MoneyWisdom #443

"...the idea that money, debt and finance are immaterial and not grounded in material production or material value violently erases how the whole of life - including the lives and households not only of the waged and the employed but also of the jobless and the wageless - is ordered and organized by the logic of speculation. The idea that money, debt and finance are immaterial fails, then, to recognize that their very operations are at the heart of the organization of social life - indeed, fails to recognize the operation of speculation as a rationality."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p. 169

MoneyWisdom #442

"...it is clear that through the command that the unemployed participate in all manner of activities - including mandatory unpaid work - regimes of activation are reworking the relationship between unemployment and employment in such a way that, rather than being opposing states, they exist along the same continuous plane. In this way, the commands of activation have rendered unemployment an activity that is continuous with work and working, albeit without a wage. In this context, it is important to appreciate that the infrastructures of activation are now so embedded and elaborated that markets have emerged for the unpaid labor of the unemployed."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p.154

MoneyWisdom #441

"...Blyth [also] argues that the burden of present-day austerity falls disproportionately on the poor and specifically on the financial-asset poor. Drawing on the language of securities contract and trading, he describes present-day austerity as a 'class-specific put-option,' one that is 'written on the majority of asset poor OECD citizens' (Blyth 2013, 258). By this Blyth means that the dynamics of austerity, especially the transformation of private into public debt that foreshadowed the rolling out of austerity measures, has effectively drawn the financial-asset poor into a project of bailing out and re-liquidating the assets (the loans and mortgages) that banks had sold and contracted out for trade on finance markets. Contemporary austerity, then, should not be confused with a project that simply benefits (or bails out) financial institutions and elites. Instead, austerity should be understood as a project that benefits the financial-asset rich, especially that part of the population holding contracts on mortgages, loans, superannuation, and other assets that are traded on financial markets."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p.52

Money Wisdom #440

"...we might propose that, contrary to the case of industrial capitalism, where time is money, in post-Bretton Woods finance markets, money is time."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p.45

Money Wisdom #439

"Bourdieu warns that this practical anticipation of the future in the economic field - the grasping of time yet-to-come as a quasi-present - should not be understood to involve a rational calculus of risk as neo-classical economics would suggest. Indeed, Bourdieu maintains that while economic orthodoxy will always reduce the practical mastery of situations of uncertainty to a rational calculus of risk, construing the anticipation of the behaviour of others as a calculation of the intent of opponents, understanding economic action and especially the practical anticipation of the future as engendered by the habitus - collective, historical, and unconscious structures - throws the calculating agent of economic orthodoxy into radical doubt."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p.35

Money Wisdom #438

"Our postfuturist mood, [Berardi] continues, is based on the awareness that the future is no going to be bright. Yet, crucially, this postfuturist sensibility is not one that has simply emerged in the light of our response to problematic external events of moments of crisis. Thus, a postfuturist sensibility cannot be explained with reference to events such as economic crisis, climate change, or natural disasters that have blighted, interfered with, or interrupted the flow of the future and its relationship to the present. On the contrary, rather then concerning crises that have temporarily and violently cut agents loose from the future, the emergence of a postfuturist sensibility concerns a shift in time itself."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p.25 

Money Wisdom #437

"By focusing not on the actions of traders but on the movement and flows of money in financial markets, I show that at issue in regard to finance markets, and specifically post Bretton Woods agreement finance markets, is not a trade on the future but a shifting relationship between time and money. In such markets, time is not a simple vessel through which money flows and moves; rather, money and time merge together."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p. 13

Money Wisdom #436

"...the logic of speculation must be understood as a rationality that defines the telos of the action."

Lisa Adkins The Time of Money (2018) p.2