The Next Revolution in our Credit-Driven Economy


Book Description

Go inside the research to see the global consequences of unethical banking The Next Revolution in our Credit-Driven Economy: The Advent of Financial Technology integrates market theory and practice to help investors identify growth opportunities, and to help regulators create a sustainable economic environment. Author Paul Schulte, former economic analyst with the National Security Council, draws upon his own decade-spanning research to demonstrate how unethical banking practices provide the brute force that drives political and economic crises worldwide. By unbundling how credit markets work, this authoritative guide provides deep insight into crisis avoidance and detection, successful investment climates, and the groundwork that must be in place for policy makers to build a sound basis for economic growth. Clear, succinct case studies provide examples of policy and its effects on economic stability, giving you a stronger understanding of the network of forces that determine how loan/deposit ratios behave around the world. Countries that lend more than they save consistently get into trouble, with catastrophic consequences for the rich and middle class as well as the politicians. This book shows how credit excesses bring about price collapse in stocks, currencies, and real estate, and provides direction for change in the context of global economics. Dive deep into the mechanisms underlying the credit markets Learn how unregulated borrowing leads to socioeconomic crises Examine real-world policy options through global case studies Discover how credit rises are best detected and avoided An economic climate in which even the smallest hiccup can have long-lasting consequences should be the ideal impetus for a close scrutiny of global banking practices and economic policy. The Next Revolution in our Credit-Driven Economy takes you behind the scenes for a new perspective, and a more informed look at where the world needs to begin changing. The second half of the book will take a look at the revolution driving financial technology. Companies in Silicon Valley and giants like Alibaba are challenging the landscape for banking. This has profound implications for policy makers, banks and for a new class of entrepreneurs who are developing software which is taking away market share from bank and challenging decades-old financial empires. The book will explore the reasons why many global banks remain flat-footed. It will go into detail about the new companies and software that are moving in the Far East and with innovations in securities, bonds, foreign exchange, retail lending and SME lending. Lastly the book will look at the strategy behind Alibaba and how it will challenge many companies from a powerful base inside China.




Global Trends 2040


Book Description

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.




The Cloud Revolution


Book Description

The conventional wisdom on how technology will change the future is wrong. Mark Mills lays out a radically different and optimistic vision for what’s really coming. The mainstream forecasts fall into three camps. One considers today as the “new normal,” where ordering a ride or food on a smartphone or trading in bitcoins is as good as it’s going to get. Another foresees a dystopian era of widespread, digitally driven job- and business-destruction. A third believes that the only technological revolution that matters will be found with renewable energy and electric cars. But according to Mills, a convergence of technologies will instead drive an economic boom over the coming decade, one that historians will characterize as the “Roaring 2020s.” It will come not from any single big invention, but from the confluence of radical advances in three primary technology domains: microprocessors, materials, and machines. Microprocessors are increasingly embedded in everything. Materials, from which everything is built, are emerging with novel, almost magical capabilities. And machines, which make and move all manner of stuff, are undergoing a complementary transformation. Accelerating and enabling all of this is the Cloud, history’s biggest infrastructure, which is itself based on the building blocks of next-generation microprocessors and artificial intelligence. We’ve seen this pattern before. The technological revolution that drove the great economic expansion of the twentieth century can be traced to a similar confluence, one that was first visible in the 1920s: a new information infrastructure (telephony), new machines (cars and power plants), and new materials (plastics and pharmaceuticals). Single inventions don’t drive great, long-cycle booms. It always takes convergent revolutions in technology’s three core spheres—information, materials, and machines. Over history, that’s only happened a few times. We have wrung much magic from the technologies that fueled the last long boom. But the great convergence now underway will ignite the 2020s. And this time, unlike any previous historical epoch, we have the Cloud amplifying everything. The next long boom starts now.




Casualties of Credit


Book Description

Modern credit, developed during the financial revolution of 1620–1720, laid the foundation for England’s political, military, and economic dominance in the eighteenth century. Possessed of a generally circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear in its foes and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet a number of casualties followed in the wake of this new system of credit. Not only was it precarious and prone to accidents, but it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence. Carl Wennerlind reconstructs the intellectual context within which the financial revolution was conceived. He traces how the discourse on credit evolved and responded to the Glorious Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the founding of the Bank of England, the Great Recoinage, armed conflicts with Louis XIV, the Whig–Tory party wars, the formation of the public sphere, and England’s expanded role in the slave trade. Debates about credit engaged some of London’s most prominent turn-of-the-century intellectuals, including Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift and Christopher Wren. Wennerlind guides us through these conversations, toward an understanding of how contemporaries viewed the precariousness of credit and the role of violence—war, enslavement, and executions—in the safeguarding of trust.




China's Banking Transformation


Book Description

China's Banking Transformation describes the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese banking system based on the author's 12 years serving on two Chinese bank boards. Acknowledging the challenges banks face, the book challenges conventional views, maintaining that China's banks now function well within China's market socialist political economy, and within China's traditional collectivist cultural world.




FinTech


Book Description

In this comprehensive, accessible work, Ross P. Buckley, Douglas W. Arner, and Dirk A. Zetzsche offer an ideal reference for anyone seeking to understand the technological transformation of finance and the role of regulation: the world of FinTech. They consider FinTech technologies including artificial intelligence, blockchain, BigData, cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, central bank digital currencies, and distributed ledger technology, and provide a unique perspective on FinTech as an interactive system involving finance, technology, law, and regulation. Starting with an evolutionary perspective, the authors then consider the major technologies transforming finance, arguing for approaches to balance the risks and challenges of innovation. They address the central role of infrastructure in digital financial transformation, highlighting lessons from China, India, and the EU, as well as the impact of pandemics and other sustainability crises, while considering the risks generated by FinTech. They conclude by offering forward-looking regulatory strategies to address the challenges facing our world today.




The Fourth Industrial Revolution


Book Description

World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolu­tion, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wear­able sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manu­facturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individu­als. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frame­works that advance progress.




The Economy of Promises


Book Description

A comprehensive and illuminating account of the history of credit in America—and how it continues to divide the haves from the have-nots The Economy of Promises is a far-reaching study of credit in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Synthesizing and surveying economic and social history, Bruce Carruthers examines how issues of trust stitch together the modern U.S. economy. In the case of credit, that trust involves a commitment by debtors to repay money they have borrowed from lenders. Each promise poses a fundamental question: why does the lender trust the borrower? The book tracks the dramatic shift from personal qualitative judgments to the impersonal quantitative measurements of credit scores and ratings, which make lending on a much greater scale possible. It discusses how lending is shaped by the shadow of failure, and the possibility that borrowers will break their promises and fail to repay their debts. It reveals how credit markets have been shaped by public policy, regulatory changes, and various political factors. And, crucially, it explains how credit interacts with economic inequality, contributing to vast and enduring racial and gender differences—which are only exacerbated by the widespread use of credit scores and ratings for “big data” and algorithmic decision-making. Bringing to life the complicated and abstract terrain of human interaction we call the economy, The Economy of Promises is an important study of the tangle of indebtedness that, for better or worse, shapes and defines American lives.




Owning Our Future


Book Description

A collection of company profiles that “succeeds in demonstrating how more sustainable business ventures can function in practice” (Publishers Weekly). As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Marjorie Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for life for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs. To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from all over the world, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical company in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work. “This magnificent book is a kind of recipe for how civilization might cope with its too-big-to-fail problem. It’s a hardheaded, clear-eyed, and therefore completely moving account of what a different world might look like—what it already does look like in enough places that you will emerge from its pages inspired to get involved.” —Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy




The Third Revolution


Book Description

In The Third Revolution, Elizabeth Economy, one of America's leading China scholars, provides an authoritative overview of contemporary China that makes sense of all of the seeming inconsistencies and ambiguities in its policies and actions.