“If It Is Stocks, It Is Not Supposed to Be a Pyramid Scheme!” Financial Consultants, Illiberal Economies, and State‐Led Financialization in Postsocialist Kazakhstan

This article examines how the formal state‐centered economy and the informal economic sphere in Kazakhstan are enmeshed and intertwined. In analyzing these entanglements, I draw on Hayden and Muir's concept of “illiberal economies,” defined as alternative paradoxical spaces that are at once critical of formal economic institutions and also reliant on those institutions for procurement of value. I examine two illiberal economies, a state‐led financialization project and a pyramid scheme called “M‐Finance,” and demonstrate how the two were guided by similar logics and promoted by the same informal financial actors. I argue that the illiberal economy of M‐Finance was at once the product of state‐driven financialization and a critique of formal financial and political institutions. It was also a creative space for participants to pursue different forms of value, with financial value as primary. This case demonstrates how mainstream and alternative economies are interconnected and fueled by similar contradictions, aspirations, and imaginations of the future.