engleski

The financialization of everyday life, household economies and new vulnerabilities

The recent household debt crisis in Croatia has shown that the financialization of everyday life has exposed households to new vulnerabilities. Having FX loans with variable interest rates has meant a highly increased debt burden hitting household budgets and drawing many below the poverty line. This leads us to the issue of the social distribution of new risks brought by financialization. We argue that there is an intrinsic complexity behind households’ use of financial products, which cannot be fully grasped by common indicators of income and liabilities distribution. Therefore, we address the role of financial products within household economies. Cluster analysis of a recent dataset (Bagić et al. 2014, N 1000), including a broad set of indicators of financial and non-financial assets, liabilities, economic practices and sociodemographics, shows six types of household economies with different exposure to financialization risks and varying capacity of resilience in case of a crisis.

financialization ; household debt ; FX loans ; household economy ; resilience

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