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Across the world, national currencies—public goods that emerged out of a previous era of currency proliferation—are now competing with private alternatives. As paper and coins fall into disuse, the seigniorage that helps to fund the circulation and regulation of currency diminishes, while their capacity to bind together states and citizens decreases in equal measure. The Swedish central bank's response to these threats, which includes issuing the world's first national digital currency, charts a course that all central banks must consider in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jayathi Ghosh's paper explores the relationship between social inequality and economic outcomes. She argues that social and relational inequalities contribute to work distribution, labor segmentation, and differential remuneration in both formal and informal labor markets. Ghosh challenges the assumption that free trade benefits both parties equally, suggesting that exchange can be extractive and favor one party over another. Her findings align with research in anthropology and feminist anthropology, which also highlight the ways in which social differences are sustained and leveraged by exchange. Ghosh's work opens up avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion on addressing social inequality. [Extracted from the article]

In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Paraguay appear not just to be geographically disparate but also to have different moral valences. After closer inspection, however, we argue that subprime lending and microfinance are two sides of the same coin. Our analysis of microfinance allows us to understand what is happening in the "in-between" as capital flows between financial investors and poor borrowers. By comparing financialization in India and Paraguay, we document and theorize the making of subprime empires that rely on actors within marginal financial sites to stabilize the evaluative frameworks and social interdependencies that make profits flow. We argue that the forms of financial capture and conversion in the "financial in-between" reproduce imperial dynamics by naturalizing the limited expectations of economic subjects of the global south and erasing the violence inherent in these forms of economic redistribution that maintain those expectations as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres by Thomas Risse. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2010. 272 pp. Paper, $24.95. In a comprehensive account of the past 20 [...]

By comparing the spatial organization of Swedish labor and leisure practices today with the movements and stereotypes tied to previous generations of Sweden's sizeable population of so-called "vagrants," this article studies the impact of state policy on the spatial imagination of both citizens and other sojourners within its bounds. Because the ethnographic research for the article took place in a new transnational city that is being created by the European Union and various local proponents, the article then considers the same issue at the EU level, to pursue the question of the EU's "state-ness" and the status of migrant laborers within that emerging polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debt-based trade and economic exchanges are becoming more and more widespread in the context of post-Soviet Central Asian societies. In the absence of viable state economic support, a functional banking system, and an effective legal system, trust-based economic exchanges serve as an alternative means for conducting micro-level businesses in Central Asia. The phenomenon of "rassiychilar," which is the central focus of this article, is one of the intriguing examples of debt-based trade in rural Fergana, Uzbekistan. This debt-based trade involves a myriad of informal economic exchanges among various actors, locally and transnationally. The article argues that trust-based economic networks and debt-based trade serve as an alternative means of doing business in rural post-socialist contexts characterized by legal uncertainty, rampant corruption, and an inefficient economic and banking system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the connection between financialization and consumerism, and claim that greater availability of consumer loans affects consumerist culture and promotes the institution of conspicuous consumption. We extend the ideas of Thorstein Veblen who coined the term of "conspicuous consumption" to illustrate our thinking with the empirical evidence on car purchases financed through bank loans in Russia's Rostov Region. We find that leveraged car buying has become embedded over the past 20 years. Social positioning drives people to seek more expensive cars, whereas getting a bank loan allows to buy an otherwise unaffordable car. We see a sign of conspicuousness in the fact that household income grows slower than the average price of a new car financed by a car loan, as well as the amount of loans. Our contribution is that a basic concept of institutional theory (conspicuous consumption) is combined with elements from other research approaches, namely the social significance of bank lending, functional differentiation of credit, and the effects of financialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction we map the tradition of thoughts and state of the art on the study of finance and financialization in relation to the anthropological Italian debate. We suggest a particular attention towards ethnographic approaches "from the margins" of finance that can help build a non unilinear and west-centric agenda for studying financial expansion also in the Italian context. Then we discuss conceptual trends on financial expansion that emerged in the international anthropological debate after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), underlining a shift from the "double movement" analysis to the rediscovery and the reframing of relational approach. Thinking of financialization beyond the dualistic interpretative prism that sets finance against society, movement against counter movement, center against periphery we invite to conceptualize financial expansion as the result of a variety of independent but related processes which must be apprehended holistically. We consider ethnography as an opportunity to unravel the multiple spatial and temporal axes and kinds of processes that constitute financial expansion. When analyzed ethnographically, financialization seems to proceed by simultaneous movements and countermovement resulting from the confrontation among increasingly financialized subjects. This interactive practice produces attempts that, despite the power asymmetries, might result in unplanned transformative outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the complexities of private debt globally, shedding light on its shift from an issue affecting primarily the Global South to its recent emergence in the Global North. It discusses how debt intertwines with status, solidarity, and stigma, analyzing various case studies to showcase its impact on social relationships, personhood, and socioeconomic hierarchies.

A condition of excess characterizes Iraqi exiles' everyday life in Jordan: excesses of waiting and anticipation, bureaucratic work, and aspirations for future benevolent governance. To grapple with this excess, they have had to develop strategies that render their lives in exile more manageable. Despite being hosted as "guests" of the Hashemite monarchy—an ambitious status evoking notions of pan‐Arab solidarity and Arab traditions of hospitality—this status does not guarantee or grant them access to substantive citizenship rights. In light of this, Iraqi exiles who arrived in Jordan following the US‐led invasion of Iraq in 2003 have often found themselves dependent on potentially injurious ways to navigate their presence. One of these strategies are relations and practices of faḍl, a form of exchange governed by a foreclosure of reciprocity and necessity of public recognition. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among what I refer to as the Iraqi exilic milieu in Jordan, this article examines how, in the absence and denial of expected forms of exchange, the circulation of stately faḍl and its cooptation by ordinary people articulate new notions and practices of valuable yet nevertheless wounding citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to introduce the reader to the anthropology of finance in its contemporary dimension of financialization. Through the lens of the feminist manifesto "GENS" (Bear et al. 2015), the author proposes a reading of ethnographies that highlights the interconnectedness of individuals' agency, projects of social reproduction, power hierarchies, and processes of money accumulation. Moreover, the article how the financial industry reproduces race, gender, and class inequalities both within societies and on a global scale, becoming increasingly pervasive in development discourse. The article is divided into three parts based on the relationship between individuals and the financial valuation process they engage in. It analyzes the experts who work within financial institutions; the social reproduction processes of the working classes increasingly reliant on credit and debt mechanisms introduced by financial capitalism; and the people excluded from global financial dynamics, whose financial inclusion is considered the most effective tool to escape poverty by governments and international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue sheds light on transnational migrants' engagement with informal urban economies worldwide. Building on anthropological literature on migration and economy, it proposes "transnational street business" as a new concept for grasping transnational dynamics in the informal urban economy. Through ethnographic case studies from different regions, the special issue illuminates how the concept of "transnational street business" serves to analytically capture the urban street's multitude of economically entangled and interdependent transnational social alliances, hierarchies, friendships, and networks. The concept encompasses the materiality of the street and the goods that are exchanged and transacted in trade relations. It also highlights the skills for competition that are needed for orientation in legal and political landscapes that cut across the formal and informal divides that migrants are faced with when setting out to create a livelihood abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores why people in Namibia go into debt to eat. Until recently, food sharing practices were maintained by social relationships in which everyone owed everyone else. This made sense, as needs would rotate evenly. However, in recent decades, and largely through state employment and social grants, the political economy has changed. Now, needs are distributed unequally. This article explores how the movement of resources through time and space is altered via the mechanism of credit/debt. The haves have become merchants and refer the have-nots to credit books in their recently opened village stores. This has two effects: for one, today the entire community owes only a very small number of people. Food transfers no longer crosscut groups but manifest them. Secondly, credits do not fully replace existing social relationships and enable sharing in other situations, mostly around meals, which also suggests continuity in shifting forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]