1,721,128 research outputs found
Laying the foundations for a crisis: mapping the historico-geographical construction of residential mortgage backed securitization in the UK
No full textThis article will explore the geographical origins of Residential Mortgage Backed Securitization (RMBS) in the United States and map the subsequent migration of RMBS, as idea, technology and investment vehicle, to the United Kingdom and other nation-states during the 1990s. It will illustrate how RMBS was used as a medium to circulate capital and construct urban space, and seek to interpret the development of RMBS and the contemporary credit crisis in the UK through a series of historical, political and sociological lenses. It argues that, despite travelling across the globe, this financial innovation has maintained a spatial sensitivity since the idea of securitization has been embodied and (re)interpreted in specific spaces to comply with local economic, political and social institutions. It also argues that this is an important primer to understanding the ‘credit crunch’ of 2007 and its repercussions. The article focuses particularly on how the current significance of securitization and RMBS can be traced back to the ‘Big Bang’ and the wider processes of the competitive re-regulation of the City of London and the British financial system more generally during the mid-1980s. It shows the differential evolution of securitization in the UK and US, and in so doing argues that such spatial variations have left different financial institutions in the two economies exposed to different forms of credit and market risk
Securitization, innovation and emergence: circulations of knowledge and capital in Europe
No full textFinancializing space
No full textFinancialization, it is argued, has agency at a number of scales, ranging from higher levels of instability within the economy as a whole, through pressure exerted on corporations by capital markets, to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households. The paper develops a sympathetic critique of the concept, arguing that the purchase of financialization on the nature of change within contemporary society has been relatively underplayed when compared to similar concepts such as neoliberalization. While the concept of financialization has the potential to unite researchers across cognate social science fields and so build badly needed critical mass and bring recognition to the social significance of money and finance, we argue that to date research has been insufficiently attentive to the role of space and place, both in terms of its processes and its effects. Research on financialization also tends to be characterized by an overly pessimistic view of the nature and future of financial markets. The paper explores a number of possibly fruitful directions for work on financialization to pursue, focusing in particular on the concepts of the financial ecology and financial citizenship
Deconstructing 'offshore' industries: the emergent spaces of tax planning in asset-backed finance
No full textNumber crunching: financialization and spatial strategies of risk organization
No full textThe emergence of the credit crunch, as a consequence of the US subprime crisis, has received considerable attention by economic geographers and social scientists. Despite this, contemporary narratives have principally focused on the global geography of the credit crunch, leading to a dearth of studies on other geographical scales, particularly regional spaces. This article seeks to address this gap by examining how regional spaces and financial institutions were reconfigured through the politics of financialization throughout the 1990s, which stimulated the adoption of inherently spatial strategies, connecting them to global markets, to increase shareholder value. It is argued in this article that these politics and strategies contributed to the vulnerability of these ‘traditional’ regional banks during the British financial crisis. Furthermore, it provides an insight into how financial elites generated trans-local networks that facilitated the financialization of regional housing markets in the UK
Tax doesn't have to be taxing: London's 'onshore' finance industry and the fiscal spaces of a global crisis
No full textIn this paper I will explore London’s onshore finance industry and how it facilitates corporate tax avoidance programmes. In doing so, I will discuss how financial elites design transactions and corporate activities so as to minimise their exposure to taxation, and how these structures are shaped by the international geographies of taxation. I will investigate an area of London’s financial sector that has previously been neglected by geographers and social scientists. Finally, I turn to illustrate how tax minimisation strategies are implemented, through the example of residential mortgage-backed securitisation, and how tax-minimisation strategies made securitisation a practical tool for financiers. This provides new insights into how taxation elites facilitated the increased financialisation of Britain’s economy and the severity of its exposure to the credit crunch
Elite knowledges: framing risk and the geographies of credit
No full textThis paper examines the history of credit scoring in Britain, and how this technology was imported from the US and adapted by the British retail banking sector. It seeks to highlight the elites who develop the social codes embedded within credit scoring software, to offer insight into the complex techno-economic networks that produce the geographies of financial inclusion, exclusion, and differential risk pricing. It is argued that the scientific status of these systems is questionable, due to the social interactions involved within the statistical modelling. Finally, the paper suggests that the spaces of credit are fluid, based upon the frequent social recalibrations of these models
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