Sub-prime mortgage lending: a cultural economy

By Paul A. Langley. 2008

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Developing cultural economists’ concerns with the assembly of agency in financial markets, agency in sub-prime mortgage lending in the United States is shown to have been made up through calculative devices of risk. Credit reporting and scoring provided for the targeting, sorting, pricing and governing of customers in terms of risk. The securitization of mortgages into risk-structured financial instruments made possible extended lending. Interest-only adjustable rate mortgage products called up mortgagors who, as leveraged investors, embraced risk in a rising property market. The current sub-prime mortgage crisis is understood in critical terms as a moment when the contradictions of these risk devices and their incapacity to capture the uncertain future have come to the surface, and agency in sub-prime lending has been disassembled. Cultural economy is thus shown to make a distinctive contribution to the politicization of sub-prime that stresses the ambiguous politics of calculation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78ab8244d449640d6b12c07b88b2a51d7dfc58fa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. S. French
2. T. Wainwright
3. Andrew Leyshon
4. Roger Lee
5. Sally Brooks
6. Daniela Gabor
7. Nigel Thrift
8. G. Clark

In Finance

1. S. French
2. Andrew Leyshon
3. T. Wainwright
4. G. Clark
5. Roger Lee
6. Nigel Thrift
7. Sally Brooks
8. Daniela Gabor

Citations in the corpus

• A very geographical crisis: the making and breaking of the 2007–2008 financial crisis (2009, background): “…in Iceland who are now forced to cut jobs and down services to reduce costs – to the myriad individuals affected by the fall out from problems such as these as well as those directly involved with predatory lenders, and subsequent acts of delinquency, default and foreclosure (Langley, 2008).”
• Financing Social Reproduction: The Gendered Relations of Debt and Mortgage Finance in Twenty-first-century America (2013, background): “So too do particular gendered assumptions regarding the determination of one’s creditworthiness or ‘riskiness’ (cf. Langley 2008, Aitken, 2010).”
• The digital revolution in financial inclusion: international development in the fintech era (2017, background): “…the ‘homo economicus’, since the ‘self-regulating capacities of subjects (…) have become key resources’ (Miller and Rose 2008: 26), financialisation transforms ‘everyday life’, creating new financial identities that Conform to the requirements of expanding financial markets (Langley, 2008, 2010).”
• The remit of financial geography—before and after the crisis (2009, background): “…previously shunned, but this flurry of lending was driven by miss selling and predatory lending which ensured that this round of long awaited reinvestment in many run down areas of the US would be short-lived and, ultimately, counter-productive (Langley 2008b; Wyly et al. 2004; Wyly et al. 2007).”
• Financializing space, spacing financialization (2011, background): “For example, Langley (2006a; 2006b; 2007; 2008) and Cutler and Waine (2001) have sought to show how new technologies of financialization have, in conjunction with the neo-liberal state, assembled self-disciplined suburban subjects.”