Financialization without liquidity: in-kind payments, forced credit, and authoritarianism at the periphery of Europe

Abstract

Abstract After 2008, the spectacular collapse of financial markets in the United States, Spain, Iceland, Portugal, and Greece has induced researchers to conceptualize financialization as a rapid and unsustainable increase in liquidity. In Macedonia, a small country at the periphery of the European Union, however, the spread of financial instruments and debt coincided with an increased use of in-kind payments instead of money. Focusing on a type of non-monetary exchanges that Macedonians call kompenzacija, the article shows how in-kind payments are integrated to financial flows, and are crucial to the emergence of an authoritarian regime. In the Macedonian context, kompenzacija is part of an ..