iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

P. Emanuele De Girolamo

@emadegi.bsky.social

180 followers 402 following 12 posts

Political economy of finance and Economic Sociology of work. Researcher at the University of Milan.

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

Big thanks to the editorial team and reviewers. I am also deeply grateful to everyone who supported me throughout the development of this paper.

040

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

9/9 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.

120

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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.

100

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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

100

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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.

101

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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.

110

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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?

100

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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.

100

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

2/9 This article revisits key historical cases to rethink how financial predation changed and became central under financialisation.

110

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

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.

doi.org

Rethinking predation under financialisation through the history of subprime mortgages: a case of raiding finance

The ‘rentier’ model provides an influential framework for conceptualising the predatory traits of financialisation. It asserts that financialisation has empowered a class of rentiers who wield infl...

1278

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

000

P. Emanuele De Girolamo @emadegi.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

2/9 The article revisits key historical cases to rethink how financial predation changed and became central under financialisation.

000