Was the US subprime crisis the prime mover? The limits of the ‘critical urbanist’ interpretation of the UK financial crisis

The aim of this chapter is to challenge the argument popular among ‘critical urbanist’ writers that the subprime crisis in the US played a crucial and necessary role in the US and UK financial crisis. It will be argued that this view exaggerates the role of the subprime crisis and of the global interconnections between banks. Instead, it is argued that the banking systems in the US and UK had developed in a fundamentally unstable way and that this was the primary cause of the financial crises in these countries, with the subprime crisis playing at most a contingent contributory role. The focus will be on the structure and operation of the UK banking system and the UK experience of the financial crisis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the very limited reforms that have so far been implemented.