An Economic Study of the City of London


Book Description

This was the first comprehensive study of the City of London to be published. The study examines the economic structure of the city and considers the main influences likely to affect the development of the City, including the pattern of demand, technological change, population movements, supply of labour and land values. Particular attention is paid to the City's international role. Specific chapters are devoted to Banking & Finance, Insurance, Trade, Commerce and the Port, and the Manufacturing Industry. The book is supported with a wealth of statistical material based on original research and contains 116 tables and 28 diagrams.




The City


Book Description

Radical insider’s account of how the city of London really works The City, as London’s financial centre is known, is the world’s biggest international banking and foreign exchange market, shaping the development of global capital. It is also, as this groundbreaking book reveals, a crucial part of the mechanism of power in the world economy. Based on the author’s twenty years’ experience of City dealing rooms, The City is an in-depth look at world markets and revenues that exposes how this mechanism works. All big international companies—not just the banks—utilise this system, and The City shows how the operations of the City of London are critical both for British capitalism and for world finance. Tony Norfield details, with shocking and insightful research, the role of the US dollar in global trading, the network of Britishlinked tax havens, the flows of finance around the world and the system of power built upon financial securities. Why do just fifty companies now have control of a large share of world economic production? The City explains how this situation came about, examining the history of the world economy from the postwar period to the present day. If you imagine you don’t like “finance” but have no problem with the capitalist market system, think again: it turns out the two cannot be separated.




The City of London


Book Description

What is the City of London? The term is in everyday use but few are willing to define it. If pressed some will suggest that it means the entire UK financial sector while others point to a particular part of London - the Square Mile. Neither of these definitions is adequate because the City is both greater and less than either finance alone or a physical location. The author demonstrates that it is only by taking a detailed look at the City over the last 100 years that it can be understood.




The Finance Curse


Book Description

An “artfully presented [and] engaging” look at the insidious effects of financialization on our lives and politics by the author of Treasure Islands (The Boston Globe). How didthe banking sector grow from a supporter of business to the biggest business in the world? Financial journalist Nicholas Shaxson takes us on a terrifying journey through the world economy, exposing tax havens, monopolists, megabanks, private equity firms, Eurobond traders, lobbyists, and a menagerie of scoundrels quietly financializing our entire society, hurting both business and individuals. Shaxson shows how we got here, telling the story of how finance re-engineered the global economic order in the last half-century, with the aim not of creating wealth but extracting it from the underlying economy. Under the twin gospels of “national competitiveness” and “shareholder value,” megabanks and financialized corporations have provoked a race to the bottom between states to provide the most subsidized environment for big business, encouraged a brain drain into finance, fostered instability and inequality, and turned a blind eye to the spoils of organized crime. From Ireland to Iowa, he shows the insidious effects of financialization on our politics and on communities who were promised paradise but got poverty wages instead. We need a strong financial system—but when it grows too big it becomes a monster. The Finance Curse is the explosive story of how finance got a stranglehold on society, and reveals how we might release ourselves from its grasp. Revised with new chapters “[Discusses] corrupt financiers in London and New York City, geographically obscure tax havens, the bizarre realm of wealth managers in South Dakota, a ravaged newspaper in New Jersey, and a shattered farm economy in Iowa . . . A vivid demonstration of how corruption and greed have become the main organizing principles in the finance industry.” —Kirkus Reviews




An Economic History of London 1800-1914


Book Description

This is the first comprehensive survey of the economic development of the world's first great industrial metropolis. Modern theories of urban economics are used to shed new light on the process of change in the city.




The Global City


Book Description

This classic work chronicles how New York, London, and Tokyo became command centers for the global economy and in the process underwent a series of massive and parallel changes. What distinguishes Sassen's theoretical framework is the emphasis on the formation of cross-border dynamics through which these cities and the growing number of other global cities begin to form strategic transnational networks. All the core data in this new edition have been updated, while the preface and epilogue discuss the relevant trends in globalization since the book originally came out in 1991.




Sustainable London?


Book Description

How is London responding to social and economic crises, and to the challenges of sustaining its population, economy and global status? Sustainable development discourse has come to permeate different policy fields, including transport, housing, property development and education. In this exciting book, authors highlight the uneven impacts and effects of these policies in London, including the creation of new social and economic inequalities. The contributors seek to move sustainable city debates and policies in London towards a progressive, socially just future that advances the public good. The book is essential reading for urban practitioners and policy makers, and students in social, urban and environmental geography, sociology and urban studies.




The City in the City


Book Description

An exploration of the dramatic transformation of London’s financial district after 1945, viewed at four spatial scales: city, street, facade, interior. In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offers the first in-depth architectural and urban history of London’s financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. Thomas examines abstract financial ideas, political ideology, and invisible markets as concrete realities; working on four spatial scales—city, street, facade, and interior—the book explores the grand plans, hidden alleys, neo-Georgian elevations, and sweaty dealing floors that have made the financial center work. Moving from politics to sociology, institutions to bodies, development plans to office desks, Thomas unravels the rich entanglements between the structure of the UK’s financial system and the structure of the environment in which it operates. Despite its physical and political centrality, this period of the City’s architectural history occupies an academic lacuna. Longstanding prejudices about developer-led architecture and the real estate industry have obscured the postwar City’s relevance. The book shows how, as currents of local government reform, nation-building, and globalization swept across Britain, the City became an ideological battleground for debates between politicians and financial institutions, real estate developers and architects, preservationists and so-called “proactive” planners throughout the latter half of the century. The City of London is a place steeped in rich cultural and architectural heritage of immense national significance, yet it is also a highly privileged citadel at the core of global financial networks. The City in the City is both a critique and a celebration of this unique and complex place.




London’s Global Office Economy


Book Description

London’s Global Office Economy: From Clerical Factory to Digital Hub is a timely and comprehensive study of the office from the very beginnings of the workplace to its post-pandemic future. The book takes the reader on a journey through five ages of the office, encompassing sixteenth-century coffee houses and markets, eighteenth-century clerical factories, the corporate offices emerging in the nineteenth, to the digital and network offices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While offices might appear ubiquitous, their evolution and role in the modern economy are among the least explained aspects of city development. One-third of the workforce uses an office; and yet the buildings themselves – their history, design, construction, management and occupation – have received only piecemeal explanation, mainly in specialist texts. This book examines everything from paper clips and typewriters, to design and construction, to workstyles and urban planning to explain the evolution of the ‘office economy’. Using London as a backdrop, Rob Harris provides built environment practitioners, academics, students and the general reader with a fascinating, illuminating and comprehensive perspective on the office. Readers will find rich material linking fields that are normally treated in isolation, in a story that weaves together the pressures exerting change on the businesses that occupy office space with the motives and activities of those who plan, supply and manage it. Our unfolding understanding of offices, the changes through which they have passed, the nature of office work itself and its continuing evolution is a fascinating story and should appeal to anyone with an interest in contemporary society and its relationship with work.




The UK Regional-National Economic Problem


Book Description

In recent years, the United Kingdom has become a more and more divided society with inequality between the regions as marked as it has ever been. In a landmark analysis of the current state of Britain’s regional development, Philip McCann utilises current statistics, examines historical trends and makes pertinent international comparisons to assess the state of the nation. The UK Regional–National Economic Problem brings attention to the highly centralised, top down governance structure that the UK deploys, and demonstrates that it is less than ideally placed to rectify these inequalities. The ‘North-South’ divide in the UK has never been greater and the rising inequalities are evident in almost all aspects of the economy including productivity, incomes, employment status and wealth. Whilst the traditional economic dominance of London and its hinterland has continued along with relative resilience in the South West of England and Scotland, in contrast the Midlands, the North of England, Northern Ireland and Wales lag behind by most measures of prosperity. This inequality is greatly limiting national economic performance and the fact that Britain has a below average standard of living by European and OECD terms has been ignored. The UK’s economic and governance inequality is unlikely to be fundamentally rebalanced by the current governance and connectivity trends, although this definitive study suggests that some areas of improvement are possible if they are well implemented. This pivotal analysis is essential reading for postgraduate students in economics and urban studies as well as researchers and policy makers in local and central government.