Abstract:This article describes an ecological approach to investment in Argentina. This approach involves seeing investments as part of an emergent web of relations among constitutive and constituting parts. Such a sensibility is central to Argentine economic life, in which no investment is treated like any other. Care about attributing equivalence and attention to the relationality of investments was also central to how people worked to save their savings in the aftermath of the Argentine economic crisis of 2001. But … Show more
“…Unlike other cases observed by the literature on barter (D'Avella ; Humphrey ), the global financial crisis did not cause a collapse of the Macedonian state, nor did it decouple the Macedonian economy from global finance. On the contrary, the VMRO‐DPMNE literally banked upon illiquidity to include as many Macedonians as possible under its political patronage.…”
Section: Conclusion: Kompenzacija Illiquidity and The World Crisiscontrasting
confidence: 67%
“…Connections or bribes allowed individuals to develop interstitial spaces (Brković ) where moral arrangements substituted for the collapsed planned economy and nascent neoliberal institutions (Dunn ; Ledeneva ; Rivkin‐Fish ; Rogers ; Torsello ). More recently, authors have described in‐kind solidarities as a survival tactic in Greece and Argentina, in contexts where the power of the state has been curbed by austerity measures (Rakopoulos ) and barter has functioned as an effective way to shield local societies from international markets (D'Avella ; Muir ).…”
After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in‐kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non‐monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in‐kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an oppressive set of relations whereby companies are forced to provide monetary credit to the regime by accepting payment in goods that lose value over time. The article describes the conditions that shape financialization at the periphery of Europe, and identifies in value conversions a crucial variable for understanding the interconnection between politics and finance.
“…Unlike other cases observed by the literature on barter (D'Avella ; Humphrey ), the global financial crisis did not cause a collapse of the Macedonian state, nor did it decouple the Macedonian economy from global finance. On the contrary, the VMRO‐DPMNE literally banked upon illiquidity to include as many Macedonians as possible under its political patronage.…”
Section: Conclusion: Kompenzacija Illiquidity and The World Crisiscontrasting
confidence: 67%
“…Connections or bribes allowed individuals to develop interstitial spaces (Brković ) where moral arrangements substituted for the collapsed planned economy and nascent neoliberal institutions (Dunn ; Ledeneva ; Rivkin‐Fish ; Rogers ; Torsello ). More recently, authors have described in‐kind solidarities as a survival tactic in Greece and Argentina, in contexts where the power of the state has been curbed by austerity measures (Rakopoulos ) and barter has functioned as an effective way to shield local societies from international markets (D'Avella ; Muir ).…”
After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in‐kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non‐monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in‐kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an oppressive set of relations whereby companies are forced to provide monetary credit to the regime by accepting payment in goods that lose value over time. The article describes the conditions that shape financialization at the periphery of Europe, and identifies in value conversions a crucial variable for understanding the interconnection between politics and finance.
“…Clients of financial consultants were acutely aware that the money they sent abroad might not return, but many evaluated life insurance as part of a broader ‘ecology of investments’ (D'Avella ). Erlan, aged 46, a senior real estate manager, explained: The stock market is practically non‐existent, investing in property and then renting it out is a hassle.…”
Section: Informal Finance and The Promise Of Stabilitymentioning
What motivates financially savvy and well‐to‐do Kazakhstanis to invest in illegal financial products peddled by informal financial consultants? This article examines how such consultants capitalize on citizens’ discontent with the state and its management of the financial sphere and position their products as means of achieving socialist‐era security through Western financial technologies. By attending to the emergent space between idealized socialism and capitalism, this article grounds finance in kin relations, gender inequities, and local economic and political histories and explores how socialist conceptions of retirement and money management are reimagined and practised in relation to state‐led financialization.
“…Outcry brokers—a small group of well‐educated middle‐class men—embodied a hidden authority that seemed at odds with free and open trade. Anthropologists have documented the cultural and economic volatility of financial markets, tracing the sociopolitical impact of digital trading technologies and new kinds of speculation (D'Avella ; Ho ; Miyazaki ; Zaloom ). Financialization does not take the same form everywhere; sometimes, it does not really take form at all.…”
mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Financialization does not take the same form everywhere; sometimes, it does not really take form at all. As Donald MacKenzie (2006,(13)(14)(15) has argued, following William Cronon (1992) and Michel Callon (1998), the futures market is a key site for seeing how theories about the disentanglement of commodities-a stripping away of the particularities of quality based on production-get put into action. Futures markets rely on a standardized notion of price and of the things (e.g., grain, cotton, or coffee) being priced.…”
For more than 150 years, most tea grown on plantations in northeast India has been sold in open‐outcry auctions in Kolkata. In this essay, I describe how, in 2009, the Tea Board of India, the government regulator of the tea trade, began to convert auctioning from a face‐to‐face outcry process to a face‐to‐computer digital one. The Tea Board hoped that with the implementation of digital technologies, trade would soon revolve around the buying and selling of futures contracts, not individual lots of tea. Despite these efforts, the tea industry has thus far resisted all attempts at financialization. That so prominent a commodity as tea has yet to be financialized provides a unique opportunity to examine the how of financialization—the governmental and technical steps that precede futures and other kinds of derivatives markets. Futures markets rely on a standardized notion of price and of the material things being priced. The story of Indian tea's resistance to financialization shows how such standardization requires not just a disentangling of commodities at the level of productive infrastructure (that is, the separation of individual trader and thing being traded) but also a reworking of the communicative infrastructure of trading. In this essay, I analyze this reworking by examining the effort to reform how tea is priced at auction. Specifically, I describe a transition in tea valuation from socially embedded price stories to standardized price scenarios.
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