Increasing levels of personal debt, soaring house prices and a looming pensions crisis have recently stimulated considerable interest in household financial behaviour. Using macro data from the financial accounts of the four largest economies in the EU from 1980 to 2003, we observe that the bourgeois virtue of prudence needs to be redefined because, in an era of financialisation, in all four countries household portfolios converge towards riskier investments. At the same time, household reactions to the major economic events of the last twenty years are more complicated than the existing literatures on financialisation and varieties of capitalism would suggest. 

Keywords

Household assets, Financialisation, Varieties of capitalism, Household financial behaviour