Browse

The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. Providing an international perspective, this book draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future. While some recent policy moves go in the right direction, others, the book argues, are not sufficient to prevent another crisis. The book shows the necessity of an adaptive prudential regulatory system that can better address financial innovation. Stressing the numerous and complex challenges faced by politicians, finance professionals, and regulators, and calling for reinforced international coordination (for example, in the treatment of distressed banks), the book puts forth a number of principles to deal with issues regarding the economic incentives of financial institutions, the impact of economic shocks, and the role of political constraints.

This book analyzes the Central Asian economies of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, from their buffeting by the commodity boom of the early 2000s to its collapse in 2014. The book examines the countries' relations with external powers and the possibilities for development offered by infrastructure projects as well as rail links between China and Europe. The transition of these nations from centrally planned to market-based economic systems was essentially complete by the early 2000s, when the region experienced a massive increase in world prices for energy and mineral exports. This raised incomes in the main oil and gas exporters, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; brought more benefits to the most populous country, Uzbekistan; and left the poorest countries, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan, dependent on remittances from migrant workers in oil-rich Russia and Kazakhstan. The book considers the enhanced role of the Central Asian nations in the global economy and their varied ties to China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. With improved infrastructure and connectivity between China and Europe (reflected in regular rail freight services since 2011 and China's announcement of its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013), relaxation of UN sanctions against Iran in 2016, and the change in Uzbekistan's presidency in late 2016, a window of opportunity appears to have opened for Central Asian countries to achieve more sustainable economic futures.

Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? This book shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. The book documents the rise of “entrepreneurial citizenship” in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations. The book chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor. While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, the book warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. The book argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development. The book lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.

Does too much competition in the banking sector hurt society? What policies can best protect and stabilize banking without stifling it? Institutional responses to such questions have evolved over time, from interventionist regulatory control after the Great Depression to the liberalization policies that started in the United States in the 1970s. The 2007–2009 crisis, which originated from an oversupply of credit, once again raised questions about excessive banking competition and what should be done about it. This book addresses the critical relationships between competition, regulation, and stability, and the implications of coordinating banking regulations with competition policies. The book argues that while competition is not responsible for fragility in banking, there are trade-offs between competition and stability. Well-designed regulations would alleviate these trade-offs but not eliminate them, and the specificity of competition in banking should be accounted for. It also asserts that regulation and competition policy should be coordinated, with tighter prudential requirements in more competitive situations, but it also shows that supervisory and competition authorities should stand separate from each other, each pursuing its own objective. The book reviews the theory and empirics of banking competition, drawing on up-to-date analysis that incorporates the characteristics of modern market-based banking, and he looks at regulation, competition policies, and crisis interventions in Europe and the United States, as well as in emerging and developing economies. Focusing on why banking competition policies are necessary, the book examines regulation's impact on the industry's efficiency and effectiveness.

Prevailing wisdom dictates that without banks countries would be mired in poverty. Yet somehow much of Europe managed to grow rich long before the diffusion of banks. This book draws on centuries of loan data from France to reveal how credit abounded well before banks opened their doors. The book shows how a vast system of shadow credit enabled nearly a third of French families to borrow in 1740, and by 1840 funded as much mortgage debt as the American banking system of the 1950s. The book traces how this extensive private network outcompeted banks and thrived prior to World War I—not just in France but in Britain, Germany, and the United States—until killed off by government intervention after 1918. Overturning common assumptions about banks and economic growth, the book paints a revealing picture of an until-now hidden market of thousands of peer-to-peer loans made possible by a network of brokers who matched lenders with borrowers and certified the borrowers' creditworthiness. The book challenges widespread misperceptions about French economic history, such as the notion that banks proliferated slowly, and the idea that financial innovation was hobbled by French law. By documenting how intermediaries in the shadow credit market devised effective financial instruments, this compelling book provides new insights into how countries can develop and thrive today.

Around the world, federalism has emerged as the system of choice for nascent republics and established nations alike. This book considers the most promising forms of federal governance and the most effective path to enacting federal policies. The result is an essential guide to federalism, its principles, its applications, and its potential to enhance democratic governance. The book assess different models of federalism and their relative abilities to promote economic efficiency, encourage the participation of citizens, and protect individual liberties. Under the right conditions, the book argues, a federal democracy—including a national legislature with locally elected representatives—can best achieve these goals. Because a stable union between the national and local governments is key, the book also proposes an innovative method for evaluating new federal laws and their possible impact on state and local governments. Finally, to show what the adoption of federalism can mean for citizens, the book discusses the evolution of governance in the European Union and South Africa's transition from apartheid to a multiracial democracy. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book brims with applicable policy ideas and comparative case studies of global significance.

Originally conceived as part of a unifying vision for Europe, the euro is now viewed as a millstone around the neck of a continent crippled by vast debts, sluggish economies, and growing populist dissent. This book presents a compelling defense of the euro. It argues that rather than blaming the euro for the political and economic failures in Europe since the global financial crisis, the responsibility lies firmly on the authorities of the eurozone and its member countries. The eurozone's self-inflicted financial calamities and economic decline resulted from a toxic cocktail of unforced policy errors by bankers, politicians, and bureaucrats; the unhealthy coziness between finance and governments; and, above all, an extreme unwillingness to restructure debt. The book traces the origins of monetary union back to the desire for greater European unity after the Second World War. But the euro's creation coincided with a credit bubble that governments chose not to rein in. Once the crisis hit, a battle of both ideas and interests led to the failure to aggressively restructure sovereign and bank debt. The book concludes that the prevailing view that monetary union can only work with fiscal and political union is wrong and dangerous. Contending that the euro has been wrongfully scapegoated for the eurozone's troubles, the book charts what actually must be done for the continent to achieve an economic and political recovery. This revised edition addresses the economic and political implications of Brexit. It charts what actually must be done for the continent to achieve a full recovery.

For nearly three decades, English has been the lingua franca of cross-border business, yet studies on global language strategies have been scarce. Providing a rare behind-the-scenes look at the high-tech giant Rakuten in the five years following its English mandate, this book explores how language shapes the ways in which employees in global organizations communicate and negotiate linguistic and cultural differences. Drawing on 650 interviews conducted across Rakuten's locations around the world, the book argues that an organization's lingua franca is the catalyst by which all employees become some kind of “expat”—detached from their native tongue or culture. Demonstrating that language can serve as the conduit for an unfamiliar culture, often in unexpected ways, the book uncovers how all organizations might integrate language effectively to tap into the promise of globalization.

It is widely accepted that a large proportion of acquisition strategies fail to deliver the expected value. Globalizing markets characterized by growing uncertainty, together with the advent of new competitors, are further complicating the task of valuing acquisitions. Too often, managers rely on flawed valuation models or their intuition and experience when making risky investment decisions, exposing their companies to potentially costly pitfalls. This book provides managers with a powerful methodology for designing and executing successful acquisition strategies. The book tackles the myriad executive biases that infect decision making at every stage of the acquisition process, and the inadequacy of current valuation approaches to help mitigate these biases and more realistically represent value in uncertain environments. Bringing together the latest advances in behavioral finance, real option valuation, and game theory, this book explains how to express acquisition strategies as sets of real options, explicitly introducing uncertainty and future optionality into acquisition strategy design. It shows how to incorporate the competitive dynamics that exist in different acquisition contexts, acknowledge and even embrace uncertainty, identify the value of the real options embedded in targets, and more. Rooted in economic theory and featuring numerous real-world case studies, the book will enhance the ability of CEOs and their teams to derive value from their acquisition strategies, and is also an ideal resource for researchers and MBAs.

This book takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West's centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and written in a cryptic language, they fueled world trade but also lured naive investors into risky businesses. This book recounts how the invention of these abstruse credit contracts was falsely attributed to Jews, and how this story gave voice to deep-seated fears about the unseen perils of the new paper economy. It locates the legend's earliest version in a seventeenth-century handbook on maritime law and traces its legacy all the way to the work of the founders of modern social theory—from Marx to Weber and Sombart. Deftly weaving together economic, legal, social, cultural, and intellectual history, the book describes how Christian writers drew on the story to define and redefine what constituted the proper boundaries of credit in a modern world increasingly dominated by finance.

Today's global economy, with most developed nations experiencing very low inflation, seems a world apart from the “Great Inflation” that spanned the late 1960s to early 1980s. Yet, this book makes the case that monetary economists and policymakers need to keep the lessons learned during that period very much in mind, lest we return to them by making the same mistakes we made in the past. The book details the advances in macroeconomic thinking that gave rise to the “Great Moderation”—a period of stable inflation and economic growth, which lasted from the mid-1980s through the most recent financial crisis. The book makes the case that the central banks' management of monetary policy—hinging on expectations and credibility—brought about this period of stability, and traces the roots of this success back to the eighteenth-century foundations of modern monetary thought. Tackling fundamental questions such as the causes of inflation and its relation to unemployment and growth, the natural rate of inflation hypothesis, the fiscal theory of the price level, and the proper goals of central banks, the book aims above all to demonstrate the dangers of forgetting the role of credibility in establishing sound monetary policy. With the lessons of the past firmly in mind, the book presents stimulating ideas and proposals about inflation-targeting principles, which provide tools for present-day monetary authorities dealing with the forces of globalization, mercantilism, and reserve accumulation.

Incentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. This book demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? The book shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and it identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses. It offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas—plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered. Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, the book questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

Debates about financial reform have led to the recognition that a healthy financial system does not depend solely on how it is structured—organizational culture matters as well. Based on extensive research in a Wall Street derivatives-trading room, this book considers how the culture of financial organizations might change in order for them to remain healthy, even in times of crises. In particular, the book explores how the extensive use of financial models and trading technologies over the recent decades has exerted a far-ranging and troubling influence on Wall Street. How have models reshaped financial markets? How have models altered moral behavior in organizations? The book takes readers behind the scenes in a bank unit that, within its firm, is widely perceived to be “a class act,” and it considers how this trading room unit might serve as a blueprint solution for the ills of Wall Street's unsustainable culture. It demonstrates that the integration of traders across desks reduces the danger of blind spots created by models. Warning against the risk of moral disengagement posed by the use of models, the book also contends that such disengagement could be avoided by instituting moral norms and social relations. The book profiles what an effective, responsible trading room can and should look like.

Milton Friedman once predicted that advances in scientific economics would resolve debates about whether raising the minimum wage is good policy. Decades later, Friedman's prediction has not come true. This book argues that it never will. Why? Because economic policy, when done correctly, is an art and a craft. It is not, and cannot be, a science. The book explains why classical liberal economists understood this essential difference, why modern economists abandoned it, and why now is the time for the profession to return to its classical liberal roots. Carefully distinguishing policy from science and theory, classical liberal economists emphasized values and context, treating economic policy analysis as a moral science where a dialogue of sensibilities and judgments allowed for the same scientific basis to arrive at a variety of policy recommendations. Using the University of Chicago—one of the last bastions of classical liberal economics—as a case study, the book examines how both the MIT and Chicago variants of modern economics eschewed classical liberalism in their attempt to make economic policy analysis a science. By examining the way in which the discipline managed to lose its bearings, the authors delve into such issues as the development of welfare economics in relation to economic science, alternative voices within the Chicago School, and exactly how Friedman got it wrong. Contending that the division between science and prescription needs to be restored, the book makes the case for a more nuanced and self-aware policy analysis by economists.

The European debt crisis has rekindled long-standing debates about the power of finance and the fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy in a globalized world. This book unravels a striking puzzle at the heart of these debates—why, despite frequent crises and the immense costs of repayment, do so many heavily indebted countries continue to service their international debts? The book provides a sweeping investigation of the political economy of sovereign debt and international crisis management. It takes readers from the rise of public borrowing in the Italian city-states to the gunboat diplomacy of the imperialist era and the wave of sovereign defaults during the Great Depression. The book vividly describes the debt crises of developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s, and sheds new light on the recent turmoil inside the Eurozone—including the dramatic capitulation of Greece's short-lived anti-austerity government to its European creditors in 2015. Drawing on in-depth case studies of contemporary debt crises in Mexico, Argentina, and Greece, the book paints a disconcerting picture of the ascendancy of global finance. It shows how the profound transformation of the capitalist world economy over the past four decades has endowed private and official creditors with unprecedented structural power over heavily indebted borrowers, enabling them to impose painful austerity measures and enforce uninterrupted debt service during times of crisis—with devastating social consequences and far-reaching implications for democracy.

The scientific study of complex systems has transformed a wide range of disciplines in recent years, enabling researchers in both the natural and social sciences to model and predict phenomena as diverse as earthquakes, global warming, demographic patterns, financial crises, and the failure of materials. This book applies the author's experience in these areas to propose a simple, powerful, and general theory of how, why, and when stock markets crash. Most attempts to explain market failures seek to pinpoint triggering mechanisms that occur hours, days, or weeks before the collapse. This book proposes a radically different view: the underlying cause can be sought months and even years before the abrupt, catastrophic event in the build-up of cooperative speculation, which often translates into an accelerating rise of stock market prices, otherwise known as a “bubbles.” The book unearths remarkable insights and some predictions—among them, that the “end of the growth era” will occur around 2050. The book probes major historical precedents, from the decades-long “tulip mania” in the Netherlands that wilted suddenly in 1637 to the South Sea Bubble that ended with the first huge market crash in England in 1720, to the Great Crash of October 1929 and Black Monday in 1987, to cite just a few. It concludes that most explanations other than cooperative self-organization fail to account for the subtle bubbles by which the markets lay the groundwork for catastrophe.