Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Drew Kaufman, University of Toronto

; ,

Description:

Global Debtscapes

Registration link: https://forms.gle/qMmwo59Kobue1zCo8
Organizer: Drew Kaufman (Geography, University of Toronto, andrew.kaufman@mail.utoronto.ca)


In the pandemic era, debt has snowballed for governments, corporations, and households. By July 2020, global public and private debt reached a new high of $296 trillion, $36 trillion above pre-pandemic levels (IIF, 2021). The resulting creditor-debtor relationships surface geographically at the global, national, state, regional, metropolitan, neighbourhood, and household scales. Countries in the Global South divert funds from healthcare, education, infrastructure, and social spending to pay existing loans. Meanwhile, the Global North harnesses monetary and fiscal policy to lessen economic woes. Within nations and cities, mortgages fuel housing price growth, gentrification, foreclosures, and bankruptcies while other households draw on debt and microfinance to survive everyday life. The result is a series of multi-scalar debtscapes (Walks, 2013; Chaudry, 2016) indicative of both uneven development (Smith, 2008) and a larger cycle of finance-led accumulation (Arrighi, 1994).

Debt, it seems, serves a core function in capital circulation. It fixes current profitability crises by channeling capital through new spaces and pulling future value to the present (Harvey, 2006; Marx & Engels, 1894). As a consequence, credit-fueled growth produces and displaces economic crises, drives inequality, re-regulates state policy, and creates new financial subjects (Epstein, 2005; Krippner, 2005; Langley, 2008; Lapavitsas, 2013; Palley, 2013; Polanyi, 1944). New financial actors emerge associated with the professional making of debt markets, whether by way of bonds (sovereign, municipal, or corporate), mortgages, treasury notes, commercial paper, or other credit-backed securities.

Debt also functions in more invisible ways. Credit continues to be a mechanism for enrolling new populations into capitalism while disciplining nations and individuals as financial subjects (Dienst, 2017; Lazzarato, 2012; Luxembourg, 1913; Mahmud, 2012; Marazzi, 2011). Elsewhere the extension of debt links with processes of racialization and white supremacy (Coates, 2014; Rothstein, 2017; Wyly, Moos, Hammel, & Kabahizi, 2009) while relying on gendered (Federici, 2014; Pollard, 2013; Rankin, 2013)) and classed hierarchies (LeBaron, 2014). The repayment of certain debts are enshrined by law. Other debts related to chattel enslavement and colonialism are conveniently forgotten (Harney & Moten, 2013). Through all of these appearances, debt has moral connotations. Paying back what is owed is ‘good’ while lending money is “evil” (Graeber, 2010).

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda