Don't mind the ‘funding gap’: what Dutch post crisis storytelling tells us about elite politics in financialized capitalism

Abstract

In this paper the lobbying efforts of the Dutch financial elite aimed at safeguarding the securitization of Dutch mortgages, which had become a crucial part of Dutch banking business models, is reconstructed, centred on the so-called Liquidity Coverage Ratio of the Basle Committee of Banking Supervision, which dates from January 2013. Section 2 traces the effects of these lobbying efforts. Section 3 describes the storyline used by the Dutch elite to distinguish Dutch securitization (‘good’) from its US counterpart (‘bad’). Section 4 contrasts this storyline with some ‘empirical irritants’ (‘ugly’) which raise broader questions about the role of securitization in the crisis, to lead, in section 5 to the straightforward question: who is telling this story and why? The concluding section draws lessons from this case about elite politics in financialized capitalism.