Institutionalising Future Geographies of Financial Inclusion: National Legitimacy Versus Local Autonomy in the British Credit Union Movement

In Great Britain, financial infrastructure withdrawal and community economic decline have focused attention on the capacity of locally "alternative" financial institutions to combat social and financial exclusion. This paper examines one such institution, the residential or "community" credit union, which provides a low-cost source of credit for members drawn from a common bond area usually based upon place of residence and/or work. Although community credit unions have traditionally been seen as providing individuals and communities with the opportunity to access credit and savings facilities in areas where there has been contraction in bank and building society provision (the financial "mainstream"), ongoing attempts exist to move away from the traditional role of community credit unions. This transition has set up three main challenges for the British credit union movement, discussed in this paper as follows: (1) a struggle over the attempt to redefine the "model" credit union within the national credit union movement; (2) the changing regulatory context for credit union development, including attempts to embrace credit unions within New Labour policies on social exclusion; and (3) a "local" challenge, including the incorporation of credit unions into community economic development initiatives. The paper considers how these challenges feed into wider understandings about the social relations, categorisation and autonomy of locally "alternative" financial institutions. We argue that future research on geographies of financial inclusion focusing on "alternative" institutions and their relationship to the financial mainstream needs to pay close critical attention to potential contradictions and tensions operating at different, yet intersecting spatial scales.     

Peonage, Power Relations, and the Built Environment at Hacienda Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico

The social and material conditions of postcolonial haciendas in Yucatan, Mexico, were greatly influenced by power relations intrinsic to the institution of debt peonage. Although landowning elites exercised enormous control over debt peons, hacienda social relations involved continuous negotiation between master and servant. Recent investigations at Hacienda Tabi, a sugar hacienda in southern Yucatan, explore the interplay between power relations and the creation and maintenance of the built environment. The evidence from Tabi suggests that during the Porfiriato (1876–1911) hacendados manipulated the settlement landscape to emphasize an order of social inequality. The spatial and structural elements of the hacienda's settlement reflected and supported the owners' attempts to control resident peons. However, those attempts were challenged by the resident Maya community, who defined the hacienda landscape imposed on them in alternative ways.     

A Time to Speak

Abstract

This article explores the significance of resonance as a mode of social causality in response to William Connolly's book, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. While applauding Connolly's identification of "affinities of spirituality" as effective in forming American politics, it suggests that the character structure of ressentiment that is encountered in right-wing Christianity and politics may be the result of instability. Examining the economic basis for growth and instability in the creation of dollars in the form of debt lacking an underlying guarantee, it suggests that this instability is felt throughout American society in everyday experiences of credit and debt.     

Income Inequality and Wealth Concentration in the Recent Crisis

This article shows that the increase of income inequality and global wealth concentration was an important driver for the financial and Eurozone crisis. The high levels of income inequality resulted in balance of payment imbalances and growing debt levels. Rising wealth concentration contributed to the crisis because the increasing asset demand from the rich played a key role in the growth of the structured credit market and enabled poor and middle‐income households to accumulate increasing amounts of debt. This analysis thereby puts both income and wealth inequality at the epicentre of the recent crisis, and as crucial for social scientists analysing the causes of the crisis. The authors’ findings suggest that the policy response to the crisis should not be limited to financial regulation but must involve policies to address inequality by increasing the bargaining power of labour as well as redistributive tax policies.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.     

The US Debtfare State and the Credit Card Industry: Forging Spaces of Dispossession

Abstract: Credit card debt is a ubiquitous feature of neoliberal capitalism. To explain the notable growth of credit card usage in the US, I adopt a historical materialist approach that employs two key analytical concepts—cannibalistic capitalism and the debtfare state—to capture the material, institutional and ideological dimensions of this process. Viewed within the bounds of cannibalistic capitalism, a mode of accumulation primarily based on the expansion of fictitious capital and secondary forms of exploitation, the debtfare state enhances the social power of money by allowing major credit card issuers (banks) to generate high levels of income from uncapped interest rates and policies that ensure the extension of plastic money to those who fall within Marx's category of the surplus population. While the expansion of debt subjects surplus workers to the disciplinary requirements of the market, it is unable to suspend the main tensions of cannibalistic capitalism, prompting ongoing reconstructions of the debtfare state.     

Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Historical Geography of an Agrarian Question

Capitalism is produced in part through its own production of nature, but it has been argued that nature also poses certain obstacles to capitalist development. Political economists and rural sociologists have argued that in certain instances agriculture, as a form of production based in nature, has proven resistant to capitalist transformation. The Mann–Dickinson thesis still stands as one of the best such formulations. This essay argues for turning the Mann–Dickinson thesis on its head so as to ask how it is that an obstacle for one set of capital comprises an opportunity for other capitals. The essay therefore examines agriculture as a nexus of nature and circulating capital. It argues that what has been construed as a primary obstacle (the disunity of working and production time and the cumulative effects thereof) has been poorly appreciated as comprising a distinctive opportunity for capitalist investments and appropriations through the credit system. Credit, by no means an exogenous or anachronistic force, develops along with production and constitutes a social relation of production along with other such relations. These contentions are borne out in a critique of the nature-as-obstacle argument and then in a discussion of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century agriculture in the United States, especially in California. In the latter discussion, I focus on the role of credit as the system that mediates the relations between nature and capital in and between different space–times. Credit, I argue, was necessarily constituted spatially and was contingently tied to the rise of agrarian formations in the American West.     

Ghostly real estate: Haunting,debt and capitalist realism in Milan

Ghosts and analogous supernatural entities are pervasive cultural objects. Anthropologists have delved into the religious, social and cultural value of these presences in depth. However, the discipline does not seem to have dedicated enough energy to interpreting this phenomenon in late capitalist societies. Nevertheless, the relationship between ghosts and capitalism constitutes an object of great interest. The real estate sector seems to be particularly suited to investigating the logic of haunting in contemporary societies. Haunting, which gives rise to ghosts, is a compelling category for understanding power relations and economic brutality. Following Derrida, ghosts are relations that mediate different temporalities in the present. In the cases of the foreclosure I ethnographically observed in Milan, those peculiar relations are debt relationships. Judges and justice system actors who oversee the procedures, aware of the presence of ghosts, act in the awareness that this haunting can in no way be resolved, following a logic that Fisher has defined as ‘capitalist realism’.     

The Duration of Book Credit in Colonial New England

Account books show that merchants frequently used book credit in exchanges with consumers. The ability of credit to act as a substitute for currency in payments depends on the terms attached to the credit, such as its duration. To investigate duration more systematically, the author employs life table analysis and the singulate mean age at marriage, methods commonly used in demography, to analyze debt records from eighteenth-century Connecticut and Massachusetts. He arrives at expected duration estimates in excess of those in the literature. Given the expected duration, book credit seems to be a good substitute for other forms of payment. If this is so, a major revision of literature on colonial monetary matters may be in order.     

Bank Lending to LDCs: From the Euphoria of Credit Syndication to the Debt Problem's Implications

This paper deals with the behaviour of commercial banks in the syndicated credits market, which proved to be the most popular instrument in the 1970s guiding credit flows to developing countries. The author argues that the distortions in the pricing structure of syndicated credits biased the international credit market towards overlending, thus making standard investment criteria less applicable to credit commitments to developing countries. The analysis of post-1982 rescheduling qualifies it as a vicious circle and stresses the urgent need for the partial forgiveness of developing countries' debts in accordance with the market price of securitized debt.     

Mortgage finance and culture

Using a nationally representative sample of 12,344 immigrants from 41 different countries of ancestry living in Spain in 2007, we find that the higher the housing‐loan penetration in the country of ancestry, the higher the likelihood of having a mortgage in Spain. Similarly, the higher the mortgage depth in the country of ancestry, the higher the present value of the monthly mortgage payments. Our results suggest that social norms regarding mortgage finance in the country of ancestry matter in determining immigrants’ mortgage finance in the host country. More specifically, the effect of social norms on the decision to have a mortgage (the extensive margin) and the amount of the mortgage payments (the intensive margin) is about one third and tenth the size of the effect of having a college degree on mortgage debt, respectively. Evidence of strong persistence of culture among those with longer tenure in the host country, those who immigrated as children or young adults, and second‐generation immigrants suggests that vertical transmission of beliefs (from parents to children) is a plausible channel of transmission. Perhaps most importantly, we find that cultural attitudes regarding property rights are most relevant when explaining individuals’ decision to get a mortgage, but those regarding credit information matter most when explaining the amount of the mortgage debt.     

Attiudes towards public debt in medieval Genoa: the Lomellini family

Genoa is well known for its characteristic public debt system, yet there has not been a great deal of research on this subject. This paper focuses on the creditor, and seeks to investigate why and under what circumstances people accept public debt. The significance of public debt for creditors in Genoa in the later middle ages will be examined through a case study of the Lomellini family, analysing colonne (a register made at a bank concerning creditors’ accounts), statutes, notarial acts, and in particular, testaments. The purpose of the purchase, use, and disposition of a share in the public debt is categorised as follows: (1) the purchase of real estate or of another public debt; (2) the property of women and minors; (3) the salvation of the soul. Through each analysis, we shall examine what influenced the creditors in their attitude toward the public debt. Public debt was not only a system of credit for the city state, but also something which penetrated into every part of people’s lives in Genoa.     

Innovation and the Entrepreneurial State in Asia: Mechanisms of Bond Market Development

Abstract

Bond markets have expanded rapidly in emerging East Asian economies in recent years. Asian policymakers have played a pivotal role in this development. This process presents an interesting challenge to the developmental state literature associated with bank-based financial systems. We argue that it is best to understand the role of the state as an entrepreneurial state in the construction of these markets, focusing on institutional innovation in three mechanisms of state-led market infrastructure: national or local credit rating agencies, mortgage corporations and bond pricing agencies. National credit rating agencies rate the creditworthiness of debt in local currency. Mortgage corporations create markets in securitised housing loans. Bond pricing agencies put a value on illiquid debt instruments to enable mark-to-market portfolio management. Together, these three mechanisms constitute the core determinants of the market (demand for creditworthy products, supply of tradeable assets, and the fixing of a price to those assets). In so doing they influence the nature of market operations, producing outcomes very different from the free market ideal type. We also consider cross-country commonalities and variations in this general pattern.     

Subprime Housing Goes South: Constructing Securitized Mortgages for the Poor in Mexico

Mexico represents the largest market for residential mortgage‐backed securitization (RMBS) in Latin America. Despite its significance to questions of development, there has been no critical analysis on the social implications and power dimensions of RMBS with regard to low‐income housing in Mexico. This essay fills this gap by demystifying the technical and thus apolitical nature of RMBS as well as by explaining how and why state‐sponsored securitization schemes subsidize financial and construction interests in the name of expanding home ownership for the poor. In so doing, the analysis employs a historical materialist approach that, first, places RMBS within the contradictory nature of capital accumulation processes in Mexico and relations of class‐based power therein, and second, views RMBS as an integral feature of housing policy that is inextricably linked to the nerve centre of capital accumulation, namely: the credit system.     

Das Wissen der Schulden. Recht,Kulturtechnik und Alltagserfahrung im liberalen Kapitalismus

The Knowledge of Debt: Law, Media Technique, and Everyday Experience in Liberal Capitalism. Performing an object such as ‘the economy’ hinges on practices of formatting knowledge. The article proposes to look at such instituting moments in connection with social conflicts over the legitimate rules of exchange. This is exemplified by way of recounting the story of the codification of Swiss bankruptcy law in 1889. In order to homogenize the legal procedures of debt collection and bankruptcy, two subject categories were instituted: ‘merchants’ and ‘non-merchants’. These different categories were thought to account for the diverging temporalities and spaces of credit exchange in everyday economic life. The introduction of the commercial register, a media-technical apparatus, enabled a formal distinction between ‘merchants’ and ‘non-merchants’. However, this boundary was contested and proved to be porose.     

Alternative Ways of Financing Production

Based upon the work of C. H. Douglas, this paper explores the role of debt in the economy. In the 1920s Douglas observed the workings of financial mechanisms within the real economy, noting that they could be modified to achieve a socially and ecologically sustainable economics of sufficiency (see Hutchinson and Burkitt 1997; Hutchinson 1998). Douglas' exploration of the role of debt (loan credit) in the economy accords well with Veblen's institutional analysis (Veblen 1990), while his writing reverberates with Veblenian terminology. As an economist, Douglas is both intuitive and eclectic, and, as Mehta (1983) observes, ‘no writer in economics has made his thought so opaque to the reader.’ Nevertheless, Douglas' rejection by orthodoxy was due in no small measure to the impracticality of tailoring his theoretical observations within the constraints of neo-classical general free market equilibrium theory. Although they gave rise to a widespread popular movement, Douglas' proposals for debt-free finance of production could not be accommodated within economic orthodoxy.     

论法律信用与和谐社会的构建

构建和谐社会必须树立法律信用。法律信用是指法律严格遵守其所明示的、确定的规则和内容。以它对公平和正义的理性追求和坚定实践所赢得的社会主体对它的信任。法律信用是法律作为制度规范整体所具有的信用,法律既有信用又能够被信仰,是法治的美好前景与和谐社会的坚强后盾。     

Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even in the context of deepening financialisation, people's lives remain dependent upon others, especially within families. We analyse how these family relations of dependency are reworked along generational lines and spatially stretched due to precarious economic conditions of indebtedness, household migration, and distant labour markets. We conclude that reframing financial subjectivity in terms of precariousness helps us to analyse the relationship between households and financial markets, as well as inform a critical politics of finance.     

浅议诚信及其价值

“诚信”是社会的一个基本道德观念。当今,我国社会在各方面取得了辉煌的成就,但同时社会问题日渐突出,“诚信”的缺失,已成为比较普遍的问题。只有从多角度研究“诚信”问题,研究提高社会“诚信”意识的措施,才能使我们这个社会充满诚信。     

Why Illness Causes More Serious Economic Damage than Crop Failure in Rural Cambodia

In rural Cambodia, illness has caused more serious economic damage to rural households than crop failure. This article explores the reasons for this using data on the strategies adopted by households in two Cambodian villages to cope with these different types of shock. The data show that Cambodian households can cope with crop failure by earning additional income. However, to cope with illness, which entails lump‐sum treatment costs, they have to borrow money or sell their assets, because households cannot acquire the necessary funds in a short period just by earning additional income. Combined with the harsh conditions of credit markets (high interest rates, strict debt collection and credit rationing), and weak risk‐sharing among households, this results in illness causing a large number of land sales in the surveyed villages.