Abstract
In this paper the lobbying efforts of the Dutch financial elite aimed at safeguarding the securitization of Dutch mortgages, which had become a crucial part of Dutch banking business models, is reconstructed, centred on the so-called Liquidity Coverage Ratio of the Basle Committee of Banking Supervision, which dates from January 2013. Section 2 traces the effects of these lobbying efforts. Section 3 describes the storyline used by the Dutch elite to distinguish Dutch securitization (‘good’) from its US counterpart (‘bad’). Section 4 contrasts this storyline with some ‘empirical irritants’ (‘ugly’) which raise broader questions about the role of securitization in the crisis, to lead, in section 5 to the straightforward question: who is telling this story and why? The concluding section draws lessons from this case about elite politics in financialized capitalism.
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