The economic and debt crisis threaten many eurozone countries and the very existence of the common currency, the euro. The crisis has meant that some special mechanisms have had to be created (EFSF, ESM) and the introduction of special procedures in heavily indebted countries. The deepening of the crisis and the economic recession in the euro area have resulted in the growth of nationalism and anti-European sentiments in EU member states. Resolving the crisis, however, requires (...) further convergence of the eurozone countries, the formation of a fiscal union and a banking union. At the same time, the crisis has shown that the grand theories of European integration, neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalism, have failed to provide answers to the questions raised by the crisis, and this has led to the growing importance of social constructivism. (shrink)

The author posits that the value of individual freedom is best realized within the context of the Moral Imagination concept of philosopher Rudolph Steiner and that when freedom is seen more as a licence for deception and exploitation not only does the greater community suffer but also the party itself suffers character destruction. Thus, laissez-faire capitalism, as exemplified by the mortgage banking meltdown of 2008 and subsequent debt-based unemployment crisis, has not only impoverished millions, destroyed savings and bankrupted (...) long-established investment firms, but also has further bonded the perpetrators to the morally undeveloped self-centredness of Lawrence Kohlberg’s least advanced moral stage. Following a discussion of the folly and futility of the consumerist culture, the author argues that the solution lies in practicing the time tested values of caring and social responsibility on the part of government and mortgage bankers coupled with self-restraint and moderation on the part of investors and borrowers. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has underscored the possibility that capital-adequacy regulations may have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis by privileging highly rated asset-backed securities, such as mortgage-backed securities. The same regulations gave an even more privileged position to sovereign debt, leading to the question of whether they helped cause the European sovereign-debt crisis. There is little question that the regulations encouraged European banks to invest in European governments' bonds, but it does not appear that this encouragement led (...) to more government borrowing by significantly reducing the yield governments needed to pay on their debt. However, it does appear that capital-adequacy regulations—along with post-2008 liquidity regulations—concentrated sovereign risk in the European banking system, aggravating the sovereign-debt problem by requiring government bailouts that, in turn, required the issuance of more sovereign debt, further jeopardizing the governments' fiscal position and banks' solvency. Exacerbating the situation, in the midst of a panic, the European Banking Authority imposed new capital requirements on banks and effectively forced them to realize mark-to-market losses on sovereign exposures. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has underscored the possibility that capital-adequacy regulations may have contributed to the 2008 financial crisis by privileging highly rated asset-backed securities, such as mortgage-backed securities. The same regulations gave an even more privileged position to sovereign debt, leading to the question of whether they helped cause the European sovereign-debt crisis. There is little question that the regulations encouraged European banks to invest in European governments' bonds, but it does not appear that this encouragement led (...) to more government borrowing by significantly reducing the yield governments needed to pay on their debt. However, it does appear that capital-adequacy regulations—along with post-2008 liquidity regulations—concentrated sovereign risk in the European banking system, aggravating the sovereign-debt problem by requiring government bailouts that, in turn, required the issuance of more sovereign debt, further jeopardizing the governments' fiscal position and banks' solvency. Exacerbating the situation, in the midst of a panic, the European Banking Authority imposed new capital requirements on banks and effectively forced them to realize mark-to-market losses on sovereign exposures. (shrink)

Focusing on Greece, this essay aims to contribute to a philosophical understanding of Europe’s current financial crisis and, more generally, of the aporetic implications of the modern determination of freedom as such. One the one hand, I draw on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in order to argue that modernity entails a potential conflict between a market economy and a state that is supposed to further the interests of the society as a whole. On the other hand, I draw on (...) Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as well as on Hegel’s account of tragedy in the Phenomenology of Spirit to reinterpret the conflict between the spheres of civil society and the state as a tragic conflict. Modernity threatens to undermine itself from within, I maintain, because the simultaneous development of capitalism and democracy makes it very hard to prevent the sphere of particular interests from encroaching upon the sphere of politics. (shrink)

The article addresses Europeanization of social movements in the context of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Europeanization occurs when movements collaborate, or make horizontal communicative linkages with movements in other countries, contest authorities beyond the state, frame issues as European and claim a European identity. The article presents a theoretical framework and research design for measuring the degree of social movement Europeanization followed by results of a pilot study on mobilization in Spain and Greece during 2011. While many (...) contentious action events studied only encompassed the domestic arena, the pilot study showed a relatively high degree of Europeanization in the Greek case, suggesting the viability of future research.El presente artículo aborda la europeización de los movimientos sociales en el contexto de la crisis de la deuda soberana europea. La europeización se produce cuando los movimientos colaboran, o establecen vínculos horizontales, con movimientos de otros países, contestan a las autoridades más allá de los límites del Estado-nación, identifican cuestiones como europeos y reclaman una identidad europea. El artículo presenta un marco teórico y un diseño investigación para medir el grado de europeización de los movimientos sociales seguido por los resultados de un estudio piloto de la movilización en España y Grecia durante el año 2011. Mientras que muchas de las acciones de protesta estudiadas solamente apelaban al ámbito doméstico, el estudio piloto muestra un relativamente alto grado de europeización en el caso griego, lo que sugiere la viabilidad de futuras investigaciones. (shrink)

Through empirical investigation of the Eurozone and Greek debt crisis 2010–12, this article demonstrates how a peak organization of financial firms—the Institute of International Finance —was able to mobilize its members transnationally to secure several key political and economic objectives. At the height of the crisis, large European banking firms were threatened by the prospect of a disorderly Greek default, coercive intervention by governments, and, potentially, a regional banking collapse. In this context, representatives from the IIF entered (...) the policymaking process to facilitate concerted private sector action, assisting EU officials with the negotiation of a substantial and orderly creditor writedown, and cooperating with legal action by the Greek government to sideline a minority of financial firms hostile to the deal. The article shows that the IIF’s disproportionate influence over policymaking was a result of their technical expertise, their ability to recruit individuals with long-standing experience of sovereign debt restructuring from the public and private sector, and the operation of elite revolving-door processes. In contrast to recent studies showing that financial actors are able to exercise more power at the national level by remaining collectively inactive, these findings suggest that, at the transnational level, financial actors can be most effective at securing their preferences when they are well organized and when they coordinate politically on the basis of collective interests. (shrink)

In times of crisis and social turbulence, the mass media play a crucial role. This becomes particularly evident in economic crises within the European Union. The (biased) way the crisis is reported shapes people’s understanding of the crisis and the parties involved. In this study, the coverage of the Greek sovereign debt crisis in the German newspapersBILD,Die Welt,Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,Süddeutsche Zeitung,tageszeitungandDer Spiegel (online)is examined for the quality criteria relevance, neutrality, balance, and analytical quality. The results (...) show that the reporting is appropriate to the relevance of the topic, but shows deficits in the criteria of balance, neutrality, and analytical quality. During the study period, coverage focuses on a small number of topics, journalists include their value judgments in news and reports. Overall, there is an obvious media bias against the Greek government’s position. (shrink)

This article discusses the way the ancient Greeks dealt with public and private debts, focusing on one specific aspect: debt cancellation. On the one hand, ancient Greeks were aware of the risks entailed in debt relief as a tool for fuelling civic strife: sources describe it as a demagogic or even criminal action often in association with the political agenda of tyrants. On the other hand, however, Greeks knew well also the benefic effects of debt cancellation in (...) coping with financial and political crisis. In late accounts of archaic history, debt relief is the solution to civic strife and the foundation act of political order. Some public decrees of the Hellenistic period attest debt relief as a communal decision of the polis, dictated by the necessity of preventing or solving ongoing or imminent crises. This second meaning and purpose of debt cancellation should perhaps urge us to reconsider from a different perspective the “politics of debt” in today’s Europe. (shrink)

The discussion that follows establishes a three-way conversation between two films, Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out [2001]) and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Le Silence de Lorna (Lorna’s Silence [2008]) and one work of theory, Maurizio Lazzarato’s La Fabrique de l’homme endetté: essai sur la condition néo-libérale (The Making of Indebted Man: Essay on the Neoliberal Condition [2011]). The subject of the conversation will be neo-liberal governance and the role of debt within it. Part of Lazzarato’s argument regards (...) the central role debt has played since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008. But another part of his argument is that during the neo-liberal era, debt has been a, if not the .. (shrink)

Numerous U.S. cities suffered immense fiscal strain following the subprime mortgage crisis and financial crash of 2007–8. Diminished revenues, tightened credit, and speculative financing that went bad in the aftermath fueled widespread fiscal distress on the local scale. Although the current moment resembles fiscal crises that crested in cities in the 1970s–90s, two factors distinguish the current period. First, municipal affairs have become thoroughly financialized—dominated by speculative securities and volatile debt arrangements—such that local crisis can no longer (...) be understood apart from financial market instability. Second, local fiscal politics have become increasingly removed from democratic oversight and control. This de-democratization hinders the capacity of political communities to reregulate markets and rebuild urban communities. An analytic model derived from the work of Hyman Minsky and Karl Polanyi emphasizes how cities become ensnared in a “financial instability” cycle and how communities seek to protect themselves by way of the “double movement.”. (shrink)

This article analyzes the Turkish central bank's “managed uncertainty” policy after the global financial crisis. During 2010–14, the central bank intentionally generated uncertainty around short-term interest rates, using the level of predictability faced by financiers as a tool to buffer the domestic economy from volatile capital flows. How did the central bank implement this unconventional policy? Building on interview data and public texts, the article argues that the surge in capital inflows after the crisis sourced a debt-led, (...) financialized economic growth model and deepened Turkey's reliance on external financing. The central bank could diverge from the financial sector's policy preferences despite Turkey's increased foreign capital dependence because the availability of low-cost, ample, private funding opportunities temporarily expanded policymakers’ room to maneuver. However, operating vis-à-vis an unsustainable growth regime, the central bank had to revert to orthodoxy in 2014 due to declining investor confidence and capital flight. This article contributes to the literature on the structural power of finance by demonstrating how finance derives its structural power from funding financialized growth, not productive investments. It also shows that financial structural power varies based on the source and cost of external financing beyond the degree of foreign capital dependence. (shrink)

When can we say that a debt crisis has been resolved fairly? An often overlooked but very important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support, limiting their capabilities and those of their citizens to exercise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewed by (...) many not merely as extremely unfortunate and regrettable, but also as deeply unfair. And indeed, increasingly potent popular movements have pressured governments, financial institutions, and the financial community to seek what they take to be fairer solutions to debt crises. The merits of these programs and proposals for dealing more fairly with sovereign debt remain hotly disputed. In this essay, we try to take a step back from the political fray and examine some more fundamental considerations that seem relevant to assessing the fairness of current arrangements governing economic exchanges related to debt contracts and alternatives that have been proposed to them.Our discussion is organized into seven sections. First, we characterize briefly the concept of fairness and its role in social evaluation. Second, we clarify what sovereign debt is, and, third, the ethical statuses that particular sovereign debts can have. Fourth, we identify and describe the main features of current practices related to sovereign debt. Fifth, we describe an "ideal picture" of creditor/debtor relations. We argue that in such a scenario a broad range of ethical considerations can plausibly be invoked in support of practices that closely resemble those presently governing sovereign debt. Sixth, we draw attention to the many ways in which in reality the relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors differ markedly from the relationships between the creditor and debtor in the ideal picture. Because of this, many of the ethical considerations that would support present practices were relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors to resemble more closely those depicted in the ideal picture fail to do so under present circumstances. We conclude, moreover, that the remaining ethical considerations that might be advanced in support of the present system are at best quite inconclusive. Finally, we describe briefly specific reform proposals to current practices. While we will not attempt to show that these proposals would necessarily make the rules governing economic exchanges relevant to sovereign debt more fair, we conclude, in light of our earlier analysis, that they must be given much more serious consideration than they have so far received in policy circles. Indeed, there are strong prima facie reasons to believe that some combination of these proposed policies might prevent or mitigate some of the most ethically regrettable outcomes of present practices and norms by changing the incentives of sovereign borrowers and those who lend to them. (shrink)

When can we say that a debt crisis has been resolved fairly? An often overlooked but very important effect of financial crises and the debts that often engender them is that they can lead the crisis countries to increased dependence on international institutions and the policy conditionality they require in return for their continued support, limiting their capabilities and those of their citizens to exercise meaningful control over their policies and institutions. These outcomes have been viewed by (...) many not merely as extremely unfortunate and regrettable, but also as deeply unfair. And indeed, increasingly potent popular movements have pressured governments, financial institutions, and the financial community to seek what they take to be fairer solutions to debt crises. The merits of these programs and proposals for dealing more fairly with sovereign debt remain hotly disputed. In this essay, we try to take a step back from the political fray and examine some more fundamental considerations that seem relevant to assessing the fairness of current arrangements governing economic exchanges related to debt contracts and alternatives that have been proposed to them.Our discussion is organized into seven sections. First, we characterize briefly the concept of fairness and its role in social evaluation. Second, we clarify what sovereign debt is, and, third, the ethical statuses that particular sovereign debts can have. Fourth, we identify and describe the main features of current practices related to sovereign debt. Fifth, we describe an "ideal picture" of creditor/debtor relations. We argue that in such a scenario a broad range of ethical considerations can plausibly be invoked in support of practices that closely resemble those presently governing sovereign debt. Sixth, we draw attention to the many ways in which in reality the relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors differ markedly from the relationships between the creditor and debtor in the ideal picture. Because of this, many of the ethical considerations that would support present practices were relations between sovereign debtors and their creditors to resemble more closely those depicted in the ideal picture fail to do so under present circumstances. We conclude, moreover, that the remaining ethical considerations that might be advanced in support of the present system are at best quite inconclusive. Finally, we describe briefly specific reform proposals to current practices. While we will not attempt to show that these proposals would necessarily make the rules governing economic exchanges relevant to sovereign debt more fair, we conclude, in light of our earlier analysis, that they must be given much more serious consideration than they have so far received in policy circles. Indeed, there are strong prima facie reasons to believe that some combination of these proposed policies might prevent or mitigate some of the most ethically regrettable outcomes of present practices and norms by changing the incentives of sovereign borrowers and those who lend to them. (shrink)

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision (...) of financial services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. (shrink)

Federal credit policies toward agriculture reflect the human values of maintaining the farm production sector largely as an industry characterized by small-scale, family farms. The Farmers Home Administration has implemented various credit programs designed to carry out this policy objective. As a result of the prolonged financial crisis in the farm economy, the agricultural community is becoming more aware of the controversies surrounding the mission of FmHA and its debt restructuring program. This paper discusses the debt restructuring (...) program administered by the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), as authorized by the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, and amended by the recently enacted Farm Bill of 1990. It discusses the key provisions of the Agricultural Credit Act authorizing FmHA to establish a debt restructuring and debt forgiveness program aimed at achieving the public policy objective of keeping financially stressed farmers in business, whenever possible.In the course of reviewing the restructuring program, FmHA officials and congressional committees reviewed the FmHA's mission and its program implementation. This review indicated that several unintended negative consequences resulted from several abuses stemming from inadequate administrative mechanisms and controls and conflicting legislative objectives of debt forgiveness and federal tax policy. In enacting the 1990 Farm Bill, Congress sought to reorient FmHA's mission to a temporary source of credit and to eliminate various abuses associated with the implementation of FmHA's debt restructuring program. The 1990 Farm Bill reflects an effort by Congress to address some the controversies surrounding federal credit policies toward agriculture. Although Congress placed limits on debt restructuring, the overall public policy objective of maintaining a family-farm posture in the agricultural sector continues to be an important social value. (shrink)

An ongoing crisis in Australian agriculture resulting from climate crises including drought, decreasing irrigation water, more recent catastrophic flooding, and an uncertain policy environment is reshaping gender relations in the intimate sphere of the farm family. Drawing on research conducted in the Murray-Darling Basin area of Australia we ask the question: Does extreme hardship/climate crises change highly inequitable gender relations in agriculture? As farm income declines, Australian farm women are more likely to be working off farm for critical family (...) income while men continue to work on farm often in circumstances of damaged landscapes, rising debt, and limited production. This paper examines the way gender relations are being renegotiated in a time of significant climate crisis. Our research suggests that climate crises have indeed led to changes in gender relations and that some changes are unexpected. Whereas one would logically assume that women’s enhanced economic contribution would increase their power in gender negotiations, we argue that this does not necessarily occur because their contribution is viewed as a farm survival strategy. Men are committed to prioritizing the farm and view women’s income generating work as critical to this purpose and yet, paradoxically, long for a return to traditional farm roles. We find that women are actively resisting traditional gender relations by reshaping a role for themselves beyond the farm—in the process moving physically and mentally away from a farm family ideology, questioning gender inequalities, and by extension their relationships. (shrink)

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback shows how the book's accomplishment is to provide a Jungian analysis of the “shadow” of wealth: the primitive meanings attached to debt deriving from ancient cultural configurations of a proper balance in the order of things. Debt is conceived in terms of social obligations, of guilt and sin, of revenge, and as a plot that structures the narrative of human life. Instead of simply looking to the archaic meanings of debt (...) for its shadow side, this review attempts to take stock of what the recent credit crisis can teach us about the place of debt in our lives. It is a question of seeking out shadows that belong specifically to our global financial system, rather than belonging to ways of accounting order, honor, and revenge from a repressed past. If financial institutions, governments, businesses, and individuals were all exposed to high levels of debt, to whom was all this wealth owed? How does the shadow of debt affect economic behavior? Since debt forms the basis of further lending, debt increases through a multiplier effect without corresponding assets, which leads to an unstable system of virtuous or vicious cycles, and debt takes over some of the social, practical, and theoretical functions formerly held by God. (shrink)

Most Americans would say the most significant threat the world faces today is terrorism. For citizens of developing countries who live in conflict and poverty, the concerns are more about peace, and about addressing poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the burden of sovereign debt.

The aim of this article is to show in what sense the institutions of the welfare state are key to the struggles that are developing around the debt crisis and against the austerity policies carried out in its name. The first part is dedicated to isolating some elements which contribute to explaining the nature of the current crisis of capitalism and the strategic issues at stake in the policies of expropriation of welfare institutions. The second part emphasizes (...) how, around the question of welfare institutions, the crisis articulates two alternative models of society and regulation of a knowledge-based economy. Within this framework, we will put forward a few lines of analysis in order to think of a different model of development, one which is founded on the ‘Welfare of the Common’ as a new mode of production. (shrink)

A Citizen Public Debt Audit is an emancipatory praxis that can mobilize citizens to make legible public debt that has been accrued in their name. Ideally, it should hold creditors accountable for debt that is determined to be odious. This study examines the public debt crisis in Puerto Rico to illustrate the historically unjust circumstances under which public debt was accumulated on the island in the context of US federal taxation and economic policies. It (...) explains how citizens are mobilizing via a CPDA to make these circumstances legible and argues that citizens should not be obliged to service debt that was accrued contrary to their own welfare, especially if conditions of repayment threaten their current and future well-being. (shrink)

The article turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of state capitalism and their theorization of money and debt in their critique of capitalism to develop an analysis of the governmental management of the current crisis determined by ordo- and neoliberalism. The paper argues that analyses which fail to properly recognize the power of capital to determine both state apparatuses and economic policy thereby fail to grasp the real functioning of money, debt and the Euro in the (...) class='Hi'>crisis and end up unwittingly supporting liberalism. This is true of positions such as heterodox theory that, though critical of conventional and neoliberal political economy, nevertheless continue to uphold the state as an independent or mediating mechanism in relation to the power of capital. The neglect of the role which money plays in the strategies of capital to control both the creation of value and the functioning of the state is to be found even in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism, a neglect which undermines his analysis of power. The paper highlights the implications of the standpoint of state capitalism for a more incisive analysis of the current crisis that reveals what is at stake for political struggles. (shrink)

I was optimistic of a new beginning in an open society when I came to America in 1999. Since then, I have indeed benefited from many aspects of American life. I have learned a lot – especially through my experience with small farms and farmers. But now, it's time to move on. And it was reading Debt and Dispossession, a book about American agriculture and human values, that crystallized in me why I wanted to leave. By telling the story (...) of the 1980s farm crisis through the words of the residents of a Minnesota town, the book prizes open many of the contradictions of American society. The 1970s were boom times for mid-western farms; farmers took advantage of “easy” farm credit to finance expansion. By the 1980s, the boom burst and slump loomed. Lenders wanted their money back and thousands of farmers were dispossessed. Debt and Dispossession probes beneath the surface of a community apparently united in protest against the dispossessions. Underneath, it finds a tangled picture of a society at war with itself, pitting farmer against farmer in a fratricidal struggle. The book let me glimpse the paradox of American individualism, all-American contradictions centering on government and consumerism, frugality and morality. Just like my experience of American agriculture and farmers as a whole, Debt and Dispossession helped me see the best side of America, but also revealed the fragility of life in a one-on-one society. (shrink)

The current global economic crisis is historically unprecedented in that it began when poor groups in the United States defaulted on their mortgage-payments and spread fear of 'toxic debt' through an internationalised financial system, bringing the banking system close to collapse and highlighting the very individualised nature of contemporary financial relations. The symposium explores contemporary finance and banking practices in the context of Marxist political economy seeking to develop the notion of financialisation and arguing that banks' increasing reliance (...) on individual households as a source of profits amounts to a form of financial expropriation or additional profit generated in the sphere of circulation. (shrink)

Moral entrepreneurship is the fine art of recycling evil into good by taking advantage of situations given or constructed as crises. It should be seen as the ultimate generalisation of the entrepreneurial spirit, whose peculiar excesses have always sat uneasily with homo oeconomicus as the constrained utility maximiser, an image that itself has come to be universalised. A task of this essay is to reconcile the two images in terms of what by the end I call ‘superutilitarianism’, which draws on (...) the lore of both superheroes and utilitarianism. After briefly surveying the careers of three exemplars of the moral entrepreneur (Robert McNamara, George Soros and Jeffrey Sachs), I explore the motives of moral entrepreneurs in terms of their standing debt to society for having already caused unnecessary harm but which also now equips him with the skill set needed to do significant good. Such a mindset involves imagining oneself a vehicle of divine will, which would be a scary proposition had it not been long presumed by Christians touched by Calvin. In conclusion, I argue that moral entrepreneurship looks most palatable – and perhaps even attractive – if the world is ‘reversible’, in the sense that every crisis, however clumsily handled by the moral entrepreneur, causes people to distinguish more clearly the necessary from contingent features of their existence. This leads them to reconceptualise past damages as new opportunities to assert what really matters; hence, a ‘superutilitarian’ ethic that treats all suffering as less cost than investment in a greater sense of the good. (shrink)

This paper situates the subprime crisis in the context of the performance of the American economy over the last twenty-five years. The restructuring of the US economy is briefly reviewed, followed by an examination of some of the contradictions of the neoliberal model. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the reasons behind stagnant investment, and how the US finance-led accumulation-régime has become dependent upon, and threatened by, credit-creation delinked from the financing of fixed-capital formation. I argue that while the (...) defeat of the remnants of the New-Deal/Civil-Rights liberal-democratic coalition has provided the political context for the bold re-assertion of the prerogatives of capitalist owners, the neoliberal model has not provided a path out of problems of stagnation and growing debt-dependency that presently plague the US economy. Further, I argue that evidence suggests that the post-1982 restoration of profitability that underpinned the relative improvement of US economic performance has peaked, and that compelling historical and theoretical reasons exist to expect that the profit-rate will decline in the coming decade. This will introduce additional stresses on the current debt-structure of the US economy, triggering a period of prolonged crisis and economic dislocation. The conclusion is that the US economy faces the spectre of a protracted crisis associated with the reassertion of the falling rate of profit. (shrink)

The 2008 housing and financial crisis brought to light many ethically questionable lending and borrowing practices. As we learn more about what caused this crisis, it has become apparent that we need to think more carefully about the conditions under which can loans be ethically offered and accepted, but also about when it might be morally permissible to default on debts. I critique two distinct philosophical approaches to assessing the ethics of debt, arguing that bothapproaches are too (...) simplistic because they focus only on individual borrowers and lenders. As a result, neither approach can adequately grasp the moral implications of the social and economic failures that frame actual dilemmas of debt facing many individuals today. (shrink)

Many scholars have looked for similarities between the recent crisis in the Eurozone and the crises that have occurred in the past in developing countries and particularly in Latin America. Problems of balance of payments, public debt, overvaluation of the exchange rate and unregulated capital inflows are frequently mentioned to compare common features of different crisis events. Additionally, Continental European countries are following similar processes of welfare state retrenchment and labour market segmentation to Latin American cases in (...) the past, but in different institutional contexts and with different levels of economic development. This article will discuss common features of past Latin American crises and the current crisis in the Eurozone in order to show how such a comparison could help to manage (and avoid) crises in an integrated financial world as well as to teach how a faulty institutional design can arise from a defective understanding of how financial capitalism works in a complex internationally integrated economic system. (shrink)

The paper addresses some similarities and differences in the institutional set-up of the classical gold standard and European Monetary Union. I argue that giving up monetary nationalism and committing to the rules of either the gold standard or EMU initially seemed to restrict the scope of state action. Therefore, the euro – like previously the gold standard – provided some policy credibility. Policy credibility was a main determinant of capital market integration and low government borrowing costs in Europe under both (...) systems. However, I shall emphasize that the membership in the gold or euro club itself did not force reforms and spending cuts upon countries that faced crisis and debt problems. The article suggests that the institutional set-ups of the gold standard and EMU determined the degree of commitment to them and the way in which countries reacted to deal with debt problems. (shrink)

Microcredit, a non-profit lending approach that is often championed as a source of women’s inclusion and empowerment, has in the past decade been followed by microfinance, a forprofit sibling of a different temperament. Microfinance in India is now in turmoil, precipitated by legislation in the state of Andhra Pradesh, which has encouraged withholding of payment, which in turn has frozen the market. This paper considers one precipitating condition of the crisis: the remarkable, new, and developing burden of formal economic (...) debt that poor women in the state have only recently come to hold – debt that now surpasses one year’s family income, on average. The development of this lending sector follows upon innovation in lending to the poor of the global north over the past two decades, and the practices show noteworthy parallels. Both lending schemes have produced similar disproportionate burdens upon some low-status individuals within their respective economic orders, and both may exploit a vulnerability that is born of aspiration and produces great dysfunction for borrowers. This paper introduces the two lending schemes, sketches the parallels, and introduces the claim that ethical finance arrangements for the poor require attention to vulnerability, an under-utilized category in both liberal ethical theory and in finance. (shrink)

Analyses of household urban agriculture have demonstrated a wealth of personal, economic, social, moral or political uses for self-provisioned food, yet have often understood the practice itself as merely a production process. This ‘means-to-an-end’ perspective is especially pronounced in studies of locations undergoing economic hardship. Urban gardening in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has been framed as an element of an informal economy, enabling household savings, access to informal networks and avoidance of industrial goods deemed (...) ethically dubious. In this article, I present evidence from participant observation and interviews with urban gardeners conducted in 2014–2015 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where urban agriculture proliferated during the European debt crisis that began in 2009. I interpret the material through an ecological perspective that focuses on labour in nature and highlights the interconnected, situated role of the gardener. My analysis of gardening styles, behaviours, attitudes and life-narratives of long-term urban growers challenges the utilitarian interpretation by arguing that urban agriculture in Ljubljana is in fact a means in itself—not an informal economy, but a narrative practice. While undertaken to ameliorate the effects of economic hardship, household urban agriculture first and foremost promotes individual wellbeing and restores a stable sense of self. I outline a series of self-making benefits of working with cultivated, edible nature that helped gardeners reconstruct their biographies after their previously established self-making processes collapsed in the economic downturn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Economy, Society, Tragedy: Moral Reflections in an Age of Crisis and Austerity LOUIS A. RUPRECHT JR. Precisely their tragedies prove that the Greeks were not pessimists... In this sense, I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher—that is to say, the most extreme antithesis and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. —Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “The Birth of Tragedy” Orgiastic religion leads most readily to song (...) and music; ritualistic religion inclines toward the pictorial arts; religions enjoining love favor the development of poetry and music. In all of this, the one important fact for us is the significance of the marked rejection of all distinctively aesthetic devices by those religions which are rational, in our special sense. —Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion tragedy and society The title of this review essay is taken from Max Weber’s posthumous magnum opus, Economy and Society,1 an ambitious and wide-ranging comparative sociological analysis of economic orders, social orders and the normative structures that both emerge from and lend meaning to the intersecting economic, political and religious spheres in which complex human arion 28.2 fall 2020 Kathryn A. Kozaitis, Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021), 248 pages. This book is the fifteenth in Oxford’s important series, “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology,” edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. 138 economy, society, tragedy societies take shape. To Weber’s grand and capacious sociological categories, economy and society, I have added a third literary and philosophical term: tragedy. Now, to be sure, Weber thought a great deal about tragedy,2 and was drawn to tragic themes in many of his most salient and influential sociological studies. One need think only of his account of the bureaucratic “routinization” of prophetic charisma in The Sociology of Religion,3 or his depiction of modern humanity’s self-imposed “iron cage” in the rousing final pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,4 a text to which I will return at the end of this essay.5 But tragedy entails far more than systemic collapse or self-inflicted disaster. In this essay, I want to explore some of the implications of combining close attention to the lived experience of concrete individuals to the highly theoretical, systems-level analysis inspired by such Weberian categories. Put another way, how may Cultural Anthropology, and more specifically Ethnography, deepen such a globally-oriented Sociology? Here, I intend to supplement Weber’s sociological dyad, economy and society, with a conception of tragedy drawn from the cognate social sciences of Comparative Religion and Cultural Anthropology; I will be using Attic Greek tragedy as a benchmark. More specifically, I wish to highlight some of the ways in which the first book-length ethnographic study of the Greek economic crisis may add vital nuance to Weber’s more theoretical, world-systems approach. That book is Kathryn Kozaitis’s Indebted: An Ethnography of Despair and Resilience in Greece’s Second City, an ethnographic study of the lived reality of Greeks experiencing the double -whammy of a sovereign debt crisis and externally imposed austerity regimes in the Greek city of Thessaloniki; the book is the fifteenth to appear inOxford’s “Issues of Globalization: Case Studies in Contemporary Anthropology” series, edited by Carla Freeman and Li Zhang. As Kozaitis demonstrates with sensitivity and eloquence, by zeroing in on the people, rather than the economic policies or the social and administrative structures, Louis A. Ruprecht Jr. 139 certain normative categories and ethical stances become more relevant, many of them implicated in ancient Greek tragedy, and drama more broadly. tragic crises appropriately to a work of cultural ethnography, Kozaitis links the personal to her profession; further still, she weaves her own personal story into the story of the people to whom she is attempting to give voice. This, she notes, constitutes “the auto-ethnography in this ethnography” (4–6). How, then, did this professor of Cultural Anthropology, based in the United States, find her way to Greece’s “second city”? The path was circuitous, and its destination unclear for quite some time. That Kozaitis’s personal... (shrink)

McDonald's thesis is that the chief villain in the unfolding tragedy of Canada is Pierre Elliott Trudeau and, to a lesser extent, his predecessor Lester B. Pearson. Goldwin Smith's well-known late-19th century comment that Canada was “rich by nature, but poor by policy” seems to hold true today. The secondlargest country in the world, rich in resources, Canada has been virtually bankrupted by government profligacy. Canada has been called “the impossible country,” and many have considered it “an impossible country to (...) govern.” The accumulated national debt is now reaching 600 billion in Canadian dollars (one Canadian dollar equals about $.72 US), which per capita is six times that of the US. (shrink)

The Eurozone Crisis is not just a monetary and economic challenge. It is as well the first tremendous challenge of the European Community and as well the national institutions and constitutions of the member states not only within the Eurozone. On one side the European Commission, the European Parliament and the ECB with its endeavours to safeguard and stabilize the single currency EURO within the Eurozone, to support the suffering countries in the south with its struggle against speculative hedge (...) funds, to render financial relief measures to those countries and its financial industry. Irrespective the fact governments and citizens within that countries, less appear to appreciate or honor that measures as efficient help to stabilize but condemn as form of European paternalism and patronage. On the other hand the countries and its citizenship especially in the north of the Eurozone to set a stop sign to the EU and the ECB. Therefore they stress the Maastricht criteria and cite the Art 125 of the TEU, which prohibits one nation to stand for or to be liable for the Government debts of another nation. Especially in the German perspective the demarcation line appears to run along between the European Commission, European Central Bank and European Court on the European side and the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the Bundesbank on the national German side. Each of the institutions feels to be bound to its origin functions and principles and save the respective constitution and the task rendered by that constitution. For a better understanding it is essential to get aware of and to reinforce the constitutional role which the Grundgesetz awarded to the Bundesverfassungsgericht and the Bundesbank and the German citizenship placing their confidence in these institutions. Es soll konkret das Verhältnis zur Nichtbeistandsklausel No-Bail-out Klausel Art 125 AEUVertrag, den Europäischen Fiskalpakt / dem ESFS, ESM / dem OMT-Programm der EZB, möglichen Entwicklung des EU zur Haftungs- und Transferunion mit einem zukünftigen Haftungsautomatismus der Mitglieder, der Unterscheidung von gemeinsamer Währungspolitik und nationaler Wirtschaftspolitik, der drohenden Vergemeinschaftung von Staatsschulden einzelner EU-Länder, die Budgethoheit des nationalen Parlaments als freie Entscheidung über die Verwendung des nationalen Haushaltes untersucht werden. Mit allen diesen Fragen mussten sich das höchste Deutsche und Europäische Gericht in jüngster Vergangenheit intensiv beschäftigen. (shrink)

For theorists in search of a political theology that is more responsive to the challenges now facing Western democracies, this book tenders a new political economy anchored in a theory of value. The political theology of the future, Carl Raschke argues, must draw on a powerful, hidden impetus--the "force of God"--to frame a new value economy. It must also embrace a radical, "faith-based" revolutionary style of theory that reconceives the power of the "theological" in political thought and action. Raschke ties (...) democracy's retreat to the West's failure to confront its decadence and mobilize its vast spiritual resources. Worsening debt, rising unemployment, and gross income inequality have led to a crisis in political representation and values that twentieth-century theorists never anticipated. Drawing on the thought of Hegel and Nietzsche as well as recent work by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Joseph Goux, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou, among others, Raschke recasts political theology for a new generation. He proposes a bold, uncompromising critical theory that acknowledges the enduring significance of Marx without his materialism and builds a vital, more spiritually grounded relationship between politics and the religious imaginary. (shrink)

This essay redefines the crisis of historicism as a collapse of trust. Following Friedrich Jaeger, it suggests that this crisis should be understood, not as a crisis caused by historicist methods, but as a crisis faced by the classical historicist tradition of Ranke. The "nihilism" and "moral relativism" feared by Troeltsch's generation did not primarily refer to the view that moral universals did not exist; rather, they expressed that the historical justification of bildungsbürgerliche values offered by (...) classical historicism did no longer work. In Niklas Luhmann's vocabulary, this is to say that moral values could no longer be trusted on historical grounds. But when the "reduction of complexity" offered by classical historicism collapsed, Troeltsch's generation faced a justification problem: what other modes of justification, if any at all, were available in a time of increasing secularization and growing feelings of discontinuity with the past? In identifying the crisis of historicism with this moral justification problem, this essay helps explain why such debts of despair could be reached in the early-twentieth-century disputes over historicism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Fran-cophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis by Martin O’ShaughnessyJoseph MaiO’Shaughnessy, Martin. Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Fran-cophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 224pp.Martin O’Shaughnessy has devoted a career to scouring the intersections of politics, identity, and contemporary French cinema, perhaps most notably in his 2007 book, The New Face of Political Filmmaking. In a review in Cineaste, (...) Jonathan Buchsbaum called that book “theoretically sophisticated” and a “powerful and eloquent polemic for retaining a class analysis of film” (90). According to Buchsbaum, The New Face asked “the central question of how films can formulate political critiques after the collapse of the grand leftist narrative(s) of the twentieth century” (89). O’Shaughnessy’s new book, Looking Beyond Neoliberalism: French and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis, is a major publication with similar qualities of theoretical breadth, and is also once again inspired by cinematic attempts to envision different political futures.Things have not gotten better since 2007. The “crisis” of O’Shaughnessy’s title does not refer narrowly to the financial meltdown of 2007–2008 and subsequent government-funded bailouts. Crisis is not an event requiring austerity (disguised as “courageous decision-making”), but in many senses the essence of global neoliberalism, or as the frequently cited Maurizio Lazzarato puts it: “the form of government of contemporary capitalism” (qtd. in O’Shaughnessy 5). The 2008 crisis has, if anything, made this form of government ever more visible, and ever more punitive and essential to Western industrial societies. With a mastery of the philosophical critique of neoliberalism, O’Shaughnessy unpacks how the logic of crisis habituates the subject to self-entrepreneurship, debt, social and political isolation, conformism, precarity, social violence, and nihilism.The book looks at these issues through cinematic works by French and Belgian Francophone filmmakers, ranging from popular auteurs like Jacques Audiard and Luc Besson to more critically political filmmakers like the Dardenne brothers or Laurent Cantet. O’Shaughnessy is not looking only for thematic representations; he also seeks new answers in films that respond to, flee, or resist neoliberalism. Like the Occupy or Nuit Debout movements, much of this cinema seeks to reformulate identifications and cultivate political resistance, though O’Shaughnessy warns us early on [End Page 117] that we are not in a place “where there is a cohesive political cinema” (9). There is, therefore, a refreshingly normative concern throughout the book: the most valuable films seek paths toward social encounter, re-assemblage of identity categories, lives that are not defined through debt, and a future in which crisis and precarity do not structure action.The first three chapters focus on the “crisis of the neoliberal subject” (6). Chapter 1 approaches the work of Jacques Audiard, who has at times been read as reinforcing regressive gender roles and at other times embracing a rather more disruptive masculinity. Bringing the lens of the neoliberal subject to bear on films like Un prophète (2009) or Un héros très discret (1996), O’Shaughnessy emphasizes Audiard’s use of crime-genre filmmaking as a parallel to capitalism, and the genre hero as a corollary to the bourgeois entrepreneurial male subjectivity it fosters and puts into crisis. Desperately, Audiard’s masculine subjects rehearse, recreate, and “perfect” themselves, initiate profitable collaboration, self-define through flexibility, improvisation, and competence, in ways that are hallmarks of, but do not surpass, an internalized neoliberal subjectivity.Chapter 2 examines how the mechanisms of debt influence characters’ beliefs and actions. What does it mean, in works by the Dardenne brothers, Laurent Cantet, and Mia Hansen-Løve, to be “man in debt” (54)? O’Shaughnessy explores debt’s temporality as it limits the possibilities of the future by tying actions to the obligations of repayment. In Le silence de Lorna (2010), Lorna is enrolled in a logic of indebtedness in exchange for papers to cross borders, at the expense of another human, Claudy. Caught in an “overarching tension between systemic violence and an ethical commitment to the Other” (45), she seeks a way out in increasingly irrational attempts to escape. Vincent, the protagonist of L’emploi du temps... (shrink)

We are living in an age of crisis—or an age in which everything is labeled a crisis. Financial, debt, and refugee “crises” have erupted. The word has also been applied to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, and many other international events. Yet the term has contradictory political and strategic meanings for those challenging power structures and those seeking to preserve them. For critics of the status quo, can the rhetoric of (...) class='Hi'>crisis be used to foment urgency around issues like climate change and financialization, or does framing a situation as a “crisis” play into the hands of the existing political order, which then seeks to tighten the leash by creating a state of emergency? Critical Theory at a Crossroads presents conversations with prominent theorists about the crises that have marked the past years, the protest movements that have risen up in response, and the use of the term in political discourse. Tariq Ali, Rosi Braidotti, Wendy Brown, Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela McRobbie, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, and Joseph Vogl offer their views on contemporary challenges and how we might address them, candidly discussing the alternatives that new social movements have offered, alongside an exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Roberto Esposito on theories of community. Sparring over crucial developments in these past years of catastrophe and the calamity of everyday life under capitalism, they shed light on how crises and the discourse of crisis can both obscure and reveal fundamental aspects of modern societies. (shrink)

When Washington Shut Down Wall Street unfolds like a mystery story. It traces Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo's triumph over a monetary crisis at the outbreak of World War I that threatened the United States with financial disaster. The biggest gold outflow in a generation imperiled America's ability to repay its debts abroad. Fear that the United States would abandon the gold standard sent the dollar plummeting on world markets. Without a central bank in the summer of 1914, the (...) United States resembled a headless financial giant. William McAdoo stepped in with courageous action, we read in Silber's gripping account. He shut the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months to prevent Europeans from selling their American securities and demanding gold in return. He smothered the country with emergency currency to prevent a replay of the bank runs that swept America in 1907. And he launched the United States as a world monetary power by honoring America's commitment to the gold standard. His actions provide a blueprint for crisis control that merits attention today. McAdoo's recipe emphasizes an exit strategy that allows policymakers to throttle a crisis while minimizing collateral damage. When Washington Shut Down Wall Street recreates the drama of America's battle for financial credibility. McAdoo's accomplishments place him alongside Paul Volcker and Alan Greenspan as great American financial leaders. McAdoo, in fact, nursed the Federal Reserve into existence as the 1914 crisis waned and served as the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. (shrink)

Nine years before the fall of Constantinople, in 1444, cardinal Bessarion in his third and last letter addressed to Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of Mystra, expressed his deep concern about the economic, political, cultural, social and moral crisis, maintaining that the multidimensional crisis would inevitably lead to Byzantium’s decline. Bessarion stresses that the aristocracy’s biased policy, the burdensome taxation, the low level of business activity, the complete lack of technological advancements and the deficient education system not only shaped the (...) Peloponnesian state but also transformed the once brave, conscientious and studious Greeks into a cowardly, indolent and ignorant people. Realizing that the constitution of Greek society and the behavior of its citizens are impediments to modernization and to cultural progress, Bessarion proposes a series of reforms based on a revival of Ancient Greek culture and on technological advances of West that would lead to a well-governed, self-sufficient and independent Greek state. On 23 April 2010, 566 years after Bessarion’s letter, the Greek government requested financial assistance from the European Support Mechanism in order to avert the probability of default in Greece. The fiscal deficit, the swelling sovereign debt and the global financial recession shape Greece in crisis. The aim of this paper is to give an interpretative presentation of Bessarion’s letter with reference to modern Greece; to analyze the causes of the Byzantine Empire’s decline and the recommended reforms in comparison to the causes of the financial crisis in Greece and the implementation of austerity measures. I will prove that nowadays modern Greeks face the same problems with the Greeks of Peloponnese such as political corruption, administrative incompetence, excessive taxation, economic impoverishment, class inequality, unemployment, reduced business activity and inability to exploit natural resources. In this sense, I will show that the identity crisis of modern Hellenism was first cultivated and formed gradually from the Renaissance to modern Greece. (shrink)

This article argues that a gender perspective enables us to better understand the emerging basis for collective organization in the world capitalist crisis. Since women and their children are most threatened by inroads on the subsistence economy, and since welfare provisions are the first budgetary cuts made by governments faced with increasing debt burdens, women are forced to engage in collective action to ensure survival. In Latin American countries, this new political arena is even more dynamic than the (...) workplace as a site for engaging in struggle. This situation contrasts with core industrial countries, where the encounter with bureaucratic agencies in redressing human welfare issues tends to fragment individual actions rather than weld together collective consciousness. (shrink)

Since the declaration of financial crisis in 2008, and the imposition of austerity measures in 2011, Greece has become an epicentre—or a “laboratory”—of multiple, successively declared crises, including the humanitarian crisis induced by the devastating effects of neoliberal structural adjustment policies. In this paper, I approach the explosion of crisis discourse as a medium for ideological negotiations of nation-state borders in relation to a continental project of securitisation. I suggest that ‘crisis’ functions as a lexicon through (...) which sovereignty can be reasserted in relation to supranational institutional interference in ostensibly democratic governance. Specifically, I examine how the refugee crisis and the debt crisis converge in nationalised space in Greece; that is, how in state discourse, ‘crises’ serve as a conduit through which the borders of an embattled nation are redrawn and hardened against threats from a political space conceptualised as ‘outside’ the nation. My point of entry is the declaration of the Greek government by the end of the summer of 2015, that it was “experiencing a crisis within a crisis,” dually victimised by migration ‘flows’ and failed European solidarity in a context of ongoing austerity measures required by its institutional lenders. The figure of ‘a crisis within a crisis’ functioned to delineate the boundaries of national space and time and to distinguish the normative victims of what are seen as distinct, if overlapping political phenomena (debt and migration), from those who parasitically share in, or indeed by their very illicit presence cause or contribute to the suffering of the national subject. If the global economic crisis had already been made ‘ours’ by being constructed as a problem inherent in the national economy, the global war on migration became reinvented as 'Europe’s crisis,’ and then ‘Greece’s.’ The nationalisation of ‘crisis’ then, has a triple function: first, to conceal the systemic and structural underpinnings of violent processes of dispossession and displacement; second, to authorise the imposition of regimes of management and securitisation; and third, to reify borders that simultaneously fortify the agencies of state sovereignties while containing those of embodied human beings. The figure of ‘nesting crises’—‘a crisis within a crisis’—emerges through gestures of ownership or territorialisation of crisis: that is, in the conditions under which, affectively and politically a ‘crisis’ becomes ‘ours’ rather than ‘theirs’ and, indeed, constitutes the ‘we’ and the ‘they.’ ‘Nesting crises’ discourse can be read as a vocabulary through which national sovereignty is reasserted and national unity reconstituted. (shrink)