Contesting household debt in Croatia: the double movement of financialization and the fetishism of money in Eastern European peripheries

Mikuš, Marek

doi:10.1007/s10624-019-09551-8

Cited by 18 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…They developed legal and economic expertise, growing into an organisation of some 15,400 members (Udruga Franak 2015). The leadership were mostly middle-class, highly educated professionals, which may explain their preference and capacity to pursue their cause through conventional tactics (Mikuš 2019). The membership structure was in line with the 2012 survey data which showed that Swiss franc debtors were typically younger families with earnings above-average income (Rodik 2015).…”

Section: Who Stands Up To Courts and Banks? Actors And Strategiessupporting

confidence: 63%

Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

Dolenec

Kralj

Balković

2021

East European Politics

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We establish features of political opportunity structures of Croatia and Serbia as parameters that help explain the strategies pursued by housing and anti-debt social movements in the two countries. Relying on the protest event analysis data for 2007-2017, we identify peaks in protest mobilisations and levels of disruptiveness. Furthermore, we analyse the actors' strategy of electoral contestation and compare it across cases. In Croatia, movement actors organised into political parties, while in Serbia, the electoral turn has remained fringe. We argue that this divergence can be explained by different levels of institutional openness to new challengers.

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Section: Who Stands Up To Courts and Banks? Actors And Strategiessupporting

confidence: 63%

Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

Dolenec

Kralj

Balković

2021

East European Politics

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“…Western banks played a major role, activating a predatory regime based on large-scale retail activities and risky credit lending, which swallowed CEE households in a mass of debt, which has been reinforced after the global financial crisis. 7 To conclude, the paper suggests that it is thanks to their subsidiary structure that the Western banks' predatory model based on debt proved to be resilient to the boom and bust cycle. By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario, it emerges that the form of the subsidiaries has not only allowed the parent banks to benefit from the bailout package-confirming the commonly held belief that bailout money goes in only to flow out again; but also that the subsidiaries and their hybrid condition at the intersection of the core and periphery has enabled new patterns of value extraction and valorization that both sustain and exceed the same dependency relation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Past and present financialization in Central Eastern Europe: the case of Western subsidiary banks

Maso

2021

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies

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By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) the paper assesses the role of Western banks in the region and how their penetration and 'resilience' is influenced by their parent and subsidiary structure. While taking stock of the variegated post-socialist transformation in CEE, it employs a genealogical method to explore how the universal bank model and its current 'bifurcation' into parent and subsidiary bank provides a lens through which to investigate a new form of dependency within the uneven geography of Europe. In the light of Rudolf Hilferding's theory of the universal bank and the theorization of financial capital, it illustrates how the present form of bank capitalization overlaps with previous forms of imperial expansion. If on one hand subsidiaries sit at the intersection between the core (home country) and the periphery (host country)-reproducing some of the old spatial hierarchy of capitalism; on the other they also enable new patterns of value extraction that go beyond these relations of dependency. Their autonomy in raising capital and in responding to local host jurisdiction in their "second home market" opens a new financial dimension of extractions that escape the oversight of national and regional regulatory regimes.

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“…Croatia’s debt boom, as in other Eastern European countries at the time, was characterized by a ‘mainstreaming of predatory lending’ – targeting of both subprime and prime borrowers with practices such as foreign currency loans and variable interest rates that banks adjusted at their discretion (Mikuš, 2019a: 297). Swiss franc loans (mostly housing loans), with principals indexed to the franc but repaid in the local currency, proved particularly destructive as the appreciation of the franc after the GFC drastically inflated principals and repayment instalments (Rodik, 2019; Rodik and Žitko, 2015).…”

Section: Mortgaged Home-ownership and Transformations Of Croatia’s Ho...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Apart from these technical considerations, some interlocutors admitted that banks operated loose credit policies. To mention one major example, credit risk assessments for Swiss franc loans systematically underrated the actual risk of repayment (Mikuš, 2019a: 308; Rodik, 2019: 100–2).…”

Section: Credit Scoring Subsidy Eligibility and Middle-classnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia

Mikuš

2022

Critique of Anthropology

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Some recent anthropological accounts of middle classes centred on their indebted home-ownership. They stressed its two contrastive logics fitting a wider binary – exposing ‘squeezed’ middle classes in the global North to increasing risks, and supporting the ascent of their ‘new’ counterparts in the South. The genealogy of middle-class housing debt in Croatia presented in this article reveals another, post-socialist trajectory where mundane and opaque institutional practices regulating access to housing finance, such as bank credit scoring and the allocation of state housing benefits, were key in steering a middle class inherited from socialism towards mortgaged home-ownership. The latter was articulated as a middle-class experience only after the 2000s credit boom had come to an end and the consequences of rampant predatory lending became visible and subject to contestation. The resulting middle-class subjectivities are ambiguous and, as comparisons with other Eastern European cases suggest, accessible for a range of political projects.

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Contesting household debt in Croatia: the double movement of financialization and the fetishism of money in Eastern European peripheries

Cited by 18 publications

References 32 publications

Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

Keeping a roof over your head: housing and anti-debt movements in Croatia and Serbia during the Great Recession

Past and present financialization in Central Eastern Europe: the case of Western subsidiary banks

‘New’ but ‘Squeezed’: Middle Class and Mortgaged Homeownership in Croatia

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