Turning debts into a market: the wonderful promises of securitization

Description

Launched in 2014, the European Commission’s project to create a Capital Markets Union (CMU) involves a return to pre-crisis ideas and mechanisms and, more specifically, a reviving of the nearly collapsed securitization market. According to the project’s official rationale, good quality securitization can help the European economy out of an enduring recession and onto a path of ‘growth and jobs’. Yet the current – and often very technical – discourse around securitization obscures the unequal power relations that securitization implies. A genuinely democratic debate on the CMU cannot shy away from looking into what securitization really is about: making profit out of people’s debts.