Everyday Leverage, or Leveraging the Everyday

Allon, Fiona

doi:10.1080/09502386.2015.1017140

Cited by 41 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The catch was that leverage came attached to most financial instruments that were available to retailers. As Fiona Allon (, 694) puts it, “profits are to be made not by investing money, in production or other productive activities, but rather by lending it.”…”

Section: A Clinical Economy Of Speculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, both overlook the transformation of debt into a means of profit. As Fiona Allon (, 702) puts it, “these are ‘debts’ that exist as much more than a simple sense of obligation or liability: the commodification of debt in securitized financial instruments facilitates ever‐growing webs of profit‐generating interconnection.” In the next section, I depict the clinical economy of speculation from Silvia's point of view to show how the commodification of debt imposes new challenges on the clinical understanding of problem gambling. I focus on a single trader to underscore the phenomenological interplay of debt, trading, and gambling.…”

Section: A Clinical Economy Of Speculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Clinical Economy of Speculation: Financial Trading and Gambling Disorder in Spain

Núñez

2017

Cult. Anthropol.

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This article concerns itself with financial traders in Spain who have been diagnosed with gambling disorder. It analyzes what I call the clinical economy of speculation, in which the category of problem gambler is repurposed to draw new lines around proper financial trading. In exploring the expansion of post–financial crisis regulatory mechanisms for credit and debt, as well as widening inequalities across the field of investment, I depict how both traders and clinicians become invested in medicalizing trading as gambling disorder. My theorizing interrogates whether and why common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when everyday people, instead of banks and other financial institutions, perform them. I argue that the pathologized trader is an attempt to regulate, at the individual level, the increasing use of borrowed capital to make financial profits. The commodification of debt, however, is not a gender‐neutral development. Female traders pay a greater price for venturing into the heights of finance. This focus on gender brings into view the redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading, and shows the role of debt‐fueled financial speculation in the expansion of financial markets. These ethnographic findings are particularly relevant in a country like Spain, where the Great Recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, even as the smaller fish of the economy are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated.

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Section: A Clinical Economy Of Speculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Clinical Economy Of Speculationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Clinical Economy of Speculation: Financial Trading and Gambling Disorder in Spain

Núñez

2017

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…It appears that parental financial support has at least narrowed the gap in funding resulting from the reduction in contributions from Nordic welfare states to young adults in a vulnerable position (Majamaa, ). Even so, recent financial developments, especially the extension of consumer credit to low‐income households and wage earners (Allon, ), easily lead to reliance on credit and consequently to debt problems. In other words, young adults who incur debts to cover the costs of education, housing and consumption are under more financial pressure in the current societal situation (see e.g., Oksanen, Aaltonen, & Rantala, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental financial support: A safety net for young adults with debt problems

Majamaa

Rantala

2019

Int J Consumer Studies

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Parental financial support benefits young adults in societies with decreasing welfare‐state support and a pattern of early home‐leaving. This article focuses on the association between young adults’ debt problems and parental financial support: the extent to which indebted young adults receive financial help from their parents. We also investigate the extent to which specific benefits are associated with debt problems or parental financial support. The data were gathered in an online survey conducted among 18‐to‐35‐year‐old Finns (n = 1,019). The results revealed, first, that many parents safeguard their indebted adult children’s lives by means of financial support and second, that heavy cash‐welfare‐benefit users are particularly likely to receive parental financial support. Our analysis also revealed that the prevalence of debt problems as well as of parental financial support were especially high among those who had received social assistance, sickness benefit or labour‐market subsidy within the previous 12 months. In a society open to new social risks as well as to debt problems, young people who lack financial support from their parents have a rockier transition to adulthood than those who receive support.

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“…That is, the outcomes -once the matter of temporality enters the credit/debt relation -are by no means straightforward, all the more so once the ability of debt to dramatically 'leverage' life comes into play, as Fiona Allon's (2015) contribution makes explicit. The globally dominant form of thinking about debt/credit is one where the two are placed in quantitative, monetary equivalence, very much in line with the principles of double entry bookkeeping: as interest on the loan accrues, repayable by the borrower, so -in principle at least -the value of the loan to the creditor increases.…”

Section: Coming To Terms: Debt and Creditmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These concern what we refer to as the 'intimacies' of debt (Allon 2015, Kish and Leroy 2015, Montegary 2015, Wilson and Yochim 2015, its 'localities' (Halawa 2015, Pellandini-Simanyl et al 2015, its 'moralities' (González 2015, Wilkis 2015 and its 'technologies' (Aitken 2015, Lopes 2015, Tiessen 2015, Yudin and Pavlyutkin 2015. These basic categorizations allow for a respective set of emphases upon how credit and debt shape and are shaped by the lived-immediate and the elasticities/constrictions of the economic ('intimacies'), by the specific places and tempos/temporalities that these affectual materialities pass through ('localities'), by the production and contestation of an ethico-aesthetics of daily practices ('moralities') and by the ever-evolving agencement (moving through them all) with highly specific socio-technical apparatuses ('technologies').…”

Section: Scenes From An Issue (Moments/totalities)mentioning

confidence: 99%