I am a senior lecturer in International Political Economy. My research questions theories, histories and politics of money, with a special focus on global banking and contemporary financial practices of money-making. "You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle its creatures". Address: London, UK
The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy... more The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global fi...
The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy... more The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global finance has not given shape to a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors as two distinct classes, but instead has set debtors against debtors, and namely the greater borrowers against the lesser ones.
Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy ... more 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 intellectual debate on money is often portrayed as a rather Manichean diatribe between two op... more The intellectual debate on money is often portrayed as a rather Manichean diatribe between two opposing traditions: on the one hand the orthodox, grounded in a ‘real’ analysis, and championing the primacy of a commodity-money; on the other hand the heterodox, based on a ‘nominal’ analysis, and advocating the primacy of a credit-money. Both traditions claim to know better the nature of money: whereas the orthodox envisages in the medium of exchange the ultimate essence of money, the heterodox attributes ontological primacy to the measure of value – or else the ‘money of account’. And yet, neither of the two traditions is concerned with comprehending the significance of money: why it is important to us, why we recognise it first of all as value. This work therefore tries to outline a comprehensive discourse on the significance of money as value. In particular, the first part is dedicated to a critique of heterodox and alternative theories of money, including Geoffrey Ingham’s major so...
Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—sovaluable—to us... more Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—sovaluable—to us. The article thus examines the sociology outlined by Geoffrey Ingham and criticises its ontology of money as ameasure of valueunderpinned by state authority. By contrast, it argues that money ought to be primarily intended asvalue in itself. Accordingly, money’s most specific attribute is none of its canonical functions but rather purchasing power: the powernotto pay, or else the power tobuy time. The latter is not the mere product of state (fiscal) agency, but is entangled from the start with the production of liquidity and the construction of speculative markets for debt. Thus the paper emphasises the importance of concrete bankdiscounting vis-à-vis abstract accounting in concrete processes of monetisation, and shows how modern money, far from cancelling debts, is historically constructed within liquid financial relations so as to “buy time” and systematically procrastinate the final ...
Abstract The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the h... more Abstract The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes’ Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes’ reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicize the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi.
The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox ... more The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes’ Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes’ reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicize the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi.
There are two main theories of banking which seem to be incompatible by nature. According to the ... more There are two main theories of banking which seem to be incompatible by nature. According to the first, banks intermediate money through their credit infrastructure but are not themselves able to create new money. By contrast, the second argues that banks do create money out of nothing in the process of lending their credit. Significantly, despite their contrasts, both theories conceptualise banking in functionalist terms as the financing of other people’s indebtedness. In so doing, they relegate to the side-lines the fact that banks are in the business first and foremost to ‘make money’ for themselves as they leverage their unique market position as dealers of other people’s debts. The article thus investigates the phenomenon of modern banking as the art of leverage. After showing the specificity of bank leverage relative to other forms of leverage across society, it delineates the fundamentals of a political economy of banking, money-making and debt finance. Finally, the article turns to an analysis of how contemporary banks make money and at once weave the infrastructure of financial markets through leverage-enhancing techniques rooted in repurchase agreements.
The article radically challenges the conventional view of modern banking as financial intermediat... more The article radically challenges the conventional view of modern banking as financial intermediation and rejects the mutually-related notion, firmly entrenched in both the mainstream and alternative imaginary, of fractional reserve banking. By contrast, it argues that modern banks are peculiar financiers which, far from banking other people's money, are originally and primarily involved with making money by creating a most fundamental institution of capitalism: liquidity. Crucially, central to the bank-engendered creation of liquidity is a negotiation of value that does not involve any formal lending of cash by a creditor - in fact, it does not require a creditor at all. Instead, it relies on a quid pro quo of debts performed by means of discounting whereby a regime of fluid property relations of mutual indebtedness, commonly known as debt finance, is established. In this regime of liquidity money is constructed as entirely a debtors' money: it is the outcome of a process of monetisation of bank debts entangled with a capitalisation of other people's debts.
Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—so valuable—to u... more Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—so valuable—to us. The article thus examines the sociology outlined by Geoffrey Ingham and criticises its ontology of money as a measure of value underpinned by state authority. By contrast, it argues that money ought to be primarily intended as value in itself. Accordingly, money’s most specific attribute is none of its canonical functions but rather purchasing power: the power not to pay, or else the power to buy time. The latter is not the mere product of state (fiscal) agency, but is entangled from the start with the production of liquidity and the construction of speculative markets for debt. Thus the paper emphasises the importance of concrete bank discounting vis-à-vis abstract accounting in concrete processes of monetisation, and shows how modern money, far from cancelling debts, is historically constructed within liquid financial relations so as to “buy time” and systematically procrastinate the final “rendering of accounts” for debtors. As a result, money cannot exist without the simultaneous existence of a debt that it will never discharge.
The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy... more The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global fi...
The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy... more The prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global finance has not given shape to a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors as two distinct classes, but instead has set debtors against debtors, and namely the greater borrowers against the lesser ones.
Apocalyptic thinking has a long religious and political tradition, but what place does it occupy ... more 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 intellectual debate on money is often portrayed as a rather Manichean diatribe between two op... more The intellectual debate on money is often portrayed as a rather Manichean diatribe between two opposing traditions: on the one hand the orthodox, grounded in a ‘real’ analysis, and championing the primacy of a commodity-money; on the other hand the heterodox, based on a ‘nominal’ analysis, and advocating the primacy of a credit-money. Both traditions claim to know better the nature of money: whereas the orthodox envisages in the medium of exchange the ultimate essence of money, the heterodox attributes ontological primacy to the measure of value – or else the ‘money of account’. And yet, neither of the two traditions is concerned with comprehending the significance of money: why it is important to us, why we recognise it first of all as value. This work therefore tries to outline a comprehensive discourse on the significance of money as value. In particular, the first part is dedicated to a critique of heterodox and alternative theories of money, including Geoffrey Ingham’s major so...
Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—sovaluable—to us... more Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—sovaluable—to us. The article thus examines the sociology outlined by Geoffrey Ingham and criticises its ontology of money as ameasure of valueunderpinned by state authority. By contrast, it argues that money ought to be primarily intended asvalue in itself. Accordingly, money’s most specific attribute is none of its canonical functions but rather purchasing power: the powernotto pay, or else the power tobuy time. The latter is not the mere product of state (fiscal) agency, but is entangled from the start with the production of liquidity and the construction of speculative markets for debt. Thus the paper emphasises the importance of concrete bankdiscounting vis-à-vis abstract accounting in concrete processes of monetisation, and shows how modern money, far from cancelling debts, is historically constructed within liquid financial relations so as to “buy time” and systematically procrastinate the final ...
Abstract The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the h... more Abstract The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes’ Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes’ reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicize the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi.
The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox ... more The article puts forward a case against the nominalist ontology of money, that is, the heterodox notion that moneyness – the quality of being money – is conferred by the money of account. From the nominalist perspective, money is essentially a balance-sheet phenomenon: a credit-debit bookkeeping entity whose origins can be traced back to ancient Near Eastern practices of accounting. This ontological position, which is often erroneously traced back to Keynes’ Treatise, mystifies and obscures the actual history of the money of account as a regime of monetary governance and a mode of speculation that only made sense in the European late medieval context of bimetallism. The article thus provides a critique of monetary nominalism based on Keynes’ reflection on the value of money in the Treatise and the General Theory. In turn, it proceeds to historicize the phenomenon of the money of account, building on the seminal contributions of Marc Bloch and Luigi Einaudi.
There are two main theories of banking which seem to be incompatible by nature. According to the ... more There are two main theories of banking which seem to be incompatible by nature. According to the first, banks intermediate money through their credit infrastructure but are not themselves able to create new money. By contrast, the second argues that banks do create money out of nothing in the process of lending their credit. Significantly, despite their contrasts, both theories conceptualise banking in functionalist terms as the financing of other people’s indebtedness. In so doing, they relegate to the side-lines the fact that banks are in the business first and foremost to ‘make money’ for themselves as they leverage their unique market position as dealers of other people’s debts. The article thus investigates the phenomenon of modern banking as the art of leverage. After showing the specificity of bank leverage relative to other forms of leverage across society, it delineates the fundamentals of a political economy of banking, money-making and debt finance. Finally, the article turns to an analysis of how contemporary banks make money and at once weave the infrastructure of financial markets through leverage-enhancing techniques rooted in repurchase agreements.
The article radically challenges the conventional view of modern banking as financial intermediat... more The article radically challenges the conventional view of modern banking as financial intermediation and rejects the mutually-related notion, firmly entrenched in both the mainstream and alternative imaginary, of fractional reserve banking. By contrast, it argues that modern banks are peculiar financiers which, far from banking other people's money, are originally and primarily involved with making money by creating a most fundamental institution of capitalism: liquidity. Crucially, central to the bank-engendered creation of liquidity is a negotiation of value that does not involve any formal lending of cash by a creditor - in fact, it does not require a creditor at all. Instead, it relies on a quid pro quo of debts performed by means of discounting whereby a regime of fluid property relations of mutual indebtedness, commonly known as debt finance, is established. In this regime of liquidity money is constructed as entirely a debtors' money: it is the outcome of a process of monetisation of bank debts entangled with a capitalisation of other people's debts.
Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—so valuable—to u... more Understanding money requires that we first grasp what makes money so significant—so valuable—to us. The article thus examines the sociology outlined by Geoffrey Ingham and criticises its ontology of money as a measure of value underpinned by state authority. By contrast, it argues that money ought to be primarily intended as value in itself. Accordingly, money’s most specific attribute is none of its canonical functions but rather purchasing power: the power not to pay, or else the power to buy time. The latter is not the mere product of state (fiscal) agency, but is entangled from the start with the production of liquidity and the construction of speculative markets for debt. Thus the paper emphasises the importance of concrete bank discounting vis-à-vis abstract accounting in concrete processes of monetisation, and shows how modern money, far from cancelling debts, is historically constructed within liquid financial relations so as to “buy time” and systematically procrastinate the final “rendering of accounts” for debtors. As a result, money cannot exist without the simultaneous existence of a debt that it will never discharge.
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