The Pursuit of (Past) Happiness? Middle-class Indebtedness and American Financialisation
The Pursuit of (Past) Happiness? Middle-class Indebtedness and American Financialisation
复制标题
追求（过去的）幸福？
DOI：
--
复制
发表时间：
2009
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
J. Montgomerie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Montgomerie
2008年底席卷金融市场的危机导致美国和欧洲的多家银行倒闭，包括投资和商业银行，以及保险巨头美国国际集团和两家美国联邦抵押贷款机构房利美和房地美的破产。随之而来的不稳定导致世界各地的股票市场急剧下跌。协调一致的单边政府干预使用了所有可以想到的政策工具，以解决银行业面临的流动性和偿付能力问题，以此作为支撑全球金融体系稳定的一种手段。本文分析了美国中等收入家庭面临的流动性和偿付能力问题，以阐明这场危机的政治、社会和经济层面。在2008年危机爆发之前，美国经济经历了一段漫长的金融市场增长时期。从新经济开始，首次公开募股(IPO)的狂潮和股东革命的到来重振了美国资本市场，推动了20世纪90年代的经济复苏。2001年互联网泡沫破裂后的7年，被描述为流动性过剩和信贷成本低廉的一段时期，我们现在知道，这段时期吹大了房地产和股市的一系列资产泡沫。“金融化”这个概念越来越多地被用来描述英美和欧洲的这段金融扩张时期。尽管金融化有不同的表现形式，但它是一个新的概念工具，被不同学科的社会科学家用来“从经验和理论上理解当代资本主义中金融的迅猛崛起”。在其最一般的层面上，金融化评估了个人、公司和国内经济如何越来越多地受到与金融市场的新关系的影响。金融化文献的一个关键方面评估了零售银行的创新如何通过改变家庭的投资和借贷模式，将个人或家庭整合到资本市场网络中。评价新政治经济学的两种主要理论范式得出了不同的结论，2009年3月第14卷第1期
The crisis gripping financial markets in late 2008 had brought about multiple bank failures, both investment and commercial, in the USA and Europe, as well as insolvency of the insurance giant AIG and the two US federal mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The resulting instability has sent stock markets around the world into precipitous decline. Coordinated and unilateral government interventions have used every conceivable policy tool to address the liquidity and solvency problems facing the banking industry as a means of shoring up stability in the global financial system. This article considers the liquidity and solvency problems facing middle-income US households in order to shed light on the political, social and economic dimensions of the crisis. Before the crisis struck over the course of 2008, the US economy experienced a protracted period of financial market growth. Beginning with the New Economy, a frenzy of Initial Public Offerings (IPO) and the advent of shareholder revolution revitalised US capital markets, contributing to the economic recovery of the 1990s. The seven years following the dot.com bubble burst in 2001 were characterised as a period of excess liquidity and cheap credit that we now know inflated a series of asset bubbles in property and stock markets. The concept of ‘financialisation’ has been used increasingly to describe this period of financial expansion across Anglo-America and Europe. Despite its different manifestations, financialisation is a new conceptual tool used by social scientists across various disciplines ‘to make empirical and theoretical sense of the tempestuous rise of finance in contemporary capitalism’. At its most general level, financialisation evaluates how individuals, firms and the domestic economy are increasingly mediated by new relationships with financial markets. A key aspect of the financialisation literature evaluates how innovation in retail banking integrates individuals or households into capital market networks through transformations in households’ investment and borrowing patterns. Different conclusions are drawn by the two main theoretical paradigms used to evaluate New Political Economy, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2009