Chartalism is a descriptive economic theory that details the procedures and consequences of using government-issued tokens as the unit of money, i.e. fiat money. The name derives from the Latin charta, in the sense of a token or ticket. The modern theoretical body of work on chartalism is known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

MMT aims to describe and analyze modern economies in which the national currency is fiat money, established and created exclusively by the government. In MMT, money enters circulation through government spending; Taxation is employed to establish the fiat money as currency, giving it value by creating demand for it in the form of a private tax obligation that can only be met using the government's currency. An ongoing tax obligation, in concert with private confidence and acceptance of the currency, maintains its value. Because the government can issue its own currency at will, MMT maintains that the level of taxation relative to government spending (the government's deficit spending or budget surplus) is in reality a policy tool that regulates inflation and unemployment, and not a means of funding the government's activities per se.

Bernard Lietaer (born in 1942 in Lauwe, Belgium) is a civil engineer, economist, author and professor. He studies monetary systems and promotes the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own local or complementary currency, which circulate parallel with national currencies.

Bernard Lietaer, the author of "The Future of Money: Beyond Greed and Scarcity" and the forthcoming "Of Human Wealth," has been active in the realm of money systems for close to 40 years in a wide variety of functions. With the publication of his post-graduate thesis at MIT in 1971 (which included a description of "floating exchanges") and the Nixon Shock of that same year which eradicated the Bretton Woods system by unhinging the US dollar value from its gold standard and inaugurated the new era of universal floating exchanges (previous to that time the only "floating exchanges" involved some exotic currencies in Latin America), the fledgling management consultant suddenly found himself to be at the center of the financial world's attention. The techniques that he had developed for those marginal Latin American currencies were overnight the only systematic research which could be used to deal with all of the major currencies of the world. A major US bank negotiated exclusive rights to his approach which required that he begin another career. While at the Central Bank in Belgium (National Bank of Belgium) he implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system. During that period, he also served as President of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System. His consultant experience in monetary aspects on four continents ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries.

David Rolfe Graeber (born 12 February 1961) is an American anthropologist and anarchist who is Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, although Yale controversially declined to rehire him, and his term there ended in June 2007. Graeber has been involved in social and political activism, including the protests against the World Economic Forum in New York City in 2002 and Occupy Wall Street. He is a member of the labor union Industrial Workers of the World and of the Interim Committee for the emerging International Organization for a Participatory Society.

Graeber's parents, who were in their forties when Graeber was born, were self-taught working-class intellectuals. Graeber's mother, Ruth Rubenstein, had been a garment worker, and played the lead role in the 1930s musical comedy revue Pins & Needles, staged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Graeber's father Kenneth, who was affiliated with the Youth Communist League, participated in the Spanish Revolution in Barcelona and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He later worked as a plate stripper on offset printers. Graeber grew up in New York, in a cooperative apartment building described by Business Week magazine as "suffused with radical politics." Graeber has been an anarchist since the age of 16, according to an interview he gave to The Village Voice in 2005.

Ben Shalom Bernanke (English pronunciation: /bərˈnæŋki/ bər-NANG-kee; born December 13, 1953) is an American economist and currently chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke has overseen the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis.

Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave. From 2002 until 2005, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, proposed the Bernanke Doctrine, and first discussed "the Great Moderation"--the theory that traditional business cycles have declined in volatility in recent decades through structural changes that have occurred in the international economy, particularly increases in the economic stability of developing nations, diminishing the influence of macroeconomic (monetary and fiscal) policy. Bernanke then served as chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers before President Bush appointed him on February 1, 2006, to be chairman of the United States Federal Reserve. Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as chairman on January 28, 2010, after being re-nominated by President Barack Obama.