Reestablishing stability and avoiding a credit crunch: Comparing different bad bank schemes

This paper develops a model to analyze two different bad bank schemes, an outright sale of toxic assets to a state-owned bad bank and a repurchase agreement between the bad bank and the initial bank. For both schemes, we derive a critical transfer payment that induces a bank manager to participate. Participation improves the bank's solvency and enables the bank to grant new loans. Therefore, both schemes can reestablish stability and avoid a credit crunch. However, an outright sale will be less costly to taxpayers than a repurchase agreement only if the transfer payment is sufficiently low. --bad banks,financial crisis,financial stability,credit crunch

Ambivalences of Cosmopolitanisms, Elites and Far-Right Populisms in Twenty-First Century Europe

Document type: Part of book or chapter of boo

Yearbook I - PhD research in progress July 2007

An edited volume with contributions from five PhD researchers in the school of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London. Each contributor details their research work in progress. Topics in this volume include: sexuality narratives of women in Turkey, post-apartheid South African culture, Turkey and the European information society, conceptualising feminism in Africa, and discourses of Europeanised cosmopolitanism

Reestablishing stability and avoiding a credit crunch: comparing different bad bank schemes

This paper develops a model to analyze two different bad bank schemes, an outright sale of toxic assets to a state-owned bad bank and a repurchase agreement between the bad bank and the initial bank. For both schemes, we derive a critical transfer payment that induces a bank manager to participate. Participation improves the bank's solvency and enables the bank to grant new loans. Therefore, both schemes can reestablish stability and avoid a credit crunch. An outright sale will be less costly to taxpayers than a repurchase agreement if the transfer payment is sufficiently low

Situated Cosmopolitanisms: notions of the Other in contemporary discourses on cosmopolitanism in Britain and Germany

The thesis proposes to understand contemporary discourses on cosmopolitanism in Britain and Germany as situated outlooks influenced by specific national cultures and nation state histories. These discourses are also embedded in the transition of the current nation state order that is driven by global capitalism and new forms of social and legal integration. Within Europe, the legal integration project of the European Union has to be regarded as at the core of these contemporary discourses. While situating discourses of cosmopolitanism historically, the thesis traces back dominant discourses of commercial (Britain) and cultural (Germany) cosmopolitanism that influence contemporary national outlooks of British (David Held, Chantal Mouffe and Homi K. Bhabha) and German voices Qiirgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck and Hanna Behrend). The main argument is that those discourses are framed by historical pathways, particular memories and national horizons situated differently in various countries, but also situated differently regarding the social locations of concrete intellectuals engaging in these discourses. Thus, the analysis of the different authors' writings pursues a double aim. On the one hand, it explores to what degree national discourses are situated as hegemonic public communicative sphere historically; on the other, it reveals how specific voices are situated individually within the larger discourse, thereby unearthing their contribution to confirming or challenging a hegemonic discourse. Most significantly, the Utopian vision of a cosmopolitan 'opening' that evolved during the 1990s shifted to a hegemonic ideological discourse of European 'closure' after 9/11 2001. The analysis reveals the appearance of a discourse of European cosmopolitanism conveying cultural Europeanisation. Apparently, this discourse neglects the problematic legacy of a distinction that was typical for the German discourse of the late 19 th and lasting until the mid of the 20th century, i.e. the distinction between the world citizen (Weltbürger)and the cosmopolitan (Koswopolit). The former had a positive connotation of mobility whereas the latter was used as an anti-Semitic signifier for Jews as unwanted 'wanderers'. The contemporary discourse conveys still biased meanings of 'mobility' and 'migration' being decisive for e.g. the notion of EU citizenship as die privileging frame of free movement constructing new insides and outsides of populations

"Europe is for being recognized for more than an ethnic background”:Middle class British, Dutch and German minority citizens’ perspectives on EU citizenship and belonging to Europe’

The paper pinpoints some crucial themes of European belonging arising in the narratives of minority key activists with various hyphened legal national citi-zenship status, e.g. South Asian Brits, Moroccan-Dutch and Turkish/ Kurd-ish-Germans. The interviews capture how visible minorities’ perspectives on European belonging are influenced by structural racism, but also by national-ly specific discourses of symbolic inclusion or exclusion of ethnic minorities respectively. In this original research project in total 43 key minority activists, men and women and all of middle class social status were interviewed between au-tumn 2009 and summer 2012, e.g. pre-Brexit, in Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. The findings of the study underline ambivalent post-cosmopolitan identities and more contradictory notions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity in Britain and the Netherlands, due to specific colonial / post-colonial contexts, and a different use of these categories in Britain and the rest of Europe. The minor-ity citizens interviewed in Germany expressed a more troubled position here as their relationship to the European Union is influenced by their feelings of belonging to Turkey, the latter outside the EU and at the border of Europe. As the ‘new’ citizens interviewed in this sample live in major cities, such as London, Berlin and Amsterdam, individual feelings of belonging to Europe, perceptions of being European and cosmopolitan were very much shaped by the concrete city spaces and a positive identification with metropolitan urban identity