HOUSING FINANCIALIZATION: - THE INTERNATIONAL LANDSCAPE A report for the Office of the Federal Housing

For this purpose, the USA reached a series of agreements with the leading oil pro- ducers to price oil in dollars to maintain the global dollar demand.iii Thus, the dollar has maintained its status as the world’s reserve currency, despite the persistent issues around the balance of payments and public budget deficit of the USA. [...] The Fed fixed the burst of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s through expansive monetary policies, while the authorities mostly ignored the accounting position of the financial sector since, because of deregulation, many financial entities operated from tax havens (Shaxson, 2021). [...] The UK Conservative Government imple- mented Help to Buy schemes in 2013 to get around the restrictions of Basel III that were about to be implemented through European Union regulation.xxii The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, described Help to Buy in 2013 as “the biggest government intervention in the housing market since the Right to Buy scheme” of the 1980s. [...] Thus, New Zealand is the country in the world with the greatest housing cost overburden among low-income homeowners with a mortgage (42%); Canada is the third in the world (41%); and the UK is the tenth (31%) (OECD, 2019). [...] According to the former governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Mark Carney, the proportion of wealth held by the richest top 1% of Americans increased from 25% in 1990 to 40% in 2012 (Carney, 2016).