Spread the Fed with Professor Bob Hockett

Building the Dream

The Federal Reserve was originally set up to be America's development bank. But somehow along the way, it lost its course. Join us as we chat with Professor Bob Hockett about his ideas on returning the Fed to its roots so we can go back to investing in all of America.
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Professor Hockett is the author of Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal and Money From Nothing: Or, Why We Should Stop Worrying About Debt and Learn to Love the Federal Reserve. He is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Professor of Public Affairs at Cornell University, and Regular Visiting Professor of Finance at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. He teaches, writes, publishes and advises in the fields of Enterprise-Organizational and Financial & Monetary Law and Economics, among other fields. He has advanced degrees in Law, Economics, Philosophy, and Finance. He is also Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, a boutique investment bank in New York City and a Director of both the Public Banking Institute and the Digital Fiat Currency Institute. In the latter connection, his Inclusive Value Ledger (‘IVL’) proposal, which would institute a public digital payments platform and associated system of digital wallets and currency at any ‘level’ of government that adopted it, is under consideration by the New York State Senate and Assembly. And his Digital Greenbacks proposal, which would function as a Treasury-administered IVL at the national level, is under consideration in both Houses of the US Congress.

Hockett has previously worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the International Monetary Fund (twice), clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, and is a Fellow of New Consensus and The Century Foundation and a Commissioned Author for the New America Foundation. He has also frequently consulted for and testified before the U.S. Congress (Senate Banking and House Financial Services in particular) and consulted for multiple government instrumentalities at the federal, state, and local levels, including the Fed, the Treasury, and the Financial Stability Oversight Council. Most recently he has helped draft multiple pieces of high-profile legislation for each of U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, and U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In policy circles he is probably best known for helping develop the Green New Deal white paper and finance plan for Representative Ocasio-Cortez; the Public Housing Green New Deal Act for Representative Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders; the Loan Shark Prevention Act for Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez; the Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist Act, the STOP Walmart Act, and the Corporate Democracy Plan for Senator Sanders; the Stop Excessive CEO Pay Act for Senator Sanders and Representatives Lee and Tlaib; the Accountable Capitalism Act for Senator Warren, and the eminent domain plan for underwater mortgages adopted by many U.S. cities after the financial crashes of 2008-09.