The Sovereignty of Credit examines finance not merely as a system of intermediation but as constitutional power over future possibility. Beneath the visible political constitution lies a credit constitution: the laws, institutions, markets, valuation practices, payment systems and standards through which claims upon future income, production, taxation and ecological capacity are created, ranked, circulated, protected and enforced. Credit converts anticipated future capacity into present purchasing power, but it also assigns part of the future to repayment and control. The paper reconstructs how this power emerged through merchant credit, public debt, fiscal-military states, colonial finance, slavery, chartered companies, industrial corporations and insurance; how it was reorganized through total war, Bretton Woods, dollar hierarchy, capital liberalization and financialization; and how it now operates through banks, central banks, sovereign debt, ratings, institutional investors, private equity, private credit, payment infrastructures, sanctions, digital money and artificial intelligence.
The central diagnosis is the Great Financial Inversion: claims become more institutionally visible and better protected than the human, productive, public and ecological capacities upon which their value depends. The Caribbean and small-island condition reveals this inversion with unusual clarity. Monetary stability coexists with restricted policy space, foreign-exchange dependence, correspondent-banking vulnerability, climate exposure and refinancing pressure. The paper therefore develops a constructive alternative: credit as delegated public power; a life-grounded hierarchy of claims; a democratic credit constitution; plural banking; mission-oriented investment; sovereign debt justice; central banking for life stability; and digital public money as civil commons. Rejecting both conspiracy mythology and institutional innocence, it argues that finance is legitimate only insofar as it protects, restores or enlarges the life-capacities from which all real value arises.
