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Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis

The subprime crisis and ensuing credit crunch has once again placed global finance and its (lack of) regulatory arrangements at the heart of mainstream political discourse. Straightforward media alarm at instability and contagion have confirmed faltering market sentiment and prompted the usual calls for transparency and accountability by politicians and central bankers. But the subprime crisis is also a signal event, highlighting deeper changes related to the ongoing financialisation of global capitalism and how this impacts upon people as they attempt to conduct their everyday lives. The unprecedented expansion of individual credit and debt has fostered a plethora of risk management techniques that point to urgent questions linked to the very sustainability of the global financial system in its current form. In this way the subprime crisis can be read as the fulcrum of wider shifts in the nature of debt, risk and expectations regarding (ir)responsible financial behaviour.

Roundtable Discussion of the Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Participants - Ben Rosamond (Warwick, chair); Andrew Gamble (Cambridge); Robert Wade (LSE); Brigitte Young (Muenster). Including question and answer session.

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Economics

Good Inflation, Bad Inflation: The Housing Boom, Economic Growth and the Disaggregation of Inflationary Preferences in Britain and Ireland

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Colin Hay looks at the recent implosion of the house price bubble in the liberal market economies of Western Europe and asks whether this raises serious concerns about macroeconomic management there, focusing in particular on the counter-inflationary preferences of public authorities.

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Economics

Headlong into the Polanyian Dilemma: Reaction and Overreaction to Banking Sector Distress

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Matthew Watson discusses how the world credit crunch which began in the summer of 2007 has been responsible for the explicit politicisation of the housing market amidst a moral panic surrounding the status of homeowner.

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Economics

Buy-To-Let, Financialization and the Geographies of Risk

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Andrew Leyshon and Shaun French analyse the buy-to-let market and its economic implications, including social and financial advancement and the creation of distinct spatial trajectories of stress within post-credit crunch urban housing markets.

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Economics

The Global Credit Crunch as the Crisis of Artificial Liquidity

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Anastasia Nesvetailova discusses whether liquidity is the cause of the financial instability associated with the subprime crisis and the ensuing credit crunch, whilst asking how liquidity structures currently affect the workings of the economy.

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Economics

Embedded Liberalism is Dead, Long Live Embedded Liberalism: National Welfare Concerns and International Policy Responses to the Subprime Crisis

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Leonard Seabrooke looks at how the subprime crisis and resulting international credit crunch demonstrates how uniquely national welfare and financial systems can blend into broader world economy structures, in different ways providing both sources of stability and sources of instability for global finance.

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Economics

Financial Innovation: Frame, Conjuncture and Bricolage

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Ewald Engelen, Ismail Erturk, Julie Froud, Adam Leaver and Karel Williams collaborate on a paper about how the type of financial innovation which eventually led to the subprime crisis is constructed in different discourses, in financial journalism and official reports as much as in mainstream academic finance or social studies of finance.

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Economics

Asset-Based Welfare and the Financialisation of the Citizen

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Alan Finlayson discusses the ethics and political theory of response to the subprime crisis, situating his analysis with respect to the UK Government's attempts to create a 'financially literate' population suited to undertaking the move to an asset-based system of welfare.

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Economics

The Role of Financial Risk in Privatised Keynesianism

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Colin Crouch analyses postwar economic and financial regulation against a series of changes in the fundamental character of macroeconomic regimes, linking the current subprime crisis to the development of a regime of privatised Keynesianism.

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Economics

Specter of the Subprime Borrower: Moving Beyond the Credit Score Analysis

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Johnna Montgomerie asks the explicitly political questions of who are the subprime borrowers, how did they come to occupy such a position and what responsibility do public policy-makers and private sector creditors bear for their current status.

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Economics

When Credit Becomes Debt: Foreclosure and Forbearance in Subprime Mortgages

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Paul Langley discusses the impact - both political and economic - of major US Federal Government programmes in support for forbearance by lenders of mortgage debt within the US subprime sector.

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Economics

Man in the Black Hat: Who is to Blame for the Subprime Crisis?

12:25 Mon 05 Jan 2009

Timothy Sinclair analyses the way in which all financial crises seem to generate an explicitly political hunt for the culprit, and asks whether the American credit rating agencies legitimately fill such a role in the ongoing credit crunch.

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Economics