Elena Esposito: What do bonds bind?

Followed by a talk with the economist and sociologist Michael Hutter

Debt has always been associated with guilt. Traditionally, however, the guilty one was not the debtor but the creditor – the one who gets a profit selling something that doesn't belong to him, because it does not belong to men: time. Today the situation is different and guilt is attributed to those who get indebted, maybe irresponsibly, but the structure is the same. Bonds operate with time, and more precisely with the future: they use the future in the present, hoping to produce a richer future that will also allow repaying the debt. The problem, as the crisis showed, is circularity: binding the future we bind something that doesn’t yet exist and depends on our present behavior – often deviating from today’s expectations and calculations.

Elena Esposito teaches Sociology of Communication at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. 2011 she published “The Future of Futures. The Time of Money in Financing and Society”.