Circulating financial innovation: new knowledge and securitization in Europe

Abstract

Research in economic geography has provided a critical examination of securitization's role in the recent global financial crisis. Building on earlier studies which interrogated the development of US securitization, contemporary research has explored how securitization has been adopted in different political economies. Although these novel studies have begun to highlight the geographies of securitization, our knowledge of the historical spread of securitization remains underdeveloped. This paper seeks to address this issue by exploring how securitization emerged within different European financial spaces. In doing so, the paper examines the cases of France, Spain and Italy to identify how securitization circulated through space and across communities of practice, facilitating the co-creation of new knowledge. The paper provides deeper insight into how securitization became established within European financial centres throughout the 1990s, shaping contemporary financial networks and the spread of the credit crunch.