Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-dfsvx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T13:32:59.479Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Structured Subprime Securities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2022

Dave Elder-Vass
Affiliation:
Loughborough University
Get access

Summary

This chapter brings us to the heart of finance: the Wall Street investment banks. It discusses the structured securities through which they parcelled up and re-sold the loan repayment commitments of mostly poorer residential property buyers in the United States, leading to the crash of 2007–2009 and the global financial crisis that followed. The objective is not to create new interpretations of the crisis itself, but rather to show the implications for the larger argument of the book. The chapter asks how these new financial products were developed, how they were fitted to the existing institutional and discursive environment, and what work was done to manipulate that environment to fit them. It also asks how these products were constructed as having value, and how financial actors were brought into the asset circles for them, stressing the central role played by the ratings agencies in constructing asset sets: groups of assets that investors come to think of as equivalent to each other, so that investors who are part of the asset circle for existing assets in the set are smoothly inducted into the asset circle for further assets simply by inserting these new assets into the set.

Type
Chapter
Information
Inventing Value
The Social Construction of Monetary Worth
, pp. 170 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×