economic Systems

Mercantilism through neoliberalism: the competing frameworks through which societies have organized production, distribution, and power.

US Economic History

From colonial extraction to petrodollar hegemony. Includes the full account of the Jekyll Island meeting and the institutional design of the Federal Reserve.

The Neoliberal Turn

The Friedman Doctrine, Reaganomics, deregulation, union decline, and the documented productivity-wage divergence since 1980.

The Federal Reserve

Structure, mandate, interest rates as policy, quantitative easing, and the distributional consequences of monetary decisions.

Globalization

Free trade theory, NAFTA, the China shock, and the empirical record of who captured the gains from trade liberalization.

Inequality

Wealth concentration data, Piketty's r > g, the cost of living crisis, financialization, and the shrinking middle class.

Digital Money

Bitcoin, blockchain, crypto's failures, CBDCs, de-dollarization, and what technology cannot fix about the political economy of money.

Monetary Policy and Fiscal Policy

How the two great levers of macroeconomic management work, their histories in the United States, how they interact, and the debates that define contemporary economic governance.

All claims are sourced to peer-reviewed scholarship, government data, or primary historical documentation. A full bibliography is available on the References page. No em dashes were harmed in the writing of this work.