As the real economy is increasingly digitalized, banking lags behind. It is thus not well placed to support the new economy. The book provides some perspective on the changes taking place, identifying the systemic weaknesses in the traditional financial infrastructure, and proposing some radical rethinking to address systemic financial instability.
For over 2,000 years, banks have served to facilitate the exchange of money and to provide a variety of economic and financial services. During the most recent financial collapse and subsequent recession, beginning in 2008, banks have been vilified as perpetrators of the crisis, the public distrust compounded by massive public bailouts. Nevertheless, another form of banking has also emerged, with a focus on promoting economic sustainability, investing in community, providing opportunity for the disadvantaged, and supporting social, environmental, and ethical agendas. Social Banking and Social Finance traces the emergence of the “bank with a conscience” and proposes a new approach to banking in the wake of the economic crisis. Featuring innovations and initiatives in banking from Europe, Canada, and the United States, Roland Benedikter presents an alternative to traditional banking practices that are focused exclusively on profit maximization. He argues that social banking is not about changing the system, but about improving some of its core features by putting into use the "triple bottom line" principle of profit-people-planet. Important lessons can be learned by the success of social banks that may be useful for the greater task of improving the global financial system and avoiding economic crises in the future.
The remarkably successful gold standard before 1914 was the first international monetary regime. This book addresses the experience of the gold standard peripheries; i.e. regime takers with limited influence on the regime. How did small countries adjust to an international monetary regime with seemingly little room for policy autonomy?
A survey of past financial crises, starting with the great banking collapses of the interwar period. The current turmoil has prompted a number of questions regarding both its origins and ways to avoid its repetition. The historical background and the evolving institutional framework of banking and financial systems are at the center of this book.
From a period of growth and considerably high levels of profitability, Greek banks recently found themselves battling a major decrease in demand in the local market, and an increase in non-performing loans. How is the Greek banking system able to survive the crisis? This is discussed by looking at the last 15 years of the Greek banking system.
This book provides a deep insight into the market changes and policy challenges that transition economies have undergone in the last twenty years. It not only comments on and evaluates the development of financial markets in transition economies, but also highlights the key obstacles to full integration of financial markets into the EU market.
Updated insight into key facts impacting on financial institutions after the financial crisis, highlighting areas of major policy and academic interest. The book includes ten chapters analysing contrasting issues such as intellectual capital, cost efficiency, bank stability, credit risk and business models for the wealth management industry.
From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism—but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and individuals who defined this era of American capitalism in the West Indies. Whether in Wall Street minstrel shows or in dubious practices across the Caribbean, the behavior of the banks was deeply conditioned by bankers’ racial views and prejudices. Drawing deeply on a broad range of sources, Hudson reveals that the banks’ experimental practices and projects in the Caribbean often led to embarrassing failure, and, eventually, literal erasure from the archives.
This book argues that post-Keynesian theories of endogenous money can be combined with Marxian analysis in order to give insight into the changing power relations between the state, finance sector and real economy since WW2. A key theme is that financial power, derived from the control of money-issue and its purchasing power, is determined by the state and market in varying proportions (depending on context) but that state sovereignty has been lost in recent decades. In addition, the growth of financial markets in recent decades, so-called financialization, has led many to assume that private finance is an important proximate driver of economic affairs in general. In contrast, the book argues that this provides insufficient explanation of events. To discuss financial factors as causes of financial crisis risks describing the phenomena without illustrating the root causes. Instead, the book argues that systemic drivers of capitalism (rooted in production), probably best understood by Marx, actually do provide a more plausible explanation of the causes of the financialization and erosion of state sovereignty. In addition, the Post-Keynesian descriptions of monetary processes are considered to best reflect the actual reality of the monetary system. This represents an interesting synthesis of the classical Marx with modern money theory. The interpretation of Marx used to explain this financial transformation has been named the Temporal Single System Interpretation, which illustrates Marx’s value theory across periods and identifies a tendency towards falling profit rates. It is claimed that falling profits, in turn, are an underlying driver of the systemic propensity towards financialisation, crisis and stagnation. The empirical findings presented, taken from case studies of the UK and Germany, appear to support this view. The central argument is that the response of agents (including the state) to the profit tendency has been a significant driver of the observed financial transformation. The book then concludes that this synthesis provides a more appropriate explanation of the historical transformation of the financial system since the Great Depression, than much of the financialization literature, and illustrates the source (and operation) of financial power in the modern capitalist state and market.
