“Working the Money”

This chapter looks at the intertwining of financial practices at firms with different forms of social ties. It concentrates on the role of mediators, such as “sekserë” and “të njohur” and the broader mobilization of migrant networks to attract deposits for the firms. The firms deliberately mobilized such social ties by offering incentives for sekserë and “menaxherë” to recruit their family members, neighbors, and friends. The chapter also talks about the transactional pathways of circulation of migrant remittances through the firms that were mediated by social ties of kinship and friendship. It investigates how social ties enabled the ongoing financial activities of the firms and how, in turn, transactions with the firms strengthened or weakened social ties.

The Pyramid Way

This chapter discusses the analogies of the former “kreditorë” regarding the modalities of financing and accumulation at the pyramid firms that captured the expression “the pyramid way,” which refers to a particular logic of investment and accumulation whereby initial investment relied on an unsustainable future return. It focuses on a practice of financing in construction known as “klering” or nonliquid payment arrangements among developers, subcontractors, and buyers. Developers typically promised to pay subcontractors with apartments or other construction materials rather than cash or credit. The chapter describes the empty klering apartments in Tirana's peripheries in the late 2000s that led to a crisis of liquidity. It traces the partial connections of different financial activities and suggests that the construction industry relied on social networks and remittance flows as sources of financing in order to avoid formal sources of credit and debt.

Epilogue

This chapter summarizes the ethnographic study of pyramid schemes in Albania. It reviews the collapse of the firms and how the economic reforms in Albania have maintained a distinct neoliberal flavor. This postsocialist neoliberal economic order has focused on liberalization and privatization reforms. The chapter looks at Albania's economy that is now rated as an upper-middle-income economy with a few large industries and foreign investments but with the majority of the working force employed in small-and medium-sized enterprises in services, agriculture, and tourism. It analyzes how pyramid schemes, speculative financing in construction, betting cafés, and Ponzi logics of accumulation and investment have become enduring economic forms in postsocialist Albania.