Interview. Michel Aglietta is scientific advisor at the Center for Prospective Studies and International Information (CEPII), an independent research organization placed under the Prime Minister. Born in 1938, professor emeritus of economics at Paris-Nanterre University, he has written numerous books on the theory of money: The Violence of Currency (with André Orléan, PUF, 1984), Sovereign Money (Odile Jacob, 1998), La Monnaie: between violence and trust (Odile Jacob, 2002), Money: between debt and sovereignty (with Pepita Ould Ahmed and Jean-François Ponsot, Odile Jacob, 2016) and The future of money (with Natacha Valla, Odile Jacob, 320 pages, 24.90 euros).
Natacha Valla is Dean of the School of Management and Innovation at Sciences Po Paris. Born in 1976, she spent much of her career at the European Central Bank, from 2001 to 2005, then from 2018 to 2020 as Deputy Managing Director in charge of monetary policy, interspersed with passages through the private sector – Goldman Sachs de 2008 to 2014, LVMH from 2016 to 2018 and again since 2020 – and through research – CEPII from 2014 to 2016. With Michel Aglietta, she published, in 2017, Financial macroeconomics (Discovery).
Does the pouring of trillions of dollars and euros of public money into the economies victims of the Covid-19 crisis, on both sides of the Atlantic, risk rekindling fears of a loss of confidence in the “value of money”, so much the feeling of a sudden abundance seems surreal after decades of speeches on the need for budgetary austerity and the condemnation of the financial obesity of the States?
We should start from the idea that money is not a technical device, a simple “utility” function for carrying out transactions, but an essential institution, expressing social membership in a human community; its operation is the manifestation of public sovereignty. Money was born 5,000 years ago in Sumer, between the Tigris and the Euphrates, at the same time as writing and a new entity, the State, which puts the sacred at a distance to become expression of the collective in its diversity. And that has not changed: any currency crisis, whether inflationary (soaring prices and collapse in the value of the currency) or deflationary (chain insolvency of debts), is also a political crisis.
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