Saving the City


Book Description

A week before the outbreak of the First World War, an acute financial crisis surged over London: the Stock Exchange closed; money markets worldwide were paralysed. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, press reports, and official archives, this book tells the extraordinary, and largely unknown, story of the first true global financial crisis.




The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report


Book Description

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.




Legacy of the Crash


Book Description

When the global financial system crashed, governments in America and Britain performed the greatest bailout in history. The legacy is record government debt, low growth and a new era of austerity. A stellar cast of contributors, including Tim Bale, Wyn Grant and Graham Wilson provide a sophisticated account of how the administrations are faring.




Forging Ahead, Falling Behind and Fighting Back


Book Description

Highlights the interactions between institutions and policy choices, as well as the importance of historical constraints on Britain's relative economic decline.




Good-bye, Great Britain


Book Description

In this authoritative and gripping book--the first full account of the 1976 International Monetary Fund crisis--Kathleen Burk and Alec Cairncross peel back the surface of the most searing economic crisis of postwar Britain to reveal its historical roots and contemporary context. During the spring of 1976, the plummeting value of the British pound against the U.S. dollar triggered a traumatic economic and political crisis. International confidence in the pound collapsed; an article in the Wall Street Journal, headlined "Good-bye, Great Britain," urged investors to get out of sterling. Refused aid by the London and New York markets, the Labour Government under Prime Minister James Callaghan was forced to turn for help to the IMF--a highly unusual move for a developed Western economy. Fearing that the economic crisis would drive Britain into a left-wing siege economy which would endanger NATO and the EEC, the United States and Germany used the IMF loan as a means to force Britain to make major domestic policy changes; when the IMF mission arrived in London in November 1976, it was announced that the price for the loan included deep cuts in domestic spending. Burk and Cairncross uncover the maneuvers of the Labour Government to evade IMF conditions. They also examine underlying economic factors, the political agenda, the rise of monetarist ideas, and the Keynesian response. Juxtaposing narrative with analysis, they provide surprising answers to critical questions and reveal how the breakdown of the post-war consensus on the macroeconomic management paved the way for the triumph of Thatcherism.




Social policy in challenging times


Book Description

There is no precedent to the current economic crisis which looks set to redefine social policy debate throughout the globe. But its effects are not uniform across nations. Bringing together a range of expert contributions, the key lesson to emerge from this book is that 'the crisis' is better understood as a variety of crises, each mediated by national context. Consequently, there is an array of potential trajectories for welfare systems, from those where social policy is regarded as incompatible with the post-crisis economy to those where it is considered essential to future economic growth and security.




Law and Finance after the Financial Crisis


Book Description

The 2008 financial crisis has become one of the defining features of the twenty first century’s first decade. The series of events which unfolded in the aftermath of the crisis has exposed major structural flaws in many of the financial systems around the globe, triggering a global call for legal and regulatory reforms to address the problems that have been uncovered. This book deals with a neglected angle of the 2008 financial crisis looking in-depth at the implicit effects of the 2008 crisis on the UK financial market. The book considers new trends in finance which have emerged since the crisis as well as the challenges faced by some older practices in the UK financial markets. After providing a reflective account of the history of law and creditors in the UK the book investigates the proliferation of certain forms of financing that have recently become very visible parts of the UK financial market’s structure, such as high cost short term lending and peer to peer lending. It provides legal and economic accounts of these forms of alternative lending, charting their developments, current status and critically assesses their impact on the UK financial market. Also examined are the ongoing funding difficulties faced by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and the suitability of the UK current legal framework to support these institutions. The book goes on to look at the viability and safety of some other post crisis trends such as banks use of Contingent Convertible Bonds (CoCos) to improve their resilience.




The UK and Multi-level Financial Regulation


Book Description

The UK and Multi-level Financial Regulation examines the role of the United Kingdom (UK) in shaping post-crisis financial regulatory reform, and assesses the implications of the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU). It develops a domestic political economy approach to examine how the interaction of three domestic groups - elected officials, financial regulators, and the financial industry - shaped UK preferences, strategy, and influence in international and EU-level regulatory negotiations. The framework is applied to five case studies: bank capital and liquidity requirements; bank recovery and resolution rules; bank structural reforms; hedge fund regulation; and the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives. It concludes by reflecting on the future of UK financial regulation after Brexit. The book argues that UK regulators pursued more stringent regulation when they had strong political support to resist financial industry lobbying. UK regulators promoted international harmonisation of rules when this protected the competitiveness of industry or enabled cross-border externalities to be managed more effectively; but were often more resistant to new EU rules when these threatened UK interests. Consequently, the UK was more successful at shaping international standards by leveraging its market power, regulatory capacity, and alliance building (with the US). But it often met with greater political resistance at the EU level, forcing it to use legal challenges to block reform or secure exemptions. The book concludes that political and regulatory pressure was pivotal in defining the UK's 'hard' Brexit position, and so the future UK-EU relationship in finance will most likely be based on a framework of regulatory equivalence.




The Fiscal Crisis of the State


Book Description

Fiscal Crisis of the State refers to the tendency of government expenditures to outpace revenues in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but its relevance to other countries of the period and also in today's global economy is evident. When government expenditure constitutes a larger and larger share of total economy theorists who ignore the impact of the state budget do so at their own (and capitalism's) peril. This volume examines how changes in tax rates and tax structure used to regulate private economic activity. O'Connor theorizes that particular expenditures and programs and the budget as a whole can be understood only in terms of power relationships within the private economy. O'Connor's analysis includes an anatomy of American state capitalism, political power and budgetary control in the United States, social capital expenditures, social expenses of production, financing the budget, and the scope and limits of reform. He shows that the simultaneous growth of monopoly power and the state itself generate an increasingly severe social crisis. State monopolies indirectly determine the state budget by generating needs that the state must satisfy. The state administration organizes production as a result of a series of political decisions. Over time, there is a tendency for what O'Connor calls the social expenses of production to rise, and the state is increasingly compelled to socialize these expenses. The state has three ways to finance increased budgetary outlays: create state enterprises that produce social expenditures; issue debt and borrowing against further tax revenues; raise tax rates and introduce new taxes. None of these mechanisms are satisfactory. Neither the development of state enterprise nor the growth of state debt liberates the state from fiscal concerns. Similarly, tax finance is a form of economic exploitation and thus a problem for class analysis. O'Connor contends that the fiscal crisis of the capitalist state is the inev




This Time Is Different


Book Description

An empirical investigation of financial crises during the last 800 years.