Securitising Suburbia: The Transformation of Anglo-American Mortgage Finance

By Paul A. Langley. 2006

110 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Informed by and contributing to approaches to finance that draw on Foucault and actor-network theory, the paper focuses on the contemporary transformation of Anglo-American mortgage finance. This transformation is understood to entail the lengthening of mortgage networks and their increased interconnection with the multiple networks of the capital markets; the making of suburban subjects as property investors in order to produce and extend mortgage borrowing in a booming housing market; and, in particular, the constitution of mortgage-backed securitisation (MBS) techniques through the calculative tools of off-balance sheet accounting, asset management, and credit rating. MBS is the practice of ‘bundling’ together a stream of future obligations arising from mortgagors repayments to provide the basis for the issue of, and the payment of principal and interest on, securities.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/299d402eb86b12cd8543b069439f96ef741a98d0

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Citations in the corpus

Geographies of money and finance I: Cultural economy, politics and place (2011, methodology): “However, this model relied on householders acting as responsible ‘investor subjects’ (Langley, 2006b).”
Financializing space, spacing financialization (2011, background): “His analysis of the securitisation of mortgage finance is strongly influenced by actor-network theory, in as much as he argues that the fusion of global and retail markets may be understood as a lengthening of domestic financial networks as both assets and liabilities become entangled in the capital”
Understanding the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis: Lessons for Scholars of International Political Economy (2011, background): “Particularly noteworthy was the work of Langley (2006), who called on scholars to pay more attention to growth of the MBS market in the United States and United Kingdom.”
Banks as Continuous Reinvention (2007, background): “As Langley or Leyshon and Thrift have emphasised, the everyday world of finance as led by retail banks was in many ways connected with innovation in the wholesale money markets.(38) Thus, the feedstock of mass consumer savings created an investment management industry: in the UK and USA savings equa”
The Capitalization of Almost Everything (2007, background): “…within the economic system as a whole (Dore, 2000), through the pressure exerted on corporations in capital markets (Froud et al, 2006; Pike, 2006; Sinclair, 2005), to the equity effects of the financial system on individuals and households (Froud et al, 2005; Langley, 2006; Martin, 2002).”
The Financialization of Home and the Mortgage Market Crisis (2008, unknown): “…takes places in global cities; highly concentrated command points that function as a global marketplace for finance (Sassen 2001; see also Langley 2006; Pryke & Lee 1995), such as New York and London.4 This is possible because MBS are, in theory, much more transparent than mortgage…”
Financialization and the Consumer Credit Boom (2008, unknown): “Cultural political economists of finance who draw on the Foucault-inspired category of ‘governmentality’ have similarly focused their attention on the assembly of ‘investor subjects’ (Aitken 2007; Knights 1997; Langley 2006b, 2007).”