The Asset Economy and the Logic of Speculation | Red May 2021

What exactly are the economic shifts that have driven the social transformations taking place in Anglo-capitalist societies? Lisa Adkins and Martijn Konings argue that growing inequality is a product of the rise of an ‘asset economy’. Decades of property inflation have seen asset ownership overshadow employment as a determinant of class position. In their new book, The Asset Economy, co-authored with Melinda Cooper, they explore the harmful effects of the Fed’s policy of Quantitative Easing and similar asset-supporting measures on a range of phenomena that are widely debated but often poorly understood: redistributions of wealth, precarity, the dynamics of land use, changes in fiscal and monetary policy, the dilemmas of “millennials”, and the rise of a speculative imperative as a social logic—a demand that one speculate merely to keep from falling further down the social ladder. Despite widespread awareness of the harmful effects of Quantitative Easing, we appear to have entered an era of policy “lock-in” that is responsible for a volatile disconnect between popular expectations and institutional priorities. Steven Shaviro joins the conversation

Martijn Konings, Lisa Adkins, Steven Shaviro, Philip Wohlstetter

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[shoshanakirya-ziraba]

I want to buy my son a shopping center and an apartment building.
Great discussion.

[jacc]

This Asset logic applys to all kind of assets. So maybe the solution for middle classes is to search for other kind of assets, not only household.

[NathanWHill]

This discussion would have benefited from referencing Marx' notion of fictitious capital. The speakers at times appear to believe that capital gains and profits come from different sources. If so there would need to be a commodity other than labor power that can create value and you would need to abandon the labor theory of value, which is fine, so long as you have an alternative theory to propose. My own sense is that speculation has to lead to expropriation from time to time. The wealth transfer after 2008 from underwater home owners to banks makes clear that the value behind profits and behind capital gains are the same. In the one case you steal from the laborer before paying the wage and in the other you steal afterward.