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“In Defence of the Nominalist Ontology of Money” by Geoffrey Ingham (published by the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 2021) contends that “Historicising the Money of Account: A Critique of the Nominalist Ontology of Money” (published by the same journal in 2020) is based on misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and imprecisions. The core proposition in “Historicising the Money of Account” is that the money of account, which is generally understood to be a universal attribute of money, is in fact an institution of late medieval and early modern times that has no significant equivalent in today’s world (or in the ancient world, for that matter). This reply is intended to provide further clarification on the historical and ontological specificity of the late medieval institution of the money of account.

The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes’ Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes’ reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicise the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi.

The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global finance has not given shape to a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors as two distinct classes, but instead has set debtors against debtors, and namely the greater borrowers against the lesser ones.

Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy within the temporal universe of contemporary capitalism? In this essay, we use the figure of the eschaton to draw out the loaded and ambiguous character of the future as it emerges through the condition of indebtedness. This entails a departure from political economy accounts of capitalist futurity, which stress the structural logic of financial speculation, in favour of an existential account that begins instead with the cosmology of money and debt. We argue that finance capital’s fixation on the future has produced a very specific form of apocalyptic imagination, characteristic of financial society and built on a libidinal economy of leverage. Rather than offering an ecstatic end to the global process of financialization, financial eschatologies bind the contemporary subject to debt and indebtedness to the very end: an endless apocalypse, premised on the ends of finance itself.

There are two main theories of banking which seem to be incompatible by nature. According to the first, banks intermediate money through their credit infrastructure but are not themselves able to create new money. By contrast, the second argues that banks do create money out of nothing in the process of lending their credit. Significantly, despite their contrasts, both theories conceptualise banking in functionalist terms as the financing of other people’s indebtedness. In so doing, they relegate to the side-lines the fact that banks are in the business first and foremost to ‘make money’ for themselves as they leverage their unique market position as dealers of other people’s debts. The article thus investigates the phenomenon of modern banking as the art of leverage. After showing the specificity of bank leverage relative to other forms of leverage across society, it delineates the fundamentals of a political economy of banking, money-making and debt finance. Finally, the article turns to an analysis of how contemporary banks make money and at once weave the infrastructure of financial markets through leverage-enhancing techniques rooted in repurchase agreements.

Since the 1990s, the scientific debate on territorial competitiveness has gone through different phases due to the various events that have occurred such as uncontrolled urbanisation, globalisation and digitalisation. Initially linked to competition between companies and, subsequently, to the productivity of countries, today, competitiveness is played out between territories and, above all, between cities. For this reason, competitiveness has become a characteristic of the city and can therefore be considered multidimensional from a systemic perspective typical of urban studies. Researchers agree in defining it as the ability to attract investments, business, creativity, talents and visitors, which is possible by enhancing various urban dimensions. The review presented in this paper analyses the foremost definitions and paradigms, investigates quantitative approaches and identifies the main trends and research gaps concerning the topic of urban competitiveness, through a bibliometric analysis. We have selected almost 1600 documents published between 1967 and 2020 from the Scopus database and we have examined them using bibliometric tools such as VOSiewer and ScientoPy. The aim is to analyse the diachronic and geographical evolution of research, to define future development and directions. The result is that the approach to the research depends on a wide variety of factors, including the time of publication, the scientific framework, the models and, lastly, the region the study comes from. We found that the ability to cope with future challenges has gradually taken on an essential role in defining how competitive a city is on an international scale, especially following the 2008 global financial crisis and the more recent COVID-19 crisis.