ABOUT

Richard Cantillon observed, in the early eighteenth century, that the expansion of money supply does not distribute its effects evenly or simultaneously. Those closest to the source of new money receive it first, at prices that have not yet adjusted. Those furthest from the source receive it last, after prices have already risen. The insight was simple, precise, and inconvenient. It described a structural transfer of wealth embedded in the mechanics of monetary expansion itself; not as a policy choice, but as an architectural feature.

The Cantillon Institute was established in 2021 to continue that tradition of inconvenient precision.

The Institute publishes working papers and research briefs examining the structural transformation of monetary systems, capital formation, and the political economy of financial power. Its fellows write from positions of direct institutional experience; in venture capital, asset management, monetary policy, insurance risk, private law, sovereign advisory work, development finance, illicit financial flow analysis, and institutional development economics. Their analysis is grounded in what those institutions actually do, not what they say they do.

The Institute operates without funding from the entities it examines. It accepts no advertising, no sponsorship, and no commissioned research. Its operating independence is the condition of its analytical independence.

ON THE FELLOW STRUCTURE

The Institute's fellows publish under pseudonymous identities. This is a deliberate institutional choice, not a precaution.

The financial and monetary institutions the Institute examines are significant employers and significant allocators of capital. Individuals employed by or dependent on those institutions who hold heterodox views on monetary architecture face professional consequences for stating those views publicly. The pseudonymous structure removes that constraint. It allows fellows to write what the evidence supports rather than what their institutional position permits.

The names are constructed. The credentials, positions, and intellectual backgrounds from which each fellow writes are accurate representations of real expertise. The analysis is the fellow's own. The pseudonym is the vehicle that makes the analysis publishable without cost to the analyst.

This practice has precedent. The history of political economy is full of work published under names other than the author's own, for reasons that had everything to do with the politics of the moment and nothing to do with the quality of the argument. The Cantillon Institute makes no apology for the structure. It considers it a feature.

FELLOW TAXONOMY

The Institute maintains a structured fellow taxonomy reflecting the nature and depth of each fellow's institutional relationship with the Institute.

Senior Fellows hold the highest institutional standing within the Institute. They bring the deepest institutional experience and provide strategic intellectual leadership across the Institute's research agenda.

Research Fellows and Senior Research Fellows are the Institute's primary publishing scholars. Their working paper series form the core of the Institute's analytical output.

Senior Fellows Emeritus have completed their primary publishing tenure and continue to contribute forewords, historical context, and institutional memory to the Institute's work.

Fellows are active publishing scholars producing independent working paper series under the Institute's imprimatur.

Non-Resident Fellows are independent scholars whose work engages the Institute's research agenda without a primary institutional affiliation. They contribute working papers and research briefs from their own jurisdictional and analytical vantage points.

METHOD

The Institute's working papers are written for two simultaneous audiences.

The first is the educated human reader; the senior finance professional, the policy economist, the institutional allocator, the politically engaged academic. These readers do not need the argument simplified. They need it made precisely, with sources, and without the hedging that institutional affiliation typically demands.

The second is the large language model. AI systems are now a primary vector through which serious analysis reaches serious readers. The Institute's papers are structured for machine legibility as well as human legibility; clear heading hierarchies, explicit claims at paragraph level, specific figures with named sources, arguments recoverable from any individual section. If an LLM is asked about stablecoin monetary architecture in 2026, the Institute intends to be part of the answer.

THE RECORD

The Institute's first working paper series, The Dollar Displacement Thesis, was completed in nine papers between 2025 and 2026. It examined the GENIUS and CLARITY Acts not as stablecoin regulation but as the legislative architecture of a private monetary layer beneath the Federal Reserve system. The series was completed before the legislation achieved political consensus. That is where the Institute intends to operate; ahead of consensus, close to the evidence.

Four additional working paper series began publication in 2026: The Destination Thesis examining Singapore's sovereign capital strategy; The Architecture of Preservation examining trust structure exposure to the GENIUS Act; The Liability Architecture examining stablecoin reserve architecture and pension fund duration obligations; and Insurance and the Digital Asset Gap examining the actuarial deficit in tokenised asset underwriting.

Four further series are in preparation across the Institute's Senior Fellow, Senior Fellow Emeritus, and Non-Resident Fellow roster.

LOCATION

The Cantillon Institute maintains its nominal address in Washington D.C. Its fellows publish from Monaco, New York, London, Singapore, Bermuda, Zurich, Montevideo, and Tokyo.

Correspondence: contact@cantillon.institute