Power exercised not through elected office but through control over the machinery that creates and prices money itself.
Most political analysis of inequality looks at outcomes: who owns what, who earns what, who votes for whom. It rarely looks at the machinery upstream of those outcomes, the fact that new money in a modern economy is created almost entirely by private commercial banks issuing loans, not by governments or central banks printing it directly. Whoever sits closest to that machinery, deciding who gets credit, on what terms, and at what price, holds a form of power that never has to appear on a ballot or in a boardroom vote.
This is the structural claim behind plutocratic finance: that a small class secures and compounds its wealth primarily through influence over money’s creation and distribution, rather than through the classic plutocratic route of directly owning production or land. The British economist Ann Pettifor develops this argument at length, tracing how a body of monetary theory built by the “Geneva School” economists in the 1930s helped justify handing private finance ever-greater, ever-less-accountable control over the creation, pricing, and distribution of money, a shift she argues concentrates wealth and power in ways that erode democratic oversight of the economy.
A note on sourcing: Pettifor’s sustained argument, laid out in her book The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers (Verso, 2017) and restated in her 2026 essay “The Monetary Roots of Political Extremism,” clearly supports the “rule by the wealthy through control of money creation” framing, and she explicitly links today’s plutocrats to this privatised monetary system. What could not be independently confirmed is that “plutocratic finance” is a verbatim phrase from her own writing rather than a paraphrase of her position; treat the label as a faithful summary of her argument, not a directly quoted coinage, unless a primary-text citation surfaces to confirm otherwise.
Source: Ann Pettifor, “The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Bankers” (Verso, 2017); Ann Pettifor, “The Monetary Roots of Political Extremism,” Project Syndicate (2026).