Dark Finance : Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of Europe

__Dark Finance__ offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations. The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Mattioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. __Dark Finance__ chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse. "This book describes the importance of finance and real estate for the emergence of authoritarian regimes. Through an ethnographic study of the pseudo-oligarchs, failed European businessmen, frustrated managers, and unpaid workers that populate Macedonia's construction sector, Fabio Mattioli illustrates how financialization results in illiquidity, rather than cheap money. Mattioli's manuscript describes the political relations that emerge from restricting access to cash, a political-economic juncture that has received little attention in the literature on financialization, but that is increasingly recognized as a critical research agenda. Guiding readers through the genesis and contradictions of a landscape of political oppression and financial failure, the book details Macedonian workers' and managers' struggle to recover meaningful social lives as they become more deeply entangled in the web of illiberal politics"-- Provided by publisher