Paul Langley

The Making of Investor Subjects in Anglo-American Pensions

An individualisation of responsibility and risk is underway in US and UK pensions, as both state and employers scale back insurance commitments that expanded during the post-1945 era. Approached from the perspective of the Foucauldian-inspired governmentality literature, this neoliberal reworking of responsibility and risk across state and occupational pensions is characterised by the summoning up of the responsible individual worker as an entrepreneurial investor subject. Collective insurance, as a technology for constructing, managing, and pooling ‘risk’ as potential danger, is sidelined in favour of the promotion of individual investment to calculate, embrace, and bear ‘risk’ as opportunity or reward. As pension guides produced by state agencies for popular consumption illustrate, only financial market investment appears as capable of providing the individual with a secure and ‘free’ retirement. Contradictions in neoliberal government ensure, however, that the investor as a subject position that is called up in this discourse is not simply an identity that is performed by individuals.

Ambiguities of global civil society

The concept of an emergent global civil society (GCS), an identifiable public sphere of voluntary association distinct from the architecture of states and markets, has become voguish in some approaches to international relations and international political economy, and in the practices of global governance. This article seeks to reveal the limitations of the prevailing commonsense framing of GCS. Challenging the idea that we can isolate an unambiguous GCS sphere, we focus instead on the particular uses of GCS – on the practices that are shaped in its name. We make a number of interventions to emphasise the conceptual and political ambiguity of GCS. First, we shift the emphasis from GCS as a bounded ‘non-governmental’; space to GCS as precisely a means of making global politics governable in particular ways. Second, we question the assumption of GCS as ‘voluntary association’, asking what it means for GCS to embody or represent the interests of social groups. Finally, we raise questions of the image of empowerment through GCS, highlighting the power relations, tensions and contradictions at the heart of a transformative politics.

Sub-prime mortgage lending: a cultural economy

Abstract Developing cultural economists’ concerns with the assembly of agency in financial markets, agency in sub-prime mortgage lending in the United States is shown to have been made up through calculative devices of risk. Credit reporting and scoring provided for the targeting, sorting, pricing and governing of customers in terms of risk. The securitization of mortgages into risk-structured financial instruments made possible extended lending. Interest-only adjustable rate mortgage products called up mortgagors who, as leveraged investors, embraced risk in a rising property market. The current sub-prime mortgage crisis is understood in critical terms as a moment when the contradictions of these risk devices and their incapacity to capture the uncertain future have come to the surface, and agency in sub-prime lending has been disassembled. Cultural economy is thus shown to make a distinctive contribution to the politicization of sub-prime that stresses the ambiguous politics of calculation.

Securitising Suburbia: The Transformation of Anglo-American Mortgage Finance

Informed by and contributing to approaches to finance that draw on Foucault and actor-network theory, the paper focuses on the contemporary transformation of Anglo-American mortgage finance. This transformation is understood to entail the lengthening of mortgage networks and their increased interconnection with the multiple networks of the capital markets; the making of suburban subjects as property investors in order to produce and extend mortgage borrowing in a booming housing market; and, in particular, the constitution of mortgage-backed securitisation (MBS) techniques through the calculative tools of off-balance sheet accounting, asset management, and credit rating. MBS is the practice of ‘bundling’ together a stream of future obligations arising from mortgagors repayments to provide the basis for the issue of, and the payment of principal and interest on, securities.

Financialization and the Consumer Credit Boom

Viewed in retrospect, the concept of ‘financialization’ highlights the massive growth in the issue and trading of ownership claims on all manner of instruments. It has also opened the way for research linking these changes in the financial markets to disciplinary transformations in corporate management and governance. There are, however, future prospects for financialization research once the concept is re-worked from a cultural political economy perspective and changes in the financial markets are linked to the consumer credit boom in Anglo-American economies. Grounded in the calculative creation and management of default risk by lenders, markets for asset-backed securities and credit derivatives have emerged that trade claims on the future repayments of borrowers on car loans, credit cards and so on. Disciplinary transformations also arise in everyday financial self-government. Thrift and prudence are no longer paramount in extending individual freedom and security, but are displaced by the responsible and entrepreneurial meeting, management and manipulation of outstanding obligations.

Debt, discipline, and government: foreclosure and forbearance in the subprime mortgage crisis

The extensive punishment of debtors through foreclosure, and federal and state support for forbearance by lenders and loan servicers, are key features of the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States of America. From a Foucauldian perspective, foreclosure and forbearance give rise to questions about the production and reproduction of subprime mortgage debt through disciplinary and governmental power relations—questions that are neglected in the dominant understanding of subprime as an anomalous and unregulated market realm where predatory lenders preyed on borrowers. In addressing these questions I make a two-stage argument. First, I show subprime to have been largely unexceptional in the ways in which it was governed as a legitimate and highly profitable part of a mass mortgage market prior to the crisis: legal processes of foreclosure combined with disciplinary technologies for the calculation of risk and the calling up of responsible, entrepreneurial, and self-disciplined financial subjects. Second, it follows that forbearance, as an apparently progressive response to the crisis, is actually deeply ambivalent and more politically problematic than activists and supporters typically acknowledge. Forbearance does suspend disciplinary norms, opening up space for disagreement over whether lenders should be coresponsible with borrowers for the reproduction of mortgages into the future. But, simultaneously, forbearance closes down the prospects for coresponsibility beyond immediate debt rescheduling, and reinforces the legal, calculate, and self-disciplinary operation of power.

Liquidity Lost: The Governance of the Global Financial Crisis

The interventions of crisis management during the 2007 to 2011 financial crisis were not simply responses to a set of given developments in markets, banking or neo-liberal capitalism. Nor can those interventions be adequately explained as the actions of sovereign state officials and institutions. Instead, Langley argues, processes of crisis governance are shown to have established six principal technical problems to be acted upon: liquidity, toxicity, solvency, risk, regulation, and debt and that the governance of these technical problems, is shown to have been strategically assembled in order to secure the continuation of a particular, financialized way of life that depends upon global financial circulations. Contributing to interdisciplinary debates in cultural economy and the social studies of finance, and grounded in extensive empirical research, this book offers an innovative analysis of how the contemporary global financial crisis was governed. Through an exploration of the interventions made by central banks, treasuries, and regulatory authorities in the Anglo-American heartland of the crisis between 2007 and 2011, experimental and strategic apparatuses of crisis governance are shown to have emerged. These discrete apparatuses established the six technical problems to be acted upon, but also shared certain proclivities and preferences. Crisis governance assembled discourses and devices of economy in relation with sovereign monetary, fiscal, and regulatory techniques, and elicited an affective atmosphere of confidence. It also sought to secure the financialized way of life which turns on the opportunities ostensibly afforded by uncertain financial circulations, and gave rise to post-crisis technical fixes designed to advance the resilience of banking and the macro-prudential regulation of financial stability. Thus, the consensus that prevails across economics, political economy, and beyond - wherein sovereign state institutions are cast as coming to the rescue of the markets, banking, or neo-liberal capitalism - conceals a great deal more than it reveals about the governance of the global financial crisis.

The Performance of Liquidity in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

‘Liquidity’ is highly significant to representations of the crisis that gripped financial markets from the summer of 2007. A wide-ranging ‘liquidity crisis’ is typically traced to the collapse of prices in markets for assets backed by or derived from the repayments of American subprime mortgagors, while public authorities are said to have responded by ‘restoring liquidity’ to markets in these now ‘distressed’ and ‘toxic assets’. Here the category of performativity is developed to enable a critical investigation of liquidity. The performance of liquidity in booming subprime markets is shown to have turned on the affirmation and exemplification of wider norms present in wholesale asset markets, and upon specific calculative and emotional valuations of risk through underwriting procedures, bond rating and hedging. However, the performance of liquidity contained its other, illiquidity, and this surfaced in subprime markets because asset prices symbolised risk valuations which could not capture incalculable future uncertainties. As the crisis broke, talk of liquidity and illiquidity licensed particular policy responses and closed down wider political debate.

'Economy', Sustainability and Sites of Transformative Space

This paper was initiated by Mary Mellor to bring together her work on alternatives for radical and sustainable transformation of the economy with Langley’s work on political economy. At the time, Mellor Chaired the University’s Sustainable City Research Institute in which Paul Langley was a Researcher. Mellor’s input looks at different forms of economic structuring and activity, including unpaid work. It forms part of a body of work that has developed radical new thinking on economic organisations and structuring that Mellor is applying to issues of social equity and democratic control of economic systems.

Transparency in the Making of Global Environmental Governance

During the 1990s, increasing transparency emerged as a key objective of those attempting to design the structures of contemporary global governance, touted as ` the solution to everything from international ® nancial crises to arms races to street crime’’ . A wide array of social forces, non-governmental organisations, state and inter-state agencies have invoked the ideal of transparency in the making of the various structures of global governance. Transparency has featured in competing normative visions of global governance, taking on a range of contested meanings in differing contexts. Inquiry into the drive for increased transparency offers, then, a useful vantage point from which to consider the political processes associated with the making of the structures of contemporary global governance. This paper traces and accounts for the drive for increased transparency as it has been felt in global environmental governance (GEG). Scholars in International Studies (IS) concerned with GEG cast transparency as a norm that has become signi® cant in transforming state behaviour. Increased transparency with regard to states’ environmental performance assists in the implementation of inter-state environmental treaties. It is the contention of this paper that such a representation of the rise of transparency in GEG is at best narrow and partial and, at worst, misleading. The impact of transparency in GEG is not as clear as the existing research would suggest. Transparency has become signi® cant not simply in terms of implementing inter-state environmental treaties, but is coming to permeate the structure of environmental governance in a broader and more pervasive manner. Transparency tends to prompt a belief in the desirability of a release of information concerning the environmental performance of institutionalised practices across both state and market institutions. Inquiry into this broader drive for transparency serves to illuminate important contested processes of change currently underway in the making of GEG. The paper is divided into three principal parts. To begin, the vague and elusive meaning of transparency as it has been advanced across the contemporary