Workshop: Monetary Policy and Distributive Justice

Event supported by Society for Applied Philosophy

1. Details of the workshop

Workshop title: “Monetary Policy and Distributive Justice” 
July 6th, 2018
Venue: Pompeu Fabra University, Law Department
Convenors: Paula Casal, Pedro Silva, and Josep Ferret
Address: Law Department. Carrer Ramon Trias Fargas 25–27. 08005. Barcelona
Phone: (+34)696931332
Email address: josep.​ferret@​upf.​edu

2. Workshop funding

The workshop is funded by the Society for Applied Philosophy and the Justice, Legitimacy, and International Institutions Research Group conducted by Paula Casal and Serena Olsaretti and supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. DER 2016–80471-C2-2‑R), and UPF’s Law Department.
The normal expectation is that any papers given at SAP funded events should be submitted in the first instance to the Journal of Applied Philosophy for potential publication. 
UPF can only pay flights in economic class. In case you have your own funds and prefer business class, there is still option to invoice UPF for your fees (contact josep.​ferret@​upf.​edu).

3. Workshop Information — Monetary Policy and Distributive Justice

Interest in monetary policy has increased significantly amongst political philosophers since the beginning of the 2007–2008 financial crisis. One of the central questions asks whether the policies of independent central banks, which have a deep distributional impact on citizens, are in line with economic justice. Thus, the workshop aims to discuss the relation between monetary policy and distributive justice, both domestically, taking into account only the interests to co-citizens, and across sovereign states. 
Baewiswyl (2017) suggests that the current monetary system in which an increase in money is injected into the credit market brings undesired consequences. The author claims that the attempts to stimulate the economy after the 2008 crisis have exacerbated leverage, credit and asset bubble, with little effect on consumption spending. Egalitarians argue as well that unconventional monetary policy like quantitative easing exacerbates inequalities in the distribution of wealth and income and propose alternative policies that should limit these effects (Fontal et al. 2016, O’Neill 2017). Katharina Pistor (2013) first argued that in financial crises where legal enforcement of financial contracts would lead to self-destruction of the financial sector, the law is suspended to ensure the survival of those at the top of financial markets, while those in the periphery of the financial system have to face the full consequences of recession. Some policies, seen as a taboo before the financial crisis, such as monetization of public debt (Turner 2016), a job guarantee (Douglas 2016, Tcherneva 2017, Mosler 1997), or helicopter drops (Blyth and Lonergan 2014, Baeriswyl 2017), are now being considered by scholars, as ways of averting financial meltdown and stimulating the real economy respectively.

References

Romain Baeriswyl, “The Case for the Separation of Money and Credit” in Monetary Policy, Financial Crises, and the Macroeconomy (Springer 2017).
Mark Blyth and Erik Lonergan, “Print less but transfer more: why central banks should give money directly to the people,” Foreign Affairs, (2014): 93 — 98.
Alexander Douglas, The Philosophy of Debt, (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Clément Fontan, François Claveau, and Peter Dietsch, “Central Banking and Inequalities: Taking Off the Blinders”, Politics, Philosophy & Economics (2016): 1–31.
Warren Mosler, “Full Employment and Price Stability.” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, (1997–98): 167–82.
Martin O’Neill, “Justice, Justification and Monetary Policy: The Case of Quantitative Easing”, (manuscript, 2017).
Katharina Pistor, “A Legal Theory of Finance”, Journal of Comparative Economics 41 (2) (2013): 315–330.
Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “Money, Power and Distribution: Implications for Different Monetary Regimes,” Journal of Self-Governance and Management Economics, 2017, 5(3): 7–27.
Adair Turner, Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).