Financial Eschatology and the Libidinal Economy of Leverage

Abstract

Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy within the temporal universe of contemporary capitalism? In this essay, we use the figure of the eschaton to draw out the loaded and ambiguous character of the future as it emerges through the condition of indebtedness. This entails a departure from political economy accounts of capitalist futurity, which stress the structural logic of financial speculation, in favour of an existential account that begins instead with the cosmology of money and debt. We argue that finance capital’s fixation on the future has produced a very specific form of apocalyptic imagination, characteristic of financial society and built on a libidinal economy of leverage. Rather than offering an ecstatic end to the global process of financialization, financial eschatologies bind the contemporary subject to debt and indebtedness to the very end: an endless apocalypse, premised on the ends of finance itself.

The invisible leverage of the rich. Absentee debtors and their hedge funds

“…Leverage is a factor of wealth and income inequality, not because the rich and ultra-rich lend at interest to the rest of the world, but because they themselves take advantage of highly leveraged corporate structures that generate financial sector debt both on-and off-balance sheet. In this respect, the notion of 'absentee debtor' has been used to describe a peculiar 31 See for instance the role of Citadel (which is both a hedge fund and a market-maker) in the GameStop panic of early 2021 (Samman and Sgambati, 2023).…”