Online Courses
- Money and Society (University of Cumbria)
- Understanding Money: the History of Finance, Speculation and the Stock Market (University of South Hampton)
In the video slider an interview with one of the creators of the first course
Books
All you can know about a book without actually reading it: the Moral Markets bookshelf

Articles & Blogs
Hand-picked for you from around the web + original articles published just on the Moral Markets site
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
“In The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, Zachary D. Carter offers a new intellectual biography tracing the life and legacy of the influential economist, which argues that in the years since Keynes’s death, Keynesian economics has been stripped of Keynesian thought. Weaving together a dazzling array of Keynes’s private letters, journalistic works and academic research, this accessible book may help to hasten Keynes’s revival, writes Stephen Paduano.”
Money Buys Even More Happiness than It Used to
“While the old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, several studies have determined that the more your income increases, the happier you are, up until US$75,000 a year. […] But in a new analysis of more than 40,000 U.S. adults aged 30 and over, my colleague and I found an even deeper relationship between money and happiness. […] Today, money and happiness are more strongly related than they were in the past. It seems money buys more happiness than it used to. How did this happen?”
Negative Interest Rates: A Positive Thing?
When we take out a loan, we pay interest, while our savings generate interest. At least, this used to be the norm. Earlier this year however, Dutch banks announced that the interest rates on savings accounts will fall below zero in order to boost the economy. Why did this happen, and how does this affect our ideas about economics? Learn from economists Stefan Zeisberger and Ivan Boldyrev about the effects of negative interest rates, and whether this measure can save our economy, even when the corona pandemic takes its toll.
Money and Modern Life
“The centrepiece of Simmel’s work is a conceptualisation of exchange, an act between two people that produces value, a ‘third term, an ideal concept which enters into the duality but is not exhausted by it’. This irreducibility is why value can, in the form of money, take on a life of its own, which Simmel describes as ‘the reification of exchange among people, the embodiment of pure function’. Of course, no one said exchange would always be fair: as bandits and medical insurance companies know, one will pay any price to live. Nevertheless, as acts of exchange proliferate, currencies and prices rationalise and standardise value.”
FINANCE, MONEY and BANKING – Six Online Courses
When discussing what direction we should go with the economy, we cannot get around discussing the role of the finance sector. In post 7 of this irregular blog series 6 courses you might want to take to learn more about (the ethics and social role of) finance, money and banking.
Money, Value, Finance and the Common Good
Kees Buitendijk and Cor van Beuningen, editors to the book Finance and the Common Good (2019, Amsterdam University Press), believe that “it makes no sense to demand change only from the financial sector, as some have falsely done.” This is the start of the introduction to the book.
