The strategy of default

This article investigates what happens when personal investors disinvest from the implicit deontic contract of indebtedness. What happens, when consumer debtors begin to default strategically, before due time? When the uncertainty of contract, title and ownership leads to mass trespass? When student debtors decide to abscond rather than pay off loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy? These are some of the strategies that personal debtors have resorted to, en masse, in the “aftermath” of the financial crisis. This article argues that the monological vision of financial markets needs to be replaced by a dialogic understanding of debtor and creditor relations which does not treat consensus as a given.