Neoliberalization through Housing Finance, the Displacement of Risk, and Canadian Housing Policy: Challenging Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The precise relationships between neoliberalization, financialization, and rising risk are still being debated in the literature. This paper examines, and challenges, the Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) developed by Hyman Minsky and his adherents. In this perspective, the level of financial risk builds over time as participants orient their behavior in relation to assessments of past levels of risk performance, leading them to overly optimistic valuation estimates and increasingly risky behavior with each subsequent cycle. However, there are problems with this approach, and many questions remain, including how participants modify their exposure to risk over time, how risk is scaled, and who benefits from changes in exposure to risk. This paper examines such questions and proposes an alternate perspective on financial instability and risk, in light of the history of risk management within Canada’s housing finance sector. The rise of financialization in Canada has been accompanied by shifts in the sectoral and scalar locus of risk within the housing sector, from the federal state, to lower levels of government, third-sector organizations, and finally, private households. In each case, the transfer of risk has occurred as participants in each stage sought to reduce their own risk exposure in light of realistic and even pessimistic (not optimistic) expectations deriving from past exposure, contradicting basic assumptions of Minsky’s FIH. This is the process that has driven the neoliberalization of housing finance in Canada, characterized by the socialization of lender risk while households increasingly take on the financial and social risks relating to shelter.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".