By emphasizing the problem of debt in the present crisis, then, we can cut across many of the other explanations currently on offer, whether those highlight the hubris of financiers, the folly of borrowers, the irrationality of the institutional structures, or the imbalances rooted in the international system. It might be best to say that all of those explanations are somehow true, and more: we are living through a generalized crisis of the regime of indebtedness, that ensemble of structured, codified, and lived social relations upon which the reproduction of the system depends. That is to say, this regime comprises not only the financial and legal infrastructure that upholds capitalist enterprises and imposes market constraints, but also the interwoven expectations and responsibilities that put the whole apparatus in motion. The current regime of indebtedness operates on a rather different scale, and along a greater number of axes, than earlier ones. Today it is not just the “national debt” and the provision of industrial or commercial credit that is under pressure, but also new flows of international credit, as well as various deeply penetrated kinds of household debt. At the limit we may say that the collective that is now indebted to itself has become unbounded—perhaps it is itself what some theorists have started to call the global multitude. So we are witnessing today a crisis in the way structures of credit seize, partition, and exploit the productivity of the multitude, which finally owes its powers to nothing other than itself.