The Magic of the Albanian Pyramid Firms: Gender, Ethnicity and Speculation in a Context of Low Finance
As the firms collapse one after the other, Maksude Kadëna captured local and international news headlines as a “gypsy” fortune-teller who “claimed to look into a crystal ball.” Since 1997, Kadëna and SUDE have become icons of the fraudulent magic associated with the phenomenon of non-bank moneylending in a context of deep socio-economic transformations from state-socialism to shock-therapy reforms. And yet, before their collapse, the firms were widely represented as virulent capitalist entrepreneurs leading the country’s capitalist entrepreneurship.
In this paper I return to various representations of the pyramid firms in Albania before and after their collapse as a way of addressing broader questions about fiction and fraud in speculative finance. I approach this question in two parts. First, I look at the complex financial repertoires (Jane Guyer) and cosmologies (Julie Chu) that converged with the moneylending of the pyramid firms and that lent legitimacy to these firms. I hone in on the discrediting indictments of Kadëna as “a gypsy fortuneteller” and note, instead, how two specific economic repertoires associated with Kadëna lent legitimacy and trust to SUDE as a capitalist financial enterprise. On the one hand, Kadëna’s identification as a Roma woman associated her not just with the supernatural practices of fortunetelling, but also with its entrepreneurial aspects. On the other hand, prior to opening the pyramid firm, Kadëna was known to have run a llotari (a sort of rotating credit associations) in her socialist workplace (the shoe factory). These two otherwise very different sets of economic practices shared a peculiar status during late-socialism: they were both part of the illegal yet somewhat tolerated (and unregulated) underground economy. Such economic practices were further seen as operating by capitalist market logics of supply-demand and of enabling forms of credit that were either forbidden or simply not available through the socialist financial architecture. I argue that, for many of the participants, SUDE and other firms were an extension (rather than a break from) these underground market practices. In this paper, I situate these practices alongside other repertoires of credibility and legitimacy deployed by these firms (such as the use of credit contracts and other legal mechanisms); I argue that, altogether, these distinct repertoires of investment, exchange, and credit enabled the speculative practices of the firms as legitimate free-market financial activities, framed within the broader context of liberalization and free-market reform.
Second, the article problematizes the shift in the public discourse around the firms—from a predominantly masculine and entrepreneurial representation before their collapse to a feminized and fraudulent one ensuing their collapse. Working alongside political economists (Marieke de Goede) and literary critics (Catherine Ingrassia) who trace similar gendered discourses of finance in other contexts of financial crisis, I note the important role of gender and ethnicity as markers of legitimacy or illegitimacy, rationality or irrationality of the pyramid firms in Albania and of speculative forms of finance broadly speaking. I argue that casting Kadëna as a fraudulent gypsy fortuneteller was itself a performative discourse that cast the pyramid firms as a product of irrational behavior and false cosmologies all the while circumventing closer scrutiny on the specific policies and politics that enabled such speculative enterprises.