Re-imagining Finance

Till Wittwer | Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou | Film

About GCRC

At a moment of planetary volatility, widening inequality, and democratic unravelling, the need for new economic thinking and unexpected collaborations has become acute. The Global Consortium for Re-thinking Capitalism (GCRC) responds to this need by offering a platform for examining how capitalism’s financial infrastructures shape ecological futures, emergent forms of politics, and the everyday experience of economic life.

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VIDEO

Reshaping Money

Gillian Tett

Gillian Tett, the renowned Financial Times journalist and Provost of King’s College Cambridge, offers a piercing perspective on the current geoeconomic crisis and the role of global finance within it. She examines three pivotal dynamics of our moment—deregulation, de-dollarisation, and digitalisation—and shows how these forces are reconfiguring the meaning and function of money today.

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WORKSHOP

Inaugural Meeting

Against the backdrop of deepening ecological, political, and economic crises, our first gathering brought together leading scholars, journalists, and activists to rethink the role of finance in shaping our collective futures. Through conversations spanning climate, democracy, digital infrastructures, and grassroots innovation, we asked: What comes after collapse? And what kind of financial imagination do we need to build it?

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Media

  • The Possibility of Democratic Finance

    Natasha van der Zwan | Interview

    Natasha van der Zwan, a leading public governance expert at the University of Groningen, examines the deep ways in which finance shapes everyday life and sets out a vision of finance organised for public good. Watch now

  • The Future of Collective Finance

    Melinda Cooper | Interview

    Melinda Cooper, one of today’s most influential political theorists based at the Australian National University, explores what forms of collective finance could emerge if we move beyond the limits of Keynesianism and orthodox ideas of the welfare state. Watch now

Provocations

Re-imagining Finance


We ask how to reinvent finance as social infrastructure. Could mutual credit systems, cooperatives, and public central banks could turn finance into a democratic commons? Such a shift would place finance in service of society, not the other way around. The below provocations try to find openings and opportunities for radically rethinking finance.

  • What if we moved to Ecologised Finance?

    In an ecologised financial democracy, every act that harms or heals the planet would be recorded in a public ecological ledger. Pollution and extraction would register as debts to the Eco-Central Bank, while care, repair, and regeneration would generate credits. Such a system would transform money into a measure of shared responsibility, aligning finance with the cycles of life itself. The Eco-M1 currency would circulate through acts of maintenance and renewal, making care – not extraction – the foundation of value.

    by Koray Caliskan

  • What if central banks became vehicles of digital democracy?

    Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) such as the digital euro could redefine how money is created and circulated. Designed as public infrastructure, they offer a chance to embed democracy at the heart of finance. Instead of serving private intermediaries, CBDCs could grant citizens direct access to secure, transparent, and accountable monetary systems. If built with participation and inclusion in mind, digital central banking could turn monetary governance into a shared civic institution – a space where finance serves the public, not private power.

    by Carola Westermeier

  • What if finance could help us rethink the crisis of the male breadwinner?

    In Latin America, amid growing precariousness and existential uncertainty, financial products targeting young men are proliferating. These platforms promote a model of masculinity centered on financial risk-taking. In Argentina, this is happening in the context of acute inflation and as part of an anti-feminist backlash actively mobilised by the far-right government. We need to imagine how to counter the way this crisis – accelerated by the pandemic – is being turned into a market opportunity that sells investment tools by reaffirming a masculinity grounded in risk-taking, self-optimisation, and anti-feminism.

    by Verònica Gago

  • What if cheap cross-border payments could fund the green transition?

    Today’s global monetary system revolves around the dollar and has from its inception been geared towards enabling fossil fuel supply and trade. It is vulnerable as it is an expensive way to transact payments that locks countries into dependence on the US. A truly multilateral cross-border payment system offers new opportunities to decarbonise financial flows.

    by Jens van ‘t Klooster

All provocations ->

GLOBAL PARTNERS

  • UCL Centre for Capitalism Studies

    University College London
    The Centre for Capitalism Studies brings a distinctive focus on finance as a cultural and political force, examining how everyday financial behaviours, retail speculation, and emerging security logics reshape democratic life, including their links to contemporary geopolitics and the far right. Its work ranges across financial cultures, the intellectual lineages of capitalism, and the shifting arrangements through which economic life is organised, offering new ways to imagine futures beyond the current poly-crisis.

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  • Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies

    The New School, New York
    The Heilbroner Center specialises in analysing the organisation of contemporary economies, with research on labour-market concentration, global supply chains, tax regimes, and the evolving ties between firms and governments. Its work clarifies how different economic and climate orders take shape and how democratic frameworks might be strengthened within rapidly changing political and technological environments.

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  • Grupo de Investigación e Intervención Feminista

    Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
    The Group of Feminist Research and Intervention, based at the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de Género (University of Buenos Aires) examines how gender, sexuality, and feminist thought shape social, political, and economic life across Latin America. Its work includes research on neoliberalism, violence, and feminist genealogies, as well as emerging forms of financialisation-from-below, where everyday credit, speculative platforms, and volatile monetary environments intersect with questions of masculinity, precarity, and far-right mobilisation. By bringing these regional dynamics into focus, GIIF offers a critical perspective on how gendered struggles inform and contest contemporary forms of finance capitalism.

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  • Southern Centre for Inequality Studies

    University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
    The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies explores how wealth disparities, labour futures, climate-inequality dynamics, and patterns of ownership shape societies in the global South. With focused work on wealth & inequality, the future of work, climate change and inequality, intersectionality, and pre-distribution and ownership, SCIS generates regionally grounded insights into how inequality operates and how more inclusive economic systems might be imagined.

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  • ANU Capitalism Studies Network

    Australian National University, Canberra
    The Capitalism Studies Network at ANU provides a regional vantage on monetary change, exploring challenges to dollar dominance, the rise of digital currency systems, and shifting configurations of investment finance, including asset management and private investment funds. Its research extends into the histories and politics of extraction, land, and labour in Australia and the Pacific, offering grounded insight into how environmental, financial, and social transformations are unfolding across the region.

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  • The New Institute

    Hamburg, Germany
    The New Institute is committed to recoupling human and non-human nature, economic and moral values, democracy as a form of governance and as a way of life, and the theory and practice of social change. Its mission is to foster transformation through interdisciplinary and trans-sectoral collaboration, bringing together academics from different disciplines with politicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, and artists.

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