Since the financial crisis of 2008, subprime lending in the United States has flourished in auto loan markets. This article charts, for the first time, some of the contours of this underresearched part of the subprime landscape. In so doing, it makes two contributions. First, it widens and resituates debates about subprime lending by building on a suite of feminist political economic scholarship to argue that the sites, practices, and agents of social reproduction provide an essential—and largely neglected—perspective on the endurance and deepening of subprime markets. Second, the article leverages the intrinsically geographical, place-bound nature of social reproduction to provide a more holistic treatment of the financialization of everyday life. The article uses (auto)mobility as a novel vantage point from which to connect hitherto disparate social science literatures on financialization, transportation planning, welfare, and urban form. Drawing on secondary data and qualitative fieldwork in Los Angeles, the research explores the proliferation of subprime auto lending and the gendered, raced, and classed inequalities in mobility that mediate everyday life—the daily commute, the school run, the grocery shopping trip—and the demand for subprime debt.

Brexit raises profound - as yet unanswerable questions - about future economic development in what is a multistate nation, the United Kingdom. This commentary forms part of a wider discussion on the impact of Brexit on the UK's political economy and financial geography.

Feminism is a broad, complex, contested term that comprises both an intellectual and political project that seeks to identify, understand, and dismantle inequalities between men and women. Feminists have sought to highlight and resist the systematic production of social difference around gender and challenge the persistence of inequalities between men and women. Work—what it is, who does it, and where—has been a key arena of struggle. The difficulties of defining feminism reflect its diverse origins and multiple, contested, and changing intellectual and political concerns. Key achievements of feminist analyses include challenging traditional definitions that conflate "work" with "paid employment," explaining gendered occupational segregation, and translating academic scholarship into political practice in the form of challenging earnings inequalities. The impacts of economic restructuring, new technologies, and gendered international divisions of labor illustrate the gendered construction of local labor markets.

This chapter uses the growth of Islamic finance to explore some of the diverse economies of contemporary global finance. The first part of the chapter considers the conceptual and practical need to re-read 'global finance' as proliferative and diverse. The chapter then explores the heterogeneous understandings and practices that characterize Islamic finance. Key features of Islamic finance – its concerns with riba, gharar and maisir – are briefly outlined. Finally, the chapter considers some of the complexity and diversity of how Islamic principles are being translated into contemporary financial practices, drawing on research from different areas of the world.

Developing an evolutionary perspective towards the changing anatomy of the banking sector reveals the enduring tensions and contradictions between spatial centralisation and the possibilities for decentralisation before, during and after the British banking crisis. The shift from banking boom to crisis in 2007 is conceptualised as a significant and on-going moment in the long-term evolution of the historical institutional-spatial dominance of London over other city-regions in Britain. The analysis demonstrates the importance of the institutional and geographical legacies of the British national political economy and variegation of capitalism established in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in shaping contemporary geographical outcomes. Regulatory changes combined with financial innovation in the latter years of the twentieth century to create an opportunity for English regional and Scottish banks excluded from previous institutional-spatial centralisation to expand excessively and consequently several failed in the banking crisis. The paper considers the future trajectory of institutional-spatial centralisation in the banking sector amidst the continued spatial restructuring of the banking crisis, involving a re-drawing of organisational boundaries, overlapping institutional and technological changes and unprecedented uncertainty about the impact of Brexit on Britain's wider political and economic landscape.

In economic geography and cognate disciplines, a good deal of attention has been paid to the roles of investors, lenders, analysts, advisors, actuaries, and other skilled financial professionals in forming and reproducing financial and other markets. Relatively neglected, by contrast, is the work of lawyers, judges, and other legal agents. This article redresses this imbalance by making two contributions. First, we highlight the role of legal labor in financial market formation in Malaysia, specifically the role of Shariah jurists and translators in institutionalizing the (re)production of Islamic values in market life. Second, drawing on cases of financial litigation and interviews with Shariah scholars, we argue that Malaysia's strategy to develop its Islamic financial governance institutions, to bolster its international stature, and to extend the regional, national, and international reach and mobility of its Islamic values is intrinsically geographical in nature. The strategy involves a rescaling and consolidation of legal spaces and institutions—including the Central Bank, the juridical system, Islamic universities, research think tanks, and their Shariah bureaucrats and professionals—to facilitate the geographical mobility of Malaysian sharia expertise to otherwise secular legal spaces. Yet, we argue that this strategy has not led to a retreat from neoliberal influence but rather to a reordering of market values and norms that collateralize moral risks in addition to market risks.

The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case study of the origins, growth and decline of the Northern Rock bank's charitable foundation. Analysis reveals the complex, geographically-embedded nature of philanthropic motivations and impacts. It demonstrates that investment in home and community by philanthropists was part of a regionally-inscribed business-model of excessive risk taking that brought them considerable personal financial rewards. It highlights tensions and conflicts between corporate philanthropists and professional grant-makers over the scale and regional focus of giving. The paper concludes that the positive outcomes of corporate philanthropy are difficult to sustain in disadvantaged regions where shifts in corporate strategy and fragilities in the local economy undermine charitable giving.

The study of economic geography is thriving. After decades of arguing for the importance of understanding the spatialities of the economy, many economists have taken heed and tried to incorporate some geographic insights into their analyses. The once-radical assertion that space, place and flows shape economies is increasingly recognized, understood and valued, it seems, by governments, think-tanks and policy-makers of all stripes (Barnes, 2018; Martin, 2018). Across the university sector, the numbers of people interested in and undertaking research in economic geography appears to be growing; the 2018 Global Conference in Economic Geography in K€ oln had 772 participants from over 50 countries (up from just under 700 attendees at the same conference in Oxford in 2015). Economic geography journals appear to be thriving and well-read and cited (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). Undergraduate students flock to economic geography courses. Within the discipline, urban, cultural, environmental and development geographers have embraced the economic and strengthened our insights and interactions with other parts of geography. These researchers may not identify as Economic Geographers, but they produce economic geographical scholarship, crossfertilize the sub-discipline, attend economic geography conferences and publish in economic journals. Yet, paradoxically, here we are debating the decline of Economic Geography (James et al., 2018; Martin, 2018), its marginalization as a sub-discipline (Cumbers, 2018) and the ‘existential angst’ that accompanies the idea that one of our big loves may be ‘potentially deep sixing’ (Barnes, 2018: 1). The sources of these concerns are summarized by James et al. (2018), who, in particular, highlight the exodus of UK economic geographers into business

How, if at all, does financialisation affect small firms that have no direct exposure to capital markets? This article argues the need to address this lacuna empirically, conceptually and politically drawing on research from a qualitative longitudinal analysis of UK small businesses in bio-business and film and media sectors. We identify three potential conduits through which financialising principles and practices may be perceived, translated and resisted for owners, managers and staff. More broadly, the article argues that financial relations should figure more prominently and move from their relatively marginal location into the heart of socio-economic analysis of small firms. As such, the research connects with and extends an important social science tradition of research on managerial control in small firms to include issues of financialisation and financial governance.

The rise of Kuala Lumpur as an Islamic financial frontier. Regional Studies. This paper examines Kuala Lumpur’s emergence as a prominent global Islamic financial centre. Its distance from the West and the Middle East offers a frontier positioning that facilitates new social practices from the integration of financial knowledge of Western world cities and Shariah authority claimed by Gulf cities. Based on primary data, the paper shows that transnational, transcultural alliances forged through skills of mediation and compromise among the city’s Islamic talents and Shariah scholars favourably connect separate economic and cultural spheres of knowledge.

In 2013, the UK Government announced that seven of the nation’s largest banks had agreed to publish their lending data at the local level across Great Britain. The release of such area based lending data has been welcomed by advocacy groups and policy makers keen to better understand and remedy geographies of financial exclusion. This paper makes three contributions to debates about financial exclusion. First, it provides the first exploratory spatial analysis of the personal lending data made available; it scrutinises the parameters and robustness of the dataset and evaluates the extent to which the data increase transparency in UK personal lending markets. Second, it uses the data to provide a geographical overview of patterns of personal lending across Great Britain. Third, it uses this analysis to revisit the analytical and political limitations of ‘open data’ in addressing the relationship between access to finance and economic marginalisation. Although a binary policy imaginary of ‘inclusion-exclusion’ has historically driven advocacy for data disclosure, recent literatures on financial exclusion generate the need for more complex and variegated understandings of economic marginalisation. The paper questions the relationship between transparency and data disclosure, the policy push for financial inclusion, and patterns of indebtedness and economic marginalisation in a world where ‘fringe finance’ has become mainstream. Drawing on these literatures, this analysis suggests that data disclosure, and the transparency it affords, is a necessary but not sufficient tool in understanding the distributional implications of variegated access to credit.

The aim of this Handbook is to make the case for the necessity -conceptual, empirical and political -to think spatially about the constitution and expressions of money and financial systems: in short to make the case for a geography of money.A key tenet of the Handbook is that taking space and place seriously is essential to understanding the constitution, operation and organization of money and financial systems, institutions, agents and markets.For economic geographers such thinking is by no means new (Harvey, 1973(Harvey, , 1982;; Corbridge et al., 1994;Leyshon and Thrift, 1997; Martin, 1999), although the dynamics of money and finance have, for too long, appeared 'offstage' (Clark, 2006: 84) relative to long(er) standing concerns of production, work, technological change, competition, agglomeration and urban and regional economic development.Beyond the discipline of Geography, and notwithstanding the ground-breaking work of Viviana Zelizer (1979), however, much of the social sciences have encountered matters financial as 'largely the (self-appointed) preserve of (financial) economists, wrapped in a forbidding mantle of technicality that warned outsiders of finance's inherent complexity' (Christophers, 2015: 189).More recently, however, a burgeoning body of work on money and finance in Sociology, Anthropology, Development, Management and Political Science, has been inspired by the growing social and cultural visibility of financial logics, practices and institutions in contemporary life.The chapters in this Handbook reflect some of this proliferating interest in money and finance, but more than this, they also articulate some of what is at stake in developing a more sophisticated understanding of the spatialities of money and finance.The role of financial logics, institutions and practices in producing and distributing a series of devastating, and ongoing, economic and political upheavals -most recently in the shape of the subprime crisis of 2007-08 -demonstrates the urgent necessity to move beyond narratives of 'inherent complexity' to better understand the economic, social, political and cultural relations of money and power that shape livelihoods and patterns of international, urban and regional development.What do we mean when we talk about a more sophisticated understanding of the spatialities of money and finance?One part of this involves appreciating the constitutive, and not merely expressive, significance of geography.These chapters go much further than simply recognizing that money and finance are arranged and instituted in particular geographical forms, that financial logics, practices, markets and institutions are located and 'happen somewhere'.Instead they argue that spatiality is integral to money, in the forms it takes, the organizations through which it is institutionalized, the ways in which it deconstructs, reassembles and distributes assets, liabilities, risk and indeed, conceives of time and space.

This article extends research exploring progressive models of reproducing economic life by reporting on research into some of the infrastructure, practices and motivations for Islamic charitable giving in London. In so doing the article: (i) makes visible sets of values, practices and institutions usually hidden in an otherwise widely researched international financial centre; (ii) identifies multiple, hard-to-research civic actors who are mobilising diverse resources to address economic hardship and development needs; and (iii) considers how these charitable values, practices and agents contribute to contemporary thinking about progressive economic possibilities.

Dawley S., Marshall N., Pike A., Pollard J. and Tomaney J. Continuity and evolution in an old industrial region: the labour market dynamics of the rise and fall of Northern Rock, Regional Studies. The Northern Rock mortgage bank was a high-profile casualty of the credit crunch in 2007. An evolutionary geographical political economy approach demonstrates that Northern Rock's growth and decline was shaped by its location in an old industrial region, and echoes the historical position of the peripheral region in the spatial division of labour. A longitudinal investigation focuses on the labour market dynamics of Northern Rock's rapid growth and decline on the North East of England. The Northern Rock case highlights the enduring occupational structure of the region's labour market, and shows how older industrial regions suffer from a process of occupational disadvantage' that restricts their ability to adapt to economic change.