From Plato to Portfolios: Ethics, Money, and My Story

My wake-up call came during the global financial crisis. Around the world, millions of families lost jobs, homes, and security, while the largest banks were rescued because they were deemed “too big to fail.” In Germany, short-time work softened the blow, yet the sense of fragility—and the human cost—was impossible to ignore. Since then, I’ve been driven by a central concern:

How do we design financial systems that benefit everyone — not just a privileged minority — while ensuring risks and rewards are shared more equitably?

To approach that challenge, I focus on money and credit—the hidden architecture of modern life. They shape the price of housing, the solvency of states, and the welfare of billions. Yet money remains widely misunderstood, and these misconceptions distort public debate, leaving people without a voice in shaping the systems that govern them.

My research explores these questions through the lens of risk ethics, finance, and the future of money. I show how financial systems shape everyday life—through too-big-to-fail banks, the dynamics of credit creation, and the cycles of boom and bust that fuel financial crises. And I ask the ethical questions that often remain hidden behind technical language: Who sets the rules? Who profits? And who carries the risk?

My path began with Philosophy and History (BA), followed by a Master’s in Ethics – Economics, Law, and Politics at the universities of Münster, Bochum, and Nanjing. Along the way, I was a scholarship holder of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) and trained as a journalist through the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s JONA program, gaining experience at Spiegel Online and the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa).

From 2016 to 2019, I pursued a PhD in Applied Ethics at Ruhr University Bochum. My dissertation—later published as Risikoethik der Banken—develops a macro-ethical, rights-based framework that evaluates risks not just at the level of individual banks but across entire economies and societies.

Today, I lead a media lab that helps educate the next generation of journalists—fostering critical thinking, creativity, and ethical awareness in an evolving media landscape. While my professional focus spans education and (digital) storytelling, my writing continues to explore the intersection of finance, ethics, and society.

Teaching is a central part of my work. I regularly design and lead seminars for scholarship students on the workings of the monetary system, the history of financial crises, and the future of money—covering topics such as Bitcoin, Stable Coins, and the Digital Euro. In this context, I have worked with guest experts including Prof. Dr. Peter Bofinger, Dr. Jonas Groß, Prof. Dr. Martin Hellwig, René Pickhardt, Dr. Stefan Richter, and Prof. Dr. Moritz Schularick.

Join me in exploring how money shapes our world—and how we can build systems that are fairer, more inclusive, and more resilient. Rethinking money is our chance to design economies that truly work for everyone.