I argue that it is well worth entertaining a thought experiment that would imagine the recent waves of financialization as rooted in resistance. Here I suggest that the spike in financialized borrowing (both among nations in the Third World and among individuals in the First) might be read not merely as the punitive and predatory machinations of capital, but also as (Pyrrhic) working-class or subaltern attempts to reclaim stolen value. In an age of neoliberal and neocolonial retrenchment, there may be merit in imagining debt as a means to claim wealth otherwise clawed back by capital.

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 52