@emadegi.bsky.social
Political economy of finance and Economic Sociology of work. Researcher at the University of Milan.
Big thanks to the editorial team and reviewers. I am also deeply grateful to everyone who supported me throughout the development of this paper.
19.12.2024 16:54 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 09/9
Centering predation in our understanding of financialisation changes how we see its core dynamics. Predation isn’t peripheral or an exception—it’s central, built on innovations in leverage and asset capture that have redefined financial power.
8/9
Subprime wasn’t isolated. Its roots trace back to corporate raiders and real estate developers, not traditional lenders.
From 1960s asset stripping to 1980s equity-driven practices, subprime extended these logics into a new era.
7/9
I propose Raiding Finance to capture this logic of predation. Unlike rentierism, it’s not about collecting rents but about using leverage to capture and strip assets quickly.
Subprime wasn't an anomaly—it reveal a broader shift in how predation operates under financialisation
6/9
Subprime relied on repeated refinancing, where new debt replaced old debt, sidelining borrowers’ incomes entirely.
Default was not a failure but a planned outcome—a strategy to extract value by seizing and liquidating homes. This wasn’t rent extraction—it was something new.
5/9
A closer look at subprime reveals something different. These loans weren’t designed to be repaid.
Instead, profitability was decoupled from repayment, with defaults built into the strategy. Lenders extracted value through refinancing and foreclosure from the home equity.
4/9
Subprime mortgages are often viewed as the most extreme example of this logic. Loans targeting marginalized groups, designed with high fees and interest, appear to exemplify predation by rentiers extracting from the most vulnerable.
But does this interpretation hold up?
3/9
Financialisation has often been understood through the rentier model, where financial actors extract value by controlling scarce resources like housing, land, or credit. Predation, in this view, is about rent extraction—charging others for access to these resources.
2/9
This article revisits key historical cases to rethink how financial predation changed and became central under financialisation.
Happy to share my first article from my PhD thesis, now published in NPE:
"Rethinking predation under financialisation through the history of subprime mortgages: Toward a raider logic of finance." 🧵
Read here: doi.org/10.1080/1356....
DM me for one of 50 free copies.
3/9
Financialisation has often been understood through the rentier model, where financial actors extract value by controlling scarce resources like housing, land, or credit. Predation, in this view, is about rent extraction—charging others for access to these resources.
2/9
The article revisits key historical cases to rethink how financial predation changed and became central under financialisation.
