Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the relations between parents and young adults as they shape mortgaged homeownership. It proposes the concept of inter-generational transfers as more adequate than "inter-household exchanges" for capturing aspirations for long-term accumulation in financial capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

Examining the financialisation of everyday life, various anthropologists have proposed households as a unit of analysis not only to refer to the important role attributed to households for the accumulation of financial capital but also to account for the increasing role of "inter-households exchanges". The latter is usually mobilised in order to challenge the primacy of individuals assumed in most commercial contractual relations by pointing to how various kin are used either as a social collateral when trying to access credit from a bank or contribute with money for mortgage down payment. Although this involves a critical adoption of the concept of household and various attempts to distance it from its operationalisation in economics' survey, still, I argue that this is a poor concept to fully capture the broader sociality of credit/debt relationships and their embeddedness in concerns about social reproduction as a long-term process. Drawing on ethnographic research on mortgages in Bucharest, in this paper I examine the important role played by parents in shaping young adult's access to the housing market. I argue that inter-generational transfers is a more useful concept reflecting a renewed relevance of generations in understanding accumulation as a long-term process for social reproducing and the shifting values of property and inheritance in financial capitalism.