P. 3 “Financialisation, the increased importance of capital markets in turning the material economy into financial assets to be traded on global markets, is a key to understanding how debt circulates in global markets. The contemporary creation of new housing, urban infrastructure and student loans are all examples of how the material economy is as often as much about generating tradeable financial assets in global markets as responding to local demand. Scholars comment on the startling growth of traded assets in the run-up to the global financial crisis of 2008, and the importance of these flows to the UK and the US.”
P. 4 The speculative activity in financial markets was certainly not confined to housing. Consumer credit (eg car loans, credit card debt, student loans etc) grew rapidly in the decade before the global financial crisis, and was also converted into credit derivatives on global markets. Many argued that consumer debt replaced the state in stimulating demand, and fuelled the economic boom experienced before the financial crisis.”
P. 6 In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, the UK government, like those of many other countries, pursued emergency fiscal stimulus meqasures and bank bailouts to avert collapse of the financial system. Years of “quantative easing” followed through which central banks bought government bonds and corporate ‘toxic’ debt. In many ways the public safety net, which had been shrinking as a mechanism of popular redistribution, had not disappeared byuty was “placed under the banking sstem” in a fashion that was “unprecedented in scale and duration… private sector debt was transformed into a sovereign debt crisis in what Blyth called the “greatest bait and switch in modern history”… consensus around austerity was pushed by many national governments, such as in the UK, and by international institutions such as the European Commission, the IMF and the European Central Bank. These institutions saw sovereign debt as potentially economically and politically destablising and imposed austerity policies as a precondition for financial aid. Many academic and policy observers argued that austerity was more political than economic that austerity was part of a longer-term political project to promote a permanent smaller state, a more reliberal state.”
P. 7 “Rarely did austerity policies remain at the central government level, but were often pushed down to the local level, where tough decisions about the distributional aspects of the cuts were forced onto local government… pushed the crisis to lower spatial scales of government, non-governmental actors and low-income households. Within the context of the UK and US, austerity was pushed down to the poorest areas in the country, which were dependent on redistributive grants from central government.”
P. 13 Citizens Advice highlights what they call “the hidden problem of household bill debt”. These debts are for essential services (including fuel, water, and telecoms, rent arrears, debts to government (such as council tax arrears or overpayments of tax credits) and fines or penalty notives. In 2017-18 Citizens Advice received almost 700,000 complaints about these debts – nearly double the complaints received about commercial consumer credit … the CAB estimates that in 2017 over £19 million was owed to government and essential services providers, a 34% increase from 2010.”
P. 18 “The growing use of surveillance and sanctions may be understood in relation to what Wacquant describes as the “distinctive paradox of neoliberal penalty”. That is, those governmental practices that celebrate the “free market” and individual responsibility, on the one hand, while deploying increasingly intrusive and punitive policies to protect the market, on the other.”
P. 23 “Smith examines Margaret Thatcher’s Right-to-buy policy as the key to understanding the “normalisation” of debt.”
P. 25 “Although there are many forms of the poverty premium, we argue that the most important form of poverty premium is in the debt infrastructure itself – the numerous ways in which small debts, owed to the private or public sector, are allowed to escalate into large debts and into problem debt.
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