Speculative futures in the time of debt

Abstract

This article concerns the temporality of debt. Against the claim that the society of debt has emptied out futures via the elevation of the promise to pay to a total social fact, it suggests that the time of securitized debt is speculative in form. Thus, in the time of securitized debt, pasts, presents and futures do not stand in a pre-set relation to one another, but are open to a constant state of revision: they may be drawn and redrawn, assembled and disassembled, set and reset. This time is tracked across changing schedules of household and personal debt − and crucially in the logics of accumulation via securitized debt – to argue that far from emptying out futures debt society demands subjects who must constantly adjust to recalibrations of pasts, presents and futures as well as to changes in the relations between and across these states.

The imaginary constitution of financial crises

“…Our approach has important implications for economic sociologists, echoing Adkins's (2017) thesis that a sociology of debt should not be confined to anthropological analysis of the 'moral crisis' of debt, but should also challenge the rational and material underpinnings of debt relations. Our proposed framework enables a better understanding of how policy 'interventions' that aimed to address the crisis were acted out, but also highlights their inherent limitations.…”

Women and children together and apart

“…Th ese changes can be understood as a response to the endemic crisis in capitalist accumulation that came to a head in the 1970s (Federici 2014). Financialized capitalism is marked by a neoliberal ideology of marketization and the propagation of a debt economy 2 where the bundling and reselling of debt, and its temporalities of risk speculation, is now central to accumulation (Adkins 2017). States-in line with the dictates of global institutions such as the IMF/World Bank-are both retrenching social support and protection and "re-familializing" such responsibilities, with women held discursively and materially culpable for their achievement (Borda Carulla 2018; Gillies 2014; Llobet and Milanich 2018).…”

Accounting for indebtedness: geopolitics, technocracy and advanced financial capital

“…Accounting is, we argue, a central aspect of financialisation, as the violence of indebtedness constrains and captures futures. New technologies of accounting, such as fair value and derivative-based accounting, capture and restate time, as these debt mechanisms have the accounting effect of bringing the future into the present (Adkins 2017, Guyer 2012). Furthermore, these financialisation measurement techniques appropriate the social lives of the indebted.…”

“…Hence, the increasing financialisation of accounting provides the mechanisms to valorise social life through valorising the indebtedness. As Adkins (2017) argues, without the ability to represent the value of indebtedness, the creditor-debtor relationship is rendered ineffective; the very essence of a net present value calculation is to be able to identify a value owed today against futures. This illustrates the combination of accounting and indebtedness, by simultaneously rewriting time (accounting for the future), providing a measurement ability for future values and valorising the finanicalised indebtedness.…”

“…Financialisation, securitisation and fair value lead to a focus on accounting for futures, which as a central pillar of indebtedness reconstitutes time (Adkins 2017). Accounting as a technology constitutes, subsumes and constructs particular subjects within the abstract social processes of accounting (Hines 1988).…”