Assetization and the 'new asset geographies' (original) (raw)
Related papers
Struggling over new asset geographies
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023
In this response, we address criticisms of our definition of assetization from an accounting perspective, its overlap with financialization, and the relationship between value and valuation it posits. We reflect on a future agenda around assetization emphasizing the political dimensions of externalizing future costs and the implications of rising inflation.
A major question in understanding emerging geographies of property transformation is what discourses are impelling capital into new spaces and places: if powerful economic players are framing urban and rural land globally as part of a common landscape of accumulation, how are they narrating this commensuration? The spread of investment vehicles such as asset-‐backed securities and real estate investment trusts (REITs) is heightening institutional investors' ability to invest in real property, in various forms: urban real estate, infrastructure, and rural land. Financialization is facilitating new forms of land ownership, large-‐scale property transfers, and more rapid speculative flows. These transformations stand to reshape landscapes and livelihoods worldwide, from small farmers in the global South to renters in rapidly gentrifying cities in the North. Critical scholarship must dig deeper into why institutional investors, in the United States and beyond, are pushing into these new frontiers. I highlight a significant defensive element cropping up in the financial industry's crisis-‐era narratives, circulating among investors, economists, and US and international regulators: questions about what investments might be safe in a time of economic volatility. Emerging storylines, and reform measures such as Dodd-‐Frank and Basel III, look variously to safe assets – sometimes defined as real property, sometimes as anything but real property – to protect individual life chances, stabilize " too big to fail " financial institutions, and secure the future of the international financial system. I argue that this often-‐paradoxical search for safe assets is a powerful force in contemporary property transformations. The years since the 2008 collapse have been a peculiar time for observers of US cities: a crisis initially triggered by failed financial experiments in US real estate has produced a fresh wave of real property speculation globally, one which is rapidly exporting US urban financial instruments to a startlingly diverse set of landscapes. Banks and fund managers in twenty-‐six countries and counting across six continents are now using US-‐style real estate investment trusts (REITs) or REIT-‐like vehicles to speculate in urban real estate; more radical financial innovators are engineering REITs around farmland and timberland in the United States and beyond; ambitious solar infrastructure developers have tried their hand at asset-‐backed securitization (ABSs) and even more exotic financial vehicles like yieldcos 1 in their US, European, North and South American, and Asian expansions. Explaining this global phenomenon and apparent paradox is imperative: the lives of billions of people, from country and city, Global North and South, stand to be affected by its transformations in the meanings and treatment of property. Moreover, this new financialization offers an important lens into how formidable but brittle financial institutions in an era of " too big to fail, " and their neoliberal regulators, are attempting to reassert their power in an increasingly unruly world. In this chapter, I suggest that these diverse geographies and forms of real property financialization, in real estate, infrastructure, and rural resource-‐producing land, are being driven by common storylines and institutional imperatives at the center, even as contingent politics and cultural meanings shape a variety of experiences on the ground. It is tempting to read today's financial experiments as simply capitalism's latest move to transgress traditional boundaries in search of gain. The financial sector's own narratives often advance this sense of an aggressive but successful and creative capitalism, e.g. via Hernando de Soto-‐style " yield gap " arguments about markets' power to unlock nascent value in the world (e.g. Christophers 2010; White et al. 2012, Li 2014). In contrast, I argue here that defensive understandings are powerfully shaping the new property boom. Major financial institutions in the United States and beyond, and system regulators such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), US Federal Reserve, and Bank of International Settlements (BIS) have been rocked by repeated shocks since 2008, made no less serious by their ability to displace this pain onto the less powerful. In response, they have promulgated influential
This entry explains the rising popularity of the concept of financialization, despite it being considered a vague and chaotic concept. It also summarizes the wide-ranging multidisciplinary literature on financialization and makes a distinction between seven dimensions, or elements, of financialization, upon which a new definition of financialization is put forward that suggests that the power of the financialization literature lies in how it tries to understand the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states, and households. In discussing the different elements of financialization, the entry focuses on the financialization of the economy, nonfinancial firms, the state and households, but also on the processes of banking disintermediation and assetization. Finally, some avenues for future research are suggested. Keywords: assets, contemporary capitalism, corporate financialization, economic geography, financial geography, financial markets, global financial crisis, housing, globalization, lobbying, neoliberalism, political economy, real estate, state Definition of financialization: the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households.
So what is assetization? Filling some theoretical gaps
Dialogues in Human Geography
Birch and Ward (2022) propose the concept of assetization to frame a research agenda in Human Geography. This interesting proposal suffers from a rather imprecise definition of what an asset is, and that is a gap I intend to fill. I argue that assetization, for Birch and Ward, does not concern every type of asset, but only what can be described as ‘financialized assets’, including financial as well as intangible assets. I underline what financialized financial and intangible assets have in common and how that makes them relevant for analyzing contemporary capitalism. More precise specification of the assets created by Birch and Ward's assetization process clarifies the concept's true potential contribution.
Common problems or different questions: A critique of 'assetisation'
Dialogues in Human Geography , 2023
This commentary provides the contours of a Marxian critique of 'assetisation'. In doing so, the paper identifies a subjective approach to valuation and value which ties together Birch's and Ward's appeal to theoretical pluralism. The argument highlights how a focus on future-orientated valuation practices elide the question of class and production and, therefore, the very basis of rent and value. A call is made for geographers to better interrogate the relationship between rent and interest in the flurry of research around rentiership.
Nature, Capital and Neighborhoods: “Dispossession without Accumulation”?
Antipode, 2011
The ongoing economic crisis, which originated in the USA and has since spread rapidly to capital markets worldwide, is massive, complex, and many times contradictory. One could say the same for responses to the crisis as governments, firms and multi-national institutions struggle to grasp the full magnitude of the event. This article interrogates the key commodities involved-land, labor and money-and the always-uneasy relations between spaces of social reproduction and capital. Such ambivalence is critical to understanding how new economic realities are formed in light of retreating neoliberalism as markets become destabilized. The analysis provided suggests the commodities involved in the housing crisis are the basis for a countermovement against dispossession.
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2013
This paper argues that the ongoing financial and economic crisis creates an opportunity for economic geography to move to a centre stage of academic debates about the nature of contemporary capitalism. Such a 'newer' economic geography needs to start by injecting finance and financialisation into conceptualisations of economies and their uneven geographies and by re-engaging with the issues of value(s), value flows and circuits of value. The paper highlights one particular aspect of circuits of value that takes a form of credit-debt relationship.
How is property geographical? The making of liberal property, I argue, relies upon a topographical logic, premised on the production of bounded, coherent spaces, through which the individuated subjects and objects of property can be rendered legible. Such a spatialization helps sustain the territorialization of property, in which the government of space becomes a means for the enactment of property. The production of such spaces requires conscious 'cuts' in the processual networks through which social spaces are produced. As such, property should be seen as a conditional achievement, ever threatened by unwanted relationality and boundary crossing. I draw from Kate Grenville's novel The Secret River to explore property's spaces, and their ambivalent ethical and practical work.