ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explains why housing is increasingly becoming financialized, but it does not explain the timing, politics and geography. A global wall of money is looking for High-Quality Collateral (HQC) investments, and housing is one of the few asset classes considered HQC. The need for HQC, supported by a neoliberal ideology, discursive tenure practices that favour homeownership, and government policies pushing the financial sector as a key engine of economic growth, have internationally but far from globallyinflated mortgage finance bubbles. The book analyses how privatized Keynesianism was introduced in the years following the Great Moderation, a period that economists think of as one of stable growth and convergence, but which was the beginning of the Great Excess, in which income and wealth inequality in many countries increased rapidly.
