False Economy

When we speak of the credit crunch of 2008-14, we are really referring to a debt crisis. Far from the aberrant outcome of an economic failure, however, debt is a necessary condition of all economy. This essay opens up the present banking crisis through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s Given Time . It addresses issues such as Credit Default Swaps and inter-bank lending through an understanding of finance as counterfeit money, and examines the question of credit as a problem of both faith and fiction. It concludes by attending to Baudelaire’s “ Assommons les pauvres! ” which Derrida describes as a “symmetrical counterpoint” to “ La fausse monnaie ,” the Baudelaire text that guides his own seminar

Counterfeit · Counterpoint · Credit crunch · Debt · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Faith · Financial crisis · Financial system · Keynesian economics · Law and economics · Political science · Reading (process · Sociology · Theology · Economic Theory and Policy · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Philosophy · Finance