Full text, The Global South, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 66-82.
If the modern financial system is premised on the historical emergence of national debt, the late twentieth witnessed the democratization of its risks through the household. And yet, as it turns out, the dispersal of risk opened the door to the cascading effects of subprime instability and default. The idealised household had not taken hold in any generalised sense, much as it imposed itself as norm, and beyond any attempt to assume that all of those who defaulted could not pay rather than had decided not to or, more broadly put, did not budget and toil as they ought.
Angela Mitropoulos 