Dealing With Private Debt Distress In The Wake Of The European Financial Crisis A Review Of The Economics And Legal Toolbox

The private non-financial sector in Europe is facing increased challenges in meeting its debt servicing obligation. In response, governments are revisiting legal tools and—in some cases—institutional arrangements to deal with over-indebtedness. For households, where the problem in some countries is large but no established best practice exists, reforms have generally sought to allow debtors a fresh start while minimizing moral hazard and preserving bank solvency and credit discipline. For the corporate sector, efforts have focused on facilitating debt restruturing (including through out of court mechanisms). Direct government intervention has been rare.

Households and Financialization in Europe develops a processual, relational and critical transdisciplinary approach to household financialization in Europe, utilizing a range of national and local case studies. It does so by drawing on debates in Marxist, feminist and radical IPE, anthropology and other fields. The book explores the household as simultaneously a micro-level social institution specializing in social reproduction, distribution and other activities; a building bloc of larger economic and social structures; and an object of multiple systems of power/knowledge. Putting this conceptualization to use in original research, the authors identify geographically and historically situated ways in which financialization transforms households and their relationships with the wider economy and society. The book traces these transformations in case studies of variegated financialization in Eastern and Southern European (semi-) peripheries where households have faced particularly severe financial issues since the global financial crisis, such as over-indebtedness and asset devaluation. Key themes recurring throughout the book include: the key role of housing in household financialization, the co-constitutive relationship between financialization and social and spatial inequalities, specific patterns in the relations of financial actors and households in semi-peripheries, and the implications of semi-peripheral forms of real and financial accumulation for household financialization. With its transdisciplinary approach, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of finance, financialization, household economics, international and global political economy, uneven development, economic anthropology, and economic sociology. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY 4.0 license.

Since 1979 the world has witnessed a remarkable cycle of personal insolvency law reform. Changes in capitalist economies, financial crises and political interest groups all contributed to this cycle of reform. This book examines the role of interest groups and distinct narratives in shaping reform in different countries while drawing attention to the role of timing, path dependency and unintended consequences in the development of personal insolvency law. The book presents case studies of personal insolvency law in the US, France, Sweden, and England and Wales. It then analyses how, following the Great Recession of 2008, international financial institutions paid greater attention to the significance of household debt in contributing to financial instability and the role of individual insolvency law in providing a fresh start. Personal insolvency law reform became part of EU responses to the eurozone crisis and the EU has proposed harmonisation of individual insolvency law to promote entrepreneurialism. This book examines the extent to which these developments represent an emerging international commonsense about personal insolvency and its relationship to neo-liberalism. Finally, this book discusses whether the international emergence of individual personal insolvency law represents a progressive step or a band-aid for the costs of neo-liberal policies, where a significant number of people live close to the precipice of over-indebtedness.

This volume explores the potentially transformative role of effective laws and legal institutions in providing people with more opportunity that is both inclusive and equitable.

Among member states, many structural weaknesses were exposed when economic performance declined significantly and financial markets became more discerning. This book focuses on the analytical underpinnings of real-time policy advice given to euro area policymakers during four cycles of the IMF’s annual Article IV consultations (2012–15) with euro area authorities.

This paper presents principles that could guide the design of more targeted policy support and facilitate the restructuring of firms adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper takes stock of vulnerabilities and risks in the enterprise sector and assesses countries’ preparedness to handle a large-scale restructuring of businesses. Crisis preparedness of insolvency systems is measured according to a newly designed indicator that includes five dimensions of the insolvency and restructuring regime (out-of-court restructuring, hybrid restructuring, reorganization, liquidation, and the institutional framework). Vulnerabilities tend to be more pronounced in jurisdictions with shortcomings in crisis preparedness, and those countries need to step up efforts to improve their insolvency systems.

How an economy handles financial and business distress has a major impact on confidence in business, the availability of investment, the cost of credit, and economic growth. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and its aftermath was a catalyst to legal reform in the field of bankruptcy and restructuring law and brought an added focus to the systemic threat of bank failure to the financial system. This book explores the general principles and practice of legal reform within bankruptcy. From a variety of specialists including practitioners, lawyers, bankers, accountants and judges from the United Arab Emirates, the UK and Singapore, it provides a variety of perspectives on the topic. Chapters include topics such as the 'Four Pillars of Regulatory Framework', the history and application of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency, the challenges for financial institutions and the treatment of the insolvency of natural persons. The book also offers a comparative study of Islamic Shari'ah principles with modern bankruptcy regimes, an analysis of bankruptcy in the UAE and an evaluation of the legal infrastructure of the DIFC Courts. The authors explore core questions surrounding bankruptcy law, including its ability to facilitate the turnaround of business, to enable efficient reallocation of capital, to provide coherent rules for entrepreneurs, investors, employees, and creditors, and to provide for both appropriate sanctions and for rehabilitation. ?

This Selected Issues paper on Euro Area Policies 2013 Article IV Consultation highlights the monetary transmission mechanism and monetary policies. The European Central Bank has announced the Outright Monetary Transactions framework to address severe distortions in sovereign bond markets and safeguard monetary transmission. The cost of unsecured bond issuance remains elevated for both core and periphery banks, but there is a growing divergence between the two, driven mainly by rising periphery spreads. Weak growth and high levels of private balance sheet debt in the periphery are weighing on the health of bank balance sheets.