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CENTRAL BANK $

THE CITIZENS’
LEDGER
DIGITIZING OUR MONEY,
DEMOCRATIZING OUR FINANCE

ROBERT C.HOCKETT
The Citizens’ Ledger
 Robert C. Hockett

The Citizens’ Ledger

Digitizing Our Money, Democratizing
Our Finance
Robert C. Hockett
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-99565-2 ISBN 978-3-030-99566-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99566-9

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Prologue: Money Without “Middlemen”

Imagine that you wish to make a payment to a friend or a house-sitter who’s

looked after your home while you’ve been traveling, or to a retail store where
you’re purchasing clothing or groceries, or to a parking meter while out or a
tax authority at tax time, or to firm or other productive unit in which you
wish to invest. Imagine further that you’re owed a refund on your recent tax
payment, or are awaiting a paycheck or some public benefit, or are borrowing
from a bank or community development financial institution (“CDFI”) to
start-up a business or grow a business you already operate.
Presently these multiple transactions will likely occur over multiple “plat-
forms” or “networks,” and will require multiple “payment media” to proceed.
You might pay the house-sitter in paper currency or over Venmo, say, then
use a chip card or strip card at the store, slip coins into a parking meter, and
send a check to a broker or tax authority. Your tax refund, in turn, might
itself come as a check or direct deposit into a bank account you maintain,
your wage or salary as paper, and your loan or other investment proceeds
as a cashier’s check or a new account opened for you by a commercial or
investment bank.
These “polyglot” means of paying and being paid complicate your life in
various ways. For one thing, you must carry multiple objects around with
you, and keep in mind multiple passwords and PIN numbers. For another
thing, the security—and privacy—afforded by some of these payment media
will differ significantly from what’s offered by others. And, perhaps worst of
all, in some of these cases your payments won’t “clear” until some appreciable

v
vi Prologue: Money Without “Middlemen”

time after they “post”—“settlement” of your transactions will often be lagged,

that’s to say, not occurring “in real time.”
But these are just the most obvious worries or inconveniences thrown up
by our “Babel” of multiple parallel payment systems. In many jurisdictions,
the U.S. conspicuous among them, most payments other than those in cash
require the maintenance of bank transaction accounts—the accounts with
which chip cards and strip cards, not to mention most payment platforms
like Zelle, Venmo and PayPal, are typically associated. Yet such accounts can
be difficult to maintain, particularly for those who aren’t wealthy and can’t
afford fees of the kinds banks and payment platform companies charge us.
The result is that some 25% of the citizenry in the wealthiest country
in the world, for example—the United States (“U.S.”)—are “unbanked” or
“underbanked.” Small businesses fare little better—the “interchange” and
related fees they must pay to facilitate electronic payments are prohibitive
for many. That’s a bit odd in a “commercial republic” like that which the
U.S. purports to be, let alone any “monetary exchange economy” like that of
most if not all “developed” countries. In such republics and their economies,
value-transfer and-storage platforms—that is, payment and savings modal-
ities—surely amount to essential commercial and financial infrastructures,
public goods that by definition ought to be freely available to all.
Yet that is not all. Thanks to the intimate link between money and
payment systems drawn out in this book, modern republics must modu-
late transaction activity—that is, “money supplies” and “money velocity”—in
order to manage “price stability” and “financial stability”—that is, “inflation”
and “deflation,” “bubbles” and “busts.” Where the payments system makes
use of intermediaries—banks, payment platform companies, and the like—
the authorities charged with this form of maintenance must work through
“middleman” institutions—commercial banks, “dealer” banks, and the like.
This brings much leakage to credit and monetary policy, diminishing its
efficacy in both inflationary booms and deflationary busts. In effect, public
action is hostage to private interest. For public infrastructure is captive to
private toll-takers.
Now imagine a simpler, more elegant, more streamlined value-storage and
-transfer architecture… Your iPhone or other “smart device” holds a digital
wallet networked horizontally to all other citizens’ and businesses’ wallets
and vertically to the republic’s fiscal and/or monetary authorities—its finance
ministry (“FM”) and/or its central bank (“CB”). To make payments to
friends, employees, businesses, tax authorities, materials suppliers, or anyone
else in their personal or professional capacities, you simply credit their wallets
 Prologue: Money Without “Middlemen” vii

while debiting yours. Payments to you or your business take the same form—
creditings of your wallet and corresponding debitings of your payors’ wallets,
all “in real time.”
Your wallet also serves as a value-storage device—a personal and/or profes-
sional digital “savings account.” The fiscal or monetary authority might also
pay interest on our wallet accounts—as central banks do now on private
sector banks’ “reserve accounts,” and as finance ministries do on the sovereign
debt instruments—treasury “bonds,” “bills,” and “notes”—that so many of
their citizens (perhaps you yourself ) purchase as safe savings vehicles. These
rates then can be raised or lowered to encourage more or less saving accord-
ingly as the republic’s monetary and fiscal agencies must encourage slower
spending to lower inflation or accelerated spending to counteract deflation
(a.k.a. “recession” or “depression”). Et voila, leak-proof monetary policy.
But there is more. Because smart device ownership is far more universal
than bank account ownership—in the U.S., for example, only 5%, not
25%, of the population is “unphoned”—the problem of the “unbanked”
and “underbanked” is all but eliminated. Payment network fees paid by busi-
nesses, meanwhile, disappear. In presently “developing” countries, relatedly, a
full banking and payments system can be had without trudging through the
decades of slow steps the “developed” world had to traverse to establish full
national “brick and mortar” banking and investment systems.
Further, communities that find that various forms of presently unremu-
nerated “care work” contribute to aggregate wealth and hence public revenue
over time—a secondary schooler tutoring primary schoolers, for example,
or a young person giving home care to an older person—can incentivize
more such work by remunerating it over smart devices. The “proof of work”
(“POW”) protocols that new digital payment technologies enable can for
their part ensure real services—value adding services—are performed for
these remunerations.
These same technologies also afford means of cryptographically protecting
individuals’ and businesses’ digital identities and transactional privacy. The
payment architecture can be programmed to replicate the privacy advantages
now offered only by cash, while capturing the security advantages offered
only by electronic networking. Digitization, in other words, can be made “all
good,” with no offsetting “bad with the good” disadvantages or “tradeoffs.”
In effect, what we’re imagining now is a digital infrastructure that isomor-
phically mirrors the underlying credit and debit , the asset and liability,
structures of all modern productive commercial societies. Legally and insti-
tutionally speaking, all modern economies amount to massive social balance
sheets, on which comprehensive “double-entry book-keeping” would include
viii Prologue: Money Without “Middlemen”

every public and private unit’s debts and entitlements, all interlinked liability
and asset structures. No actually tabulated balance sheet quite does this,
of course (though we’ll find that central bank records quite nearly do it),
but this is nevertheless the legal, monetary, and financial structure of all
commercial societies—including most of the societies of modern Africa, Asia,
Europe, Oceania, and the Americas—established since the late medieval or
early modern eras.
Present-day payment and value-accounting practices obscure this shared
underlying structure, and in so doing enable all manner of inefficiency and
rent-extraction, as multiple for-profit entities purport to offer—for a price—
bits and pieces of a dismembered commercial and financial infrastructure
that should be—and can be—made freely available to all. The upshot is
intolerable injustice and massively scandalous waste.
It doesn’t have to be this way. While our present value-accounting, value-
storage, and value-transfer systems are understandable outgrowths of an
earlier time when the state of technology simply didn’t allow for comprehen-
sive account-keeping across whole economies, that earlier time is now past.
New modes of data-compiling, -storing, and -collating enable the construc-
tion of literal physical ledgers (in electronic digital form) that replicate the de
facto ledgers that are all of our modern commercial and financial economies’
fund-stocks (“savings”) and fund-flows (“payments”).
Something much like this compiling and tracking is done by our central
banks worldwide already, for it’s the only way they can fulfill their public
money-management mandates not “in the dark,” but transparently, with full
knowledge, “in the full light of day.” But what our public instrumentalities—
our central banks and finance ministries—benefit by we the citizens should
benefit by too. Since they, our public agents, “keep” economy-wide macro
ledgers, we, their principals, ought to be able to use them—to save and to
spend, to invest and be invested in, through them.
Happily, the new savings and payments technologies discussed in this
book will enable just that. They will enable our savings and payments, and
hence also our investment, modalities to catch up with our computing and
communications modalities. That will effectively convey the productivity and
efficiency gains wrought by the latter to our practices and infrastructures that
make up the former.
We must act quickly, however. For the rent-taking middleman institutions
that have benefitted by the old regime see the threats posed to their oligopoly
by the emerging regime. They are accordingly acting quite swiftly to ensure
that the public efficiencies offered by new technology remain restricted, for-
profit, and thus expensive. Too many central banks, in turn, seem to be
 Prologue: Money Without “Middlemen” ix

willing to listen to these interests as they now upgrade their national payments
systems with the aforementioned technologies.
When you hear references to “central bank digital currencies” or “CBDC,”
as we’re all apt to hear now, this is what’s being referenced. It is the task of
this book to show you both why to keep paying attention, and how to weigh-
in. It’s about what to demand as a citizen—a citizen of a free and productive
commercial republic.
 Praise for The Citizens’ Ledger

“Computer scientists, financiers, and even some economists seem often to

overlook the ways money, finance and accounting on the one hand, and
money, banking, and central banks on the other hand all interact. One result
is that treatments of central bank-issued digital currencies (‘CBDCs’) tend to
lose sight of the full range of critical consequences – and opportunities! – that
flow from alternative possible digital currency arrangements.
After Hockett’s treatise, no such unsystematic or incomplete ‘siloed’
thinking will be possible. In highly accessible prose supplemented by simple
intuitive diagrams, Hockett shows how the trillions of commercial and finan-
cial transactions that occur in our economies each day can be modeled as
single national account books of millions of interlocking personal and insti-
tutional balance sheets – full ‘Citizens’ Ledgers’ that digital technology is now
able to replicate.
The potential this opens is far more interesting – and far more exciting –
than most current discussions of CBDC appear to appreciate. As Hockett
demonstrates, the future now available to us includes transactional privacy
and free banking services for all households and businesses, leak-proof mone-
tary policy for all central banks, and a transformed financial system that is
once again geared toward production instead of mere speculation.”
—U.S. Congressman Ro Khanna, Professor of Economics and author of
Dignity in a Digital Age (2022) and Entrepreneurial Nation (2012)

xi
xii Praise for The Citizens’ Ledger

“With the inclusive vision and bold energy that have become hallmarks of
Robert Hockett’s work, The Citizens’ Ledger: Digitizing Our Money, Democra-
tizing Our Finance does not disappoint. In it, Hockett challenges readers to
imagine – and then operationalize – a universal public savings and payments
infrastructure for people he calls American ‘citizens of the contemporary
commercial republic.’ Fans and foes alike of digital financial technologies
will revel in the breadth and sheer exhilaration of Hockett’s ambitious
and sweeping proposal to reimagine the US financial system, and to dare
policymakers to reply to the question ‘why not?’”
—Sarah Bloom Raskin, Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of Law, Duke
University Law School; former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, 2013–2017;
former Governor, Federal Reserve Board, 2010–2013

“In this exciting book, the uniquely imaginative legal and financial scholar,
Robert Hockett, proposes a streamlined way to make our newly electronic
‘Babel’ of cash payment methods far more equitable and efficient. New
digital technologies make it possible, he envisions, to reduce the complexity
of these payments to a single electronic wallet for every citizen. This new
universal savings and payments platform, administered by the Treasury or
the Federal Reserve System, would sharply reduce costs, speculative excesses,
and opportunities to defraud, while also eliminating the problems of finan-
cial exclusion and the unbanked with a single stroke. Hockett comes full circle
from an earlier, simpler but less opportunistic age to reduce the current digital
cacophony and excess profit exploitation to a productive minimum. It’s the
first book of its kind, and likely to be the definitive word on its subjects.”
—Jeff Madrick, New York Times economics columnist; Editor, Challenge
magazine; author of Invisible Americans, Seven Bad Ideas, The Age of
Greed, The End of Affluence, Taking America, and other books

“For far too long, our financial system and its apologists have conditioned
consumers and savers to believe that banking and monetary services are
best handled by private sector intermediaries alone. As America’s foremost
architect of democratic financial systems, Bob Hockett has given policy-
makers at every level of government the blueprint to bank the unbanked
and streamline our savings, payments, and monetary policy infrastructures
without exploiting or extracting value from people or business firms.
Instead of blindly ushering predatory fintech products and wasteful cryp-
tocurrency exchanges into their communities, all lawmakers at every level
 Praise for The Citizens’ Ledger xiii

of government in the US and abroad must read this book to learn how to
democratize finance and rebuild public capital.”
—Ronald Tae Sok Kim, New York State Assemblyman for the 40th District

“This book starts from the novel premise that ‘all modern economies amount
to massive social balance sheets’ and draws transformative conclusions from
that starting point. In so doing it gives the reader a fresh perspective to under-
stand how all modern economies, and the financial systems attached to them,
have developed. It expertly outlines how our vast networks of payment and
accounting practices and institutions have evolved, but also rightly impresses
upon us the urgency of developing savings and payments technologies that
will now allow us to streamline, simplify, and benefit from this evolving space.
Currently, our existing institutions and protocols are failing to keep up,
and more troubling, rent-taking middlemen that have benefited from the old
regime are moving quickly to thwart the adoption of a framework that would
ensure public efficiencies offered by new technology. This book presents a
clear-eyed vision for how financial systems can evolve to reflect more just and
equitable access to the public, and not just to private, profit-seeking institu-
tions and entities that seek to keep this realm obscure. It is essential reading
for anyone interested in digital currency, financial systems, monetary policy,
payments regimes, and the democratization of finance.”
—Amara Enyia, Advisory Board, Public Banking Institute; and Board of
Directors, Chicago Community Loan Fund

“Breathtaking. Visionary. The ideas developed in this book unlock new

frontiers for civic technical solutions to many persistent challenges.”
—Michael Warner, San Francisco, Project Manager, Multiple Central Bank
Digital Currency Initiatives
 Contents

1 Introduction: Money, Finance, and Production

in Contemporary Commercial Republics 1
1.1 Money and Production, Public and Private: The
Two-by-Two Matrix of Commercial Republican
Economies 2
1.2 Ills of Financial Hybridity—And Their Possible
Money-Tech Cure 4
1.3 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance as Our Newly
Available Cure 6
2 Money, Capital, and Investment: Fixing Some Critical
Terms and Relations 19
2.1 Capital: A Crucial Yet Oft-Muddled Term 20
2.1.1 Production: What Capital Is (Ultimately) For 20
2.1.2 Generic Capital 21
2.1.3 Generic Capital in Production—Investment
Capital 21
2.2 Investment: Antonym and Antidote to Speculation 23
2.2.1 Investment and Finance 23
2.2.2 Stratification and N-ary (a.k.a.“Meta-”) Markets 24
2.2.3 Intermediation, Derivation, “Financialization” 25
2.3 Money: From Measure to Medium—and Back 27
2.3.1 Paying—Including Investing 28

xv
xvi Contents

2.3.2 Accounting 28
2.3.3 Crediting/Debiting 29
3 Franchise Finance: A Brief Exposition and Exposé 33
3.1 Hybridity in the Large: Exposition 33
3.2 Hybridity in Detail: Exposé 36
3.2.1 Credit-Money’s Endogeneity: Private Lending
of Public Capital 36
3.2.2 Endogeneity’s Blessing—And Curse: Production
and Wealth, Speculation and Recursive
Collective Action Problems 38
4 Franchise Finance: Why and How We Got Here 49
4.1 Why Credit and Currency 49
4.1.1 Credit: Production and Payment in Time 50
4.1.2 Currency: From Ledgers to Tokens—And Back 50
4.2 Why Uniformity 54
4.2.1 Spatial Uniformity: Payments and “Universal
Equivalents” 55
4.2.2 Temporal Uniformity: “Sound Money”
and “Elastic Currency” 57
5 Franchise Finance: Why We Retain It—And Why We Need
Not 73
5.1 Why We Retain It: New Facts, Old Ideas 74
5.2 Why We Need Not: New Facts, New Prospects 76
5.3 Ending Hybridity—Citizen Ledger Finance in Broad
Outline 82
6 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance: What We Now Can
and Must Do 95
6.1 Liability-Side Reform: Reserve Accounts, Citizen
Wallets, and Resident Wallets 97
6.1.1 What the U.S. and Others Do Now: Reserve
Accounts 97
6.1.2 What We Must Add: Digital Citizen Wallets,
Resident Wallets, and Their Common Digital
Ledger 101
6.2 Asset-Side Reform: Digitized CB, NIC, PSF, and Other
Public Issuances 108
6.2.1 What We Do Now: Finance Ministry Debt,
Agency Debt, and (Sometimes) Other 108
 Contents xvii

6.2.2 What We Must Add: Digitized CB-Discounted

Paper, NIC Issuances, PSF Holdings, and Other 110
6.3 Systemic Ramifications: Private Sector Transformation
and Public Sector Consolidation 116
6.3.1 Private Money Capital: From Credit-Generation
and -Multiplication to Honest Intermediation 116
6.3.2 Public Investment Capital: From Central Bank
and Finance Ministry, Fiscal and Monetary,
and “T-Bill,” “Fed Note,” and “Mint Coin”
Separation to Digital Consolidation 120
7 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance: Logistics and Technics 137
7.1 From Abstract Accounting to Concrete Logistics:
Making It Happen Now 137
7.2 From Macro Logistics to Micro Technics: Why
to Digitize Now 141
7.2.1 The Bright Side of the Ledger 141
7.2.2 The Dark Side of the Ledger 143
8 From Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance to Citizen Fintech:
Democratic Digitization and Its Possible Forms 157
8.1 Moneys and Payment Systems 157
8.2 From Payments to Moneys: Technical Options
for the Democratic Digital Currency 166
9 Digitized Citizen Ledger Finance: Cavils and Competitors 185

Epilogue: From Fintech to Ourtech—And Our Finance 195

Index 197
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Stylized production function 20

Fig. 2.2 Stylized production function in a monetary exchange
economy 22
Fig. 2.3 Stylized representation of stratified and derivative markets 26
Fig. 3.1 Exogenous deposit and endogenous bank money 38
Fig. 5.1 Consolidated public balance sheet 88
Fig. 6.1 Regular central bank/bank arrangements and financial flows 99
Fig. 6.2 Central-Bank- or Finance-Ministry-Administered democratic
digital currency payments system 102
Fig. 6.3 U.S. Fed portfolio, measured in $ trillions, as of Spring 2020 110
Fig. 6.4 Reformed Bank/Central Bank/Finance Ministry/NIC w/
Stabilization Fund 123
Fig. 8.1 Central-bank- or finance-ministry-administered democratic
digital currency payments system 168

xix
 1
Introduction: Money, Finance,
and Production in Contemporary
Commercial Republics

Many of the world’s citizens, Americans included, pride themselves both

on their innovative cultures and the associated dynamisms of their produc-
tive economies. Many likewise celebrate their modern polities’ foundings as
democratic republics—res publicae (“public things”) inclusively constituted
and managed by more or less materially independent and freely associating
citizens, households, and firms (personae privata).1
This modern ideal of the “commonwealth” or “good society,” trace-
able in large measure to seventeenth-century English Oppositionist,
eighteenth-century French and Scottish Enlightenment, and nineteenth-
century German Romantic updatings of Renaissance Italian and Roman
Republican antecedents, often travels together with two related concep-
tions—those of a “commercial republic” and the “exchange economy” that
serves as any such republic’s material substrate.2 The structures named by
these terms in turn open the door to often-puzzling or -troubling forms
of hybridity in the realms of production and finance in such societies—
including all contemporary commercial republics.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
R. C. Hockett, The Citizens’ Ledger,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99566-9_1
2 R. C. Hockett

1.1 Money and Production, Public and Private:

The Two-by-Two Matrix of Commercial
Republican Economies
Key to the formation and healthy maintenance of any commercial society
and associated economy are their forms of money and finance—the means
by which current resources find productive deployment in the creation of
future resources, or “wealth.”3 Virtually by definition in any such society and
associated economy, these forms themselves will involve at least some degree
of private sector project-planning and associated “private ordering.”4
Finance being a matter of channeling today’s resources to the production
of tomorrow’s resources, and such “channeling” in any exchange economy
being at least partly a matter of contractual transfer, financial modalities and
the forms of money they use will make at least some use of commercial modal-
ities.5 They will employ modes of payment—forms of money—through
which productive units can purchase access to productive “inputs” that
they do not already have—that is, finance their productive operations—in
producing the “outputs” that constitute their material wealth.6
This reliance of monetary and financial modalities on commercial modal-
ities in any exchange economy on the one hand, and the aforementioned
“mixed” public/private character of any republic, including a commercial
republic, on the other hand, confront the citizens of any such republic with
a critical foundational choice. That is the choice of what roles the “public”
and “private” sectors will play in supplying the indispensible value-transfer
(“payment”), value-storage (“saving”), and other commercial and financial
infrastructures used by productive units on the one hand, and what asso-
ciated roles public and private should play in governing productive financial
flows via those structures on the other hand.7
Should production itself be a private sector affair while financing produc-
tion is made a public sector affair, for example? Should the reverse be the case?
Or should both finance and production be mainly public or mainly private
affairs?
In most modern commercial republics, citizens have more or less defini-
tively answered, to their own satisfaction at least, the “who does production”
question—at least from the late eighteenth century to the present-day: they
have thus far elected to leave production primarily, though not of course
solely, “in private hands.” We modern republican citizens don’t have exten-
sive networks of “public sector industry” and “state-owned enterprises,” for
example, even though we do have many “government corporations” and
“government-sponsored enterprises” (“GSEs”).8
 1 Introduction: Money, Finance, and Production … 3

Where the financing of production is concerned, by contrast, modern

commercial republics have been decidedly more ambivalent throughout their
histories—and this, we shall see, is at least partly attributable to technological
factors.
On the one hand, they have founded and operated national and suprana-
tional development banks—the First and Second Banks of the U.S. and the
Landesbanken and Sparkassen system of Germany, for example. These helped
oversee and finance national economic development in the late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.9 Meanwhile the U.S.’s War.
Finance Corporation (“WFC”) and Reconstruction Finance Corporation
(“RFC”), to note two more recent examples, presided over national war mobi-
lization and productive revitalization during the first half of the twentieth
century while the world’s post-war regional development banks—the Euro-
pean Bank for Reconstruction and Development (“EBRD”), the World Bank
(“IBRD”), the Asian Development Bank (“ADB”), the Inter-American Devel-
opment Bank (“IADB”), the European Investment Bank (“EIB”), etc., of the
second half of the same century—did much the same for the wider world.10 .
On the other hand, our commercial republics—especially but not solely
the Anglophone ones—have also allowed nominally private sector “finan-
cial services industries” both to flourish and to grow into ever-larger parts
of their GDP-measured macroeconomies, especially over the past 50 years.11
And we frequently tell ourselves to this day that this industry is the primary
driver—indeed both the coordinator and the “fuel”-supplier—of our national
production processes themselves.12
The fact of the matter, then, is that while the modern commercial
republic’s productive processes both are and have always to this point been
by and large privately ordered, our financial systems are and have always been
hybrid in character. They have been mixes of combined public and private
sector credit allocation on the one hand, and variably successful public credit
modulation on the other hand—success and failure in turn fluctuating with
changing degrees of public sector appreciation that credit allocation on the
one hand, and modulation on the other, cannot ultimately be kept separate.13
It is this problem—that of fluctuating success and failure in the mixed
public/private financing of private sector production—which we’ll address,
even solve, through the new savings and payment technologies addressed in
this book. I aim to do that by showing how new monetary technologies give
us the means to end ever-more dysfunctional financial hybridity itself, by
separating our monetary and financial systems into distinct public and private
sector components along lines that make good institutional sense as a matter
4 R. C. Hockett

of both democratic republican justice and commercial republican productive

efficiency.
But specifying in detail what this entails requires more specificity both
about the nature of our distinctly contemporary species of financial hybridity
on the one hand, and about what susceptibilities to disease are encoded in
the DNA, so to speak, of those species on the other hand.
Explicating what parts or portion of our financial systems should be made
forthrightly part of “the commons” in our “commonwealths,” in other words,
requires that we carefully explicate what parts of it already are.14

1.2 Ills of Financial Hybridity—And Their

Possible Money-Tech Cure
For the past 150 to 200 years, modern financial systems have operated not
only as generically hybrid arrangements, but more specifically as public–
private franchise arrangements.15 At the core of our finance franchises
lie sovereign publics (the “publics” of our “republics”) and their money-
modulators—the issuers and managers of their monetized full faith and
credit, their “money”—on the one hand, and the private sector financial insti-
tutions and markets that are publicly licensed to allocate most of the resultant
“credit-money” used in these republics on the other hand.16
The U.S. provides an instructive example. For the half-century following
the mid-1860s, its public money-modulator was the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”), a regulator whose name is sugges-
tive but whose role grew progressively more obscure to the public once
its original mandate was transferred, in principal part, to the newly estab-
lished, largely German-inspired, Federal Reserve System (“FRS,” “Fed”) circa
1913.17 Since the latter date, and especially since the U.S. banking reforms
of the Depression-era 1930s, the Fed has served as the American republic’s
primary money-modulator, while private sector financial institutions have
continued to act as its primary, though not as its sole, money-allocators.18
Over the last decade, developments in several distinct “spaces” or “spheres”
have prompted what is in effect, even if not yet in name, a broad reassessment
of both American and other hybrid financial arrangements in commercial
republics worldwide. One such development has been the global financial
debacle of just over a decade ago, as followed by its debt- deflationary
sequel—a still-lingering malady that proximately originated in American
financial dysfunction and ultimately culminated in global economic devas-
tation.19
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Title: Sea curse

Author: Robert E. Howard

Release date: January 13, 2024 [eBook #72707]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Weird Tales, 1928

Credits: Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEA CURSE

***
 Sea Curse
ROBERT E. HOWARD

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sea Curse, copyright 1928 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for

Weird Tales, May 1928.

Sea Curse

And some return by the failing light

And some in the waking dream,
For she hears the heels of the dripping ghosts
That ride the rough roofbeam.
—Kipling
 They were the brawlers and braggarts, the loud boasters and hard
drinkers, of Faring town, John Kulrek and his crony Lie-lip Canool. Many a
time have I, a tousled-haired lad, stolen to the tavern door to listen to their
curses, their profane arguments and wild sea songs; half fearful and half in
admiration of these wild rovers. Aye, all the people of Faring town gazed on
them with fear and admiration, for they were not like the rest of the Faring
men; they were not content to ply their trade along the coasts and among
the shark-teeth shoals. No yawls, no skiffs for them! They fared far, farther
than any other man in the village, for they shipped on the great sailing-ships
that went out on the white tides to brave the restless gray ocean and make
ports in strange lands.

Ah, I mind it was swift times in the little sea-coast village of Faring
when John Kulrek came home, with his furtive Lie-lip at his side,
swaggering down the gang-plank, in his tarry sea-clothes, and the broad
leather belt that held his ever-ready dagger; shouting condescending
greeting to some favored acquaintance, kissing some maiden who ventured
too near; then up the street, roaring some scarcely decent song of the sea.
How the cringers and the idlers, the hangers-on, would swarm about the
two desperate heroes, flattering and smirking, guffawing hilariously at each
nasty jest. For to the tavern loafers and to some of the weaker among the
straight-forward villagers, these men with their wild talk and their brutal
deeds, their tales of the Seven Seas and the far countries, these men, I say,
were valiant knights, nature's noblemen who dared to be men of blood and
brawn.

And all feared them, so that when a man was beaten or a woman
insulted, the villagers muttered—and did nothing. And so when Moll
Farrell's niece was put to shame by John Kulrek, none dared even to put in
words what all thought. Moll had never married, and she and the girl lived
alone in a little hut down close to the beach, so close that in high tide the
waves came almost to the door.

The people of the village accounted old Moll something of a witch, and
she was a grim, gaunt old dame who had little to say to anyone. But she
minded her own business, and eked out a slim living by gathering clams,
and picking up bits of driftwood.
 The girl was a pretty, foolish little thing, vain and easily befooled, else
she had never yielded to the shark-like blandishments of John Kulrek.

I mind the day was a cold winter day with a sharp breeze out of the east
when the old dame came into the village street shrieking that the girl had
vanished. All scattered over the beach and back among the bleak inland
hills to search for her—all save John Kulrek and his cronies who sat in the
tavern dicing and toping. All the while beyond the shoals, we heard the
never-ceasing droning of the heaving, restless grey monster, and in the dim
light of the ghostly dawn Moll Farrell's girl came home.

The tides bore her gently across the wet sands and laid her almost at her
own door. Virgin-white she was, and her arms were folded across her still
bosom; calm was her face, and the gray tides sighed about her slender
limbs. Moll Farrell's eyes were stones, yet she stood above her dead girl and
spoke no word till John Kulrek and his crony came reeling down from the
tavern, their drinking-jacks still in their hands. Drunk was John Kulrek, and
the people gave back for him, murder in their souls; so he came and laughed
at Moll Farrell across the body of her girl.

"Zounds!" swore John Kulrek; "the wench has drowned herself, Lie-lip!"

Lie-lip laughed, with the twist of his thin mouth. He always hated Moll
Farrell, for it was she that had given him the name of Lie-lip.

Then John Kulrek lifted his drinking-jack, swaying on his uncertain legs.
"A health to the wench's ghost!" he bellowed, while all stood aghast.

Then Moll Farrell spoke, and the words broke from her in a scream
which sent ripples of cold up and down the spines of the throng.

"The curse of the Foul Fiend upon you, John Kulrek!" she screamed.
"The curse of God rest upon your vile soul throughout eternity! May you
gaze on sights that shall sear the eyes of you and scorch the soul of you!
May you die a bloody death and writhe in hell's flames for a million and a
million and yet a million years! I curse you by sea and by land, by earth and
by air, by the demons of the oceans and the demons of the swamplands, the
fiends of the forests and the goblins of the hills! And you—" her lean finger
stabbed at Lie-lip Canool and he started backward, his face paling, "you
shall be the death of John Kulrek and he shall be the death of you! You shall
bring John Kulrek to the doors of hell and John Kulrek shall bring you to
the gallows-tree! I set the seal of death upon your brow, John Kulrek! You
shall live in terror and die in horror far out upon the cold grey sea! But the
sea that took the soul of innocence to her bosom shall not take you, but
shall fling forth your vile carcass to the sands! Aye, John Kulrek—" and she
spoke with such a terrible intensity that the drunken mockery on the man's
face changed to one of swinish stupidity, "the sea roars for the victim it will
not keep! There is snow upon the hills, John Kulrek, and ere it melts your
corpse will lie at my feet. And I shall spit upon it and be content."

Kulrek and his crony sailed at dawn for a long voyage, and Moll went
back to her hut and her clam gathering. She seemed to grow leaner and
more grim than ever and her eyes smoldered with a light not sane. The days
glided by and people whispered among themselves that Moll's days were
numbered, for she faded to a ghost of a woman; but she went her way,
refusing all aid.

That was a short, cold summer and the snow on the barren inland hills
never melted; a thing very unusual, which caused much comment among
the villagers. At dusk and at dawn Moll would come up on the beach, gaze
up at the snow which glittered on the hills, then out to sea with a fierce
intensity in her gaze.

Then the days grew shorter, the nights longer and darker, and the cold
grey tides came sweeping along the bleak strands, bearing the rain and sleet
of the sharp east breezes.

And upon a bleak day a trading-vessel sailed into the bay and anchored.
And all the idlers and the wastrels flocked to the wharfs, for that was the
ship upon which John Kulrek and Lie-lip Canool had sailed. Down the
gang-plank came Lie-lip, more furtive than ever, but John Kulrek was not
there.

To shouted queries, Canool shook his head. "Kulrek deserted ship at a

port of Sumatra," said he. "He had a row with the skipper, lads; wanted me
to desert, too, but no! I had to see you fine lads again, eh, boys?"
 Almost cringing was Lie-lip Canool, and suddenly he recoiled as Moll
Farrell came through the throng. A moment they stood eyeing each other;
then Moll's grim lips bent in a terrible smile.

"There's blood on your hand, Canool!" she lashed out suddenly—so

suddenly that Lie-lip started and rubbed his right hand across his left sleeve.

"Stand aside, witch!" he snarled in sudden anger, striding through the

crowd which gave back for him. His admirers followed him to the tavern.

Now, I mind that the next day was even colder; grey fogs came drifting
out of the east and veiled the sea and the beaches. There would be no
sailing that day, and so all the villagers were in their snug houses or
matching tales at the tavern. So it came about that Joe, my friend, a lad of
my own age, and I, were the ones who saw the first of the strange thing that
happened.

Being harum-scarum lads of no wisdom, we were sitting in a small

rowboat, floating at the end of the wharfs, each shivering and wishing the
other would suggest leaving, there being no reason whatever for our being
there, save that it was a good place to build air-castles undisturbed.

Suddenly Joe raised his hand. "Say," he said, "d'ye hear? Who can be out
on the bay upon a day like this?"

"Nobody. What d'ye hear?"

"Oars. Or I'm a lubber. Listen."

There was no seeing anything in that fog, and I heard nothing. Yet Joe
swore he did, and suddenly his face assumed a strange look.

"Somebody rowing out there, I tell you! The bay is alive with oars from
the sound! A score of boats at the least! Ye dolt, can ye not hear?"

Then, as I shook my head, he leaped and began to undo the painter.

"I'm off to see. Name me liar if the bay is not full of boats, all together
like a close fleet. Are you with me?"
 Yes, I was with him, though I heard nothing. Then out in the greyness we
went, and the fog closed behind and before so that we drifted in a vague
world of smoke, seeing naught and hearing naught. We were lost in no time,
and I cursed Joe for leading us upon a wild goose chase that was like to end
with our being swept out to sea. I thought of Moll Farrell's girl and
shuddered.

How long we drifted I know not. Minutes faded into hours, hours into
centuries. Still Joe swore he heard the oars, now close at hand, now far
away, and for hours we followed them, steering our course toward the
sound, as the noise grew or receded. This I later thought of, and could not
understand.

Then, when my hands were so numb that I could no longer hold the oar,
and the forerunning drowsiness of cold and exhaustion was stealing over
me, bleak white stars broke through the fog which glided suddenly away,
fading like a ghost of smoke, and we found ourselves afloat just outside the
mouth of the bay. The waters lay smooth as a pond, all dark green and silver
in the starlight, and the cold came crisper than ever. I was swinging the boat
about, to put back into the bay, when Joe gave a shout, and for the first time
I heard the clack of oar-locks. I glanced over my shoulder and my blood
went cold.

A great beaked prow loomed above us, a weird, unfamiliar shape against
the stars, and as I caught my breath, sheered sharply and swept by us, with a
curious swishing I never heard any other craft make. Joe screamed and
backed oars frantically, and the boat walled out of the way just in time; for
though the prow had missed us, still otherwise we had died. For from the
sides of the ship stood long oars, bank upon bank which swept her along.
Though I had never seen such a craft, I knew her for a galley. But what was
she doing upon our coasts? They said, the far-farers, that such ships were
still in use among the heathens of Barbary; but it was many a long, heaving
mile to Barbary, and even so she did not resemble the ships described by
those who had sailed far.

We started in pursuit, and this was strange, for though the waters broke
about her prow, and she seemed fairly to fly through the waves, yet she was
making little speed, and it was no time before we caught up with her.
Making our painter fast to a chain far back beyond the reach of the swishing
oars, we hailed those on deck. But there came no answer, and at last,
conquering our fears, we clambered up the chain and found ourselves upon
the strangest deck man has trod for many a long, roaring century.

"This is no Barbary rover!" muttered Joe fearsomely. "Look, how old it

seems! Almost ready to fall to pieces. Why, 'tis fairly rotten!"

There was no one on deck, no one at the long sweep with which the craft
was steered. We stole to the hold and looked down the stair. Then and there,
if ever men were on the verge of insanity, it was we. For there were rowers
there, it is true; they sat upon the rowers' benches and drove the creaking
oars through the gray waters. And they that rowed were skeletons!

Shrieking, we plunged across the deck, to fling ourselves into the sea.
But at the rail I tripped upon something and fell headlong, and as I lay, I
saw a thing which vanquished my fear of the horrors below for an instant.
The thing upon which I had tripped was a human body, and in the dim gray
light that was beginning to steal across the eastern waves I saw a dagger hilt
standing up between his shoulders. Joe was at the rail, urging me to haste,
and together we slid down the chain and cut the painter.

Then we stood off into the bay. Straight on kept the grim galley, and we
followed, slowly, wondering. She seemed to be heading straight for the
beach beside the wharfs, and as we approached, we saw the wharfs
thronged with people. They had missed us, no doubt, and now they stood,
there in the early dawn light, struck dumb by the apparition which had
come up out of the night and the grim ocean.

Straight on swept the galley, her oars a-swish; then ere she reached the
shallow water—crash!—a terrific reverberation shook the bay. Before our
eyes the grim craft seemed to melt away; then she vanished, and the green
waters seethed where she had ridden, but there floated no driftwood there,
nor did there ever float any ashore. Aye, something floated ashore, but it
was grim driftwood!

We made the landing amid a hum of excited conversation that stopped

suddenly. Moll Farrell stood before her hut, limned gauntly against the
ghostly dawn, her lean hand pointing seaward. And across the sighing wet
sands, borne by the grey tide, something came floating; something that the
waves dropped at Moll Farrell's feet. And there looked up at us, as we
crowded about, a pair of unseeing eyes set in a still, white face. John Kulrek
had come home.

Still and grim he lay, rocked by the tide, and as he lurched sideways, all
saw the dagger hilt that stood from his back—the dagger all of us had seen
a thousand times at the belt of Lie-lip Canool.

"Aye, I killed him!" came Canool's shriek, as he writhed and groveled

before our gaze. "At sea on a still night in a drunken brawl I slew him and
hurled him overboard! And from the far seas he has followed me—" his
voice sank to a hideous whisper, "because—of—the—curse—the—sea—
would—not—keep—his—body!"

And the wretch sank down, trembling, the shadow of the gallows already
in his eyes.

"Aye!" Strong, deep and exultant was Moll Farrell's voice. "From the
hell of lost craft Satan sent a ship of bygone ages! A ship red with gore and
stained with the memory of horrid crimes! None other would bear such a
vile carcass! The sea has taken vengeance and has given me mine. See now,
how I spit upon the face of John Kulrek."

And with a ghastly laugh, she pitched forward, the blood starting to her
lips. And the sun came up across the restless sea.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEA CURSE ***

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paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied

warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted
by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.