Household credit in the making and breaking of Greek households

Abstract

This chapter focusses on the role of household credit in the financialization of everyday life in Greece. Ethnographic data collected in Athens during the household credit boom as well as during its bust after the Global Financial Crisis is used to examine a local conceptualization of the household, the noikokyrió, as a normative ideal that shapes household credit use, and to demonstrate the ways in which the noikokyrió is embedded in larger family networks of economic obligation and assistance. This is complemented with an analysis of the introduction of Greece’s first personal insolvency law for the protection of over-indebted consumers. The law shaped household financialization by creating a payment culture that, while ostensibly calling forth a neoliberal financial subject based on personal responsibility, in practice utilizes ideologies of familialism towards maximizing the repayment of debts. The chapter argues that lenders mobilize the tensions between the noikokyrió and extended family obligations to expand value extraction and the socialization of risks.