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Debt, Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance

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  • Patrick Bond

Abstract

The power, vulnerability and destructiveness of financial markets are out of control in South Africa, now among the most unequal, economically volatile and protest-intensive countries worldwide. While debt made itself felt in many sites, of interest in both criticising and promoting solutions is the ‘scale jumping’ required from South Africa’s national insertion into the world financial system, entailing the Reserve Bank setting very high interest rates, in turn leading to unpayable levels of consumer debt, and at a time when microfinance is suddenly discredited as a development strategy. Macro- and micro-financial problems fused in the course of the Marikana Massacre of August 2012, reflecting the local and global powers of the Moody’s rating agency and ‘mashonisa’ loan sharks. The over-indebted Marikana mineworkers, who led a strike which catalysed many wildcat strikes elsewhere, confronted the local crisis by displacing it into the national economy. This only heightened the contradictions that Moody’s punished with its September 2012 credit-rating downgrade. Without a genuine ‘debt relief’ solution at both scales, society will continue to unravel, as financialisation reaches its limits within one of the world’s most extreme cases of uneven and combined development.

Suggested Citation

  • Patrick Bond, 2013. "Debt, Uneven Development and Capitalist Crisis in South Africa: from Moody’s macroeconomic monitoring to Marikana microfinance," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(4), pages 569-592.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:34:y:2013:i:4:p:569-592
    DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2013.786283
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    Cited by:

    1. Nick Bernards, 2018. "The Truncated Commercialization of Microinsurance and the Limits of Neoliberalism," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 49(6), pages 1447-1470, November.
    2. Janda, Karel & Tran, Quang & Zetek, Pavel, 2014. "Vliv externího financování na mikrofinanční rozvoj - makro perspektiva [Influence of external funding on microfinance performance - macro perspective]," MPRA Paper 58166, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Shaukat Ansari, 2022. "Cash Transfers, International Finance and Neoliberal Debt Relations: The Case of Post‐apartheid South Africa," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 53(3), pages 551-575, May.
    4. Karwowski, Ewa, 2017. "Corporate financialisation in South Africa: From investment strike to housing bubble," Economics Discussion Papers 2017-7, School of Economics, Kingston University London.
    5. Bateman, Milford, 2014. "South Africa's post-apartheid microcredit-driven calamity: Comparing 'developmental' to 'anti-developmental' local financial models," Working Papers 47, Austrian Foundation for Development Research (ÖFSE).
    6. Janda, Karel & Van Tran, Quang & Zetek, Pavel, 2014. "Influence of External Funding on Microfinance Performance," MPRA Paper 58170, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Jorge Garcia-Arias & Alan Cibils & Agostina Costantino & Vitor B. Fernandes & Eduardo Fernández-Huerga, 2021. "When Land Meets Finance in Latin America: Some Intersections between Financialization and Land Grabbing in Argentina and Brazil," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(14), pages 1-37, July.
    8. Monika Grubbauer, 2020. "Assisted Self‐help Housing in Mexico: Advocacy, (Micro)Finance and the Making of Markets," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 44(6), pages 947-966, November.

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