Financialization and the subprime subject: the experiences of homeowners during California’s housing boom

This paper extends scholarship on the ‘everyday practices’ of global finance by specifically examining the decisions, motivations, and financial practices of homeowners caught up in the subprime lending boom in California. Drawing on evidence from 80 in-depth interviews in Oakland and Stockton, the paper explores how homeowners enacted their own subject positions within the financial ecologies of subprime markets. The research enriches and complicates our understanding of the interplay between financialization and the formation of financial subjects, and highlights how race and class, affective ties, and distinct socio-spatial relations shape and inform borrowers’ financial decisions and practices, even during a period of excessive credit access and house price speculation.     

Embedding financialization: a policy review of the English Affordable Homes Programme

Decent, affordable housing continues to be a major concern for policy-makers, providers and society at large. This paper contributes to the debate over the future of social housing in England by reviewing the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP). The AHP (2011–2015) saw the level of grant funding reduced dramatically; with the shortfall to be filled from housing associations own resources, increased rents and borrowing. To understand the implications of the AHP, this paper utilizes the concept of financialization. Financialization is a multifaceted process that seeks to explain the increased role and power of the financial markets in society. Specifically, the paper shows that the AHP leads to increased debt levels in the social housing sector, is predicated on short-termism and accumulation by dispossession. Finally, by employing financialization the paper also addresses debates about the nature of housing policy and how it can best be conceptualized.     

全球大型矿业公司发展动向分析

大型矿业公司是矿业市场参与的核心主体,全球大型矿业公司发展动向可以直观反映全球矿业市场基本形势。分析大型矿业公司最新发展战略和动向对我国矿业公司发展战略制定和走出去投资具有重要参考意义。本文分析了大型矿业公司发展的历程、垄断和金融化特点以及近年来发展动向,形成的主要结论如下：全球大型矿业公司经历了本土化、多元化、全球化、垄断和金融化以及低碳化和高技术化五个发展阶段;国际矿业公司在金融资本的参与下,占有了大量优质资源,垄断了全球矿业市场;美国、英国、南非、澳大利亚等西方矿业公司高度金融化,而中国、俄罗斯等国矿业公司金融化程度较低;全球主要大型矿业公司整体动向呈战略收缩态势。国际矿业公司的战略收缩对于我国公司来说既是机遇,也是挑战,我国矿业公司在投资过程中应高度谨慎,避免成为“接盘侠”。     

The alternative financialization of the German housing market

While many European countries experienced a global housing boom in the early/mid-2000s, house prices and mortgage debt in Germany stagnated. Therefore, the German housing system is considered to be operating outside financialized capitalism. Despite Germany’s apparent stability, we argue that an alternative trajectory of financialization in the German housing market can be observed. This trajectory has followed three stages or ‘waves’. The first wave started around the time of German unification and is characterized by the failed attempt of West German banks to marketize and liberalize German housing finance. The second wave started in the late 1990s and is characterized by the ‘financialized privatization’ of many public housing associations and the speculative investments of private equity firms and hedge funds. The third wave started during the global financial crisis and is characterized by booming housing prices and the market entry of listed real estate companies.     

Land Redevelopment and the Built Environment in Third-Wave Cities: Review and Synthesis

I seek to synthesize several different approaches to issues of urban land redevelopment and the built environment. The essay focuses on developments in the third and current historical wave of capitalist development. I describe the economic logic of land-use change with reference to both commercial and residential property. This logic has become intimately intertwined with global finance and this state of affairs has introduced new elements of fluidity and risk into the built environment. Issues of urban policy and the role of municipal authorities in shaping urban land markets are then considered. I describe how local government agencies increasingly pursue development projects in complex partnerships with representatives of the real-estate industry. In the second half of the paper, the overall argument is recast by reference to three important trends in regard to land-redevelopment and the built environment in third-wave cities, namely, the economic and architectural renaissance of central business districts, the widespread gentrification of inner-city neighborhoods, and the emergence of a new post-suburban phase of peripheral urban expansion.     

Clever Odysseus: narratives and strategies of rental property investor subjectivity in Australia

Abstract

This paper is about property investment discourse in Australia, and how it constructs ‘property investor subjectivity’. Using the conceptual frameworks of financialization and governmentality studies, the paper examines current policy settings, media, books and, in particular, property investment seminars. Property investment discourse often takes the narrative form of the ‘property investment journey’, invoking Campbell’s ‘monomyth’ of the ‘hero’s journey’. It also presents a range of strategies of investment, underpinned by a common commitment to strategic thinking, and a rethinking of debt, such that an individual comes to know themselves through property investment. The paper shows how property investor subjectivity obtains purchase in contemporary subjectivity formation, and presents both challenges and opportunities for a counter discourse that advances the prospect of policies for more affordable, accessible housing and financial security.     

Generation rent and the financialization of housing: a comparative exploration of the growth of the private rental sector in Ireland,the UK and Spain

Abstract

This article analyses the growth of the private rental sector over recent years through a comparative analysis of three classic homeowner societies: Ireland, the UK and Spain. The article argues that theories of financialization provide a useful framework for understanding ‘generation rent’. In particular, the cyclical nature of credit markets tends to undermine homeownership over the medium term. This contributes to and intensifies the wider set of policy changes associated with neoliberalism. The article also accounts for the divergent experiences of our three case study countries within their common trajectory. It does so through an analytical focus on the interaction between global aspects of financialization and more nationally based ones, such as mortgage markets, as well as on how both are mediated by national policy regimes. The article thus aims to contribute to the emerging literature seeking to explain ‘generation rent’ and explore its significance, and more broadly to political economy approaches to housing system change.     

Local financialization,household debt,and the great recession

To test the relationship between local financial sector activity and household borrowing, I exploit the credit-supply shock that occurred prior to the Great Recession as a plausibly exogenous source of variation in borrowing behavior. Using a difference-in-differences approach I find that per-capita indebtedness increased by several thousand dollars—approximately 10%—more in states with a large local financial sector during the housing market boom. A similar positive relationship between financialization and indebtedness holds at the county level. These results suggest the growing influence of local financial markets as a fundamental cause of the Great Recession.     

Transnational migration,remittances and the financialization of housing in Colombia

Recently, various Latin American governments have sought to render migrants as development agents by channelling remittances to specific sectors such as housing and finance. The available literature has yet to articulate how these developments are reconfiguring the political economy of housing in the region. The paper draws on empirical data collected at both ends of the Colombia–UK migration network. It argues that the Colombian Government’s efforts to incorporate migrants into the polity through a renovated housing policy aim to institutionalize migrant households’ transnational practices and their links with global circuits of capital and finance. They are underpinned by the repositioning of housing away from consumption into an investment item and driver of economic growth and the financial sector as the main medium for households’ access to public and private housing, and other basic services. These developments have taken place in the context of a broader process of financialization of the global development agenda in the last three decades.     

The integrating role of private homeownership and mortgage credit in British neoliberalism

Abstract

The financialization of the British economy has occurred in part due to the deregulation of the financial sector by the Thatcher government, which was necessary to support their drive to widen access to private housing. However, explaining how the macroeconomic effects of increased homeownership and mortgage credit under the Thatcher government can be more concretely linked to the micro-foundations of the economy and subject formation remains an under-explored research area. This paper contributes to such research through the use of Foucault’s theory of morality to explain how the Thatcher government promoted an ethics-oriented morality that transformed private homeownership into a dominant social norm and established a mortgage-led accumulation regime in Britain. Additionally, the widespread acceptance of private homeownership subjected the British public to the disciplinary rules-oriented morality of mortgage finance, which integrated a previously fractured social base into a functioning social formation under British neoliberalism.