Abstract:

The liberalisation of banking in Malta has unleashed a process of financialisation by which households increasingly rely on debt to finance their entry to homeownership. Scholarship inspired by the ‘Welfare Regimes’ and the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ approaches would suggest that financialisation presents a serious threat to, if not complete uprooting of, established institutional arrangements in the local residential housing system. I suggest, instead, that established institutional arrangements mediate the process by which financialisation shapes the entry to homeownership. Relying on a breadth of statistical evidence based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey and on documents, I argue that key institutions in Malta increasingly draw on the infrastructural power of financial markets to sustain and extend the entry to homeownership. In that respect, not only do they cement their own position in the local residential housing system, but inevitably they end up solidifying finance’s place in Maltese society.

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