Tales from Albarado

A ledger of a former sekser (broker) listing names of former creditors, amounts deposited into the pyramid schemes Gjallica and Cenaj. As the records indicate, the sekser managed deposits in Albanian lek, Greek drachmas, Italian liras, and German Deutschmarks. Photo by Smoki Musaraj, Vlora, July 2008 (Last names of former creditors have been blurred to protect their anonymity)

Explore the Albanian Ponzi Archive here.

See blog posts about Tales from Albarado: “Ethnography of a Ponzi Scheme” (Cornell University Press blog) and “Money and Speculation in Times of Crisis” (Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion blog).

In early 1990s, about a dozen pyramid/ponzi schemes, locally known as pyramid firms (firma piramidale), were all the rage in Albania. This was a time of deep economic, social, and political transformation, following the dissolution of the command economy and the rapid embrace of postsocialist free-market reform. The firms attracted 1.5 million investors in a country of about 3 million people. When they collapsed in 1997, the country fell into anarchy and a near civil war. Tales from Albarado revisits these times of excitement and loss to gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations. Based on oral histories by former investors and brokers to the firms and on archival media research, the books argues that the Ponzi logics of accumulation prevalent in postsocialist Albania were intricately connected to the major political and economic transformations of the end of the twentieth century. S

This ethnographic study of Ponzi schemes calls attention to forms of credit expansion and speculative finance from below (rather than through top-down financialization). Following the trajectories of various objects of wealth flowing through the schemes—-multiple currencies, privatization vouchers, remittances, and recently privatized apartments—-the book outlines key pathways of value transformation across local and transnational markets and social networks. The book also identifies strategies for transforming, creating, and converting value through the pyramid firms. I argue that the pyramid firms provided an alternative means of saving, investing, and multiplying wealth for people located at the margins of global capital. As such, these financial practices provide insight into the multiple and diverse economies that proliferate within neoliberal regimes, while also being other to neoliberal logics, institutions, and practices.