Crisis in Space: Ruminations on the Unevenness of Financialization and its Geographical Implications ¹

European Union financial integration, a geography perspective

“…The crisis originated in summer 2007, when the US subprime mortgage market melted down (Aalbers, ), resulting in a run on the repo and the securitization‐fuelled shadow banking system (Thiemann, ). In August 2007, three of BNP Paribas' investment funds terminated redemptions, signalling the start of crisis transmission to Europe (Engelen, ). The big universal banks, such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Nataxis, but also smaller German regional banks (Hendrikse, ; Howarth & Quaglia, ) had toxic US mortgages on their balance sheets, acquired in the boom years, triggering obligations they could no longer meet (Bayoumi, ; Fligstein & Habinek, ; Jones, Kelemen, & Meunier, ).…”

“…Given the substantial role of Northern European banks in the genesis and transmission of the crisis, the imaginary guiding the crisis resolution is remarkable and arguably complacent and false (Engelen, ; Engelen et al, ). In efforts at resolution, the crisis has consistently been presented as typical to “Anglo‐American capitalism” exported like a “cancer” to Europe (Bieling, ; Engelen, ). This was bad capitalism supposedly kept outside the European “island of stability” (Bassens & Van Meeteren, ).…”

“…The priority given to constrain activities of hedge funds in this directive was remarkable. While hedge funds were portrayed as the Anglo‐American “locusts” in the European financial space (Engelen, ) and were blamed for the downfall of proud European national champions such as ABN AMRO (Van Meeteren & Bassens, ), hedge funds had played no role in the financial crisis (Quaglia, ). Like the Lamfalussy expert group a decade earlier, the De Larosière () expert group produced a European financial governance overhaul report (Spendzharova, ).…”

Geographies of Securitized Catastrophe Risk and the Implications of Climate Change

“…Finally, economic geographers have begun to reconceptualize the spatial characteristics and footprint of finance, calling for a finer‐grained geographic account of the processes that constitute financialization as such (Christophers , Engelen ). Contra the analytical units of the regulation school (Boyer ), they have suggested the inadequacy of conceptualizing “financialization through the geographical prism of national economic space” (French, Leyshon, and Wainwright , 9; see also Christophers ).…”

Crisis and the Reproduction of Core-Periphery Relations on the Hungarian Housing Market

“…They analyze these concrete institutional setups and socioeconomic circumstances in order to account for exactly how the systemic pressures of global financial capitalism are translated to other scales (Hudson and Hadjimichalis, 2014;Hudson, 2016) . We thus situate ourselves theoretically between recent propositions within economic geography for re-theorizing uneven development (see Peck, 2016), the post-crisis burgeoning literature on financialization (see Engelen, 2012), and writings on variegated capitalism (see Peck and Theodore, 2007) .…”