The banking sector is undergoing a process of fundamental transformation - mainly due to the challenges of digitalization, insistent customers, regulation and a volatile economic environment. This book provides an in-depth understanding of the underlying logic of 21st century's banking environment and helps to develop a roadmap for the successful transformation of contemporary business models. The authors introduce the 'Zurich model for a customer-centric banking architecture enabling the reader to develop a sustainable business model which copes with the challenges of this information age. They identify customer behavior traps in such an environment; introduce adequate strategic instruments and cornerstones for providing added value through financial services, and provide core factors for conducting a successful transformation process.

The papers in this volume were presented at three invited sessions at the annual meetings of the Western Economic Association in San Diego, California on July 8-10, 1999. The comments by delegates were also presented at that time and are included in the volume.

The theme of the sessions was "Bank Problems: A Global Perspective." As has been well documented in previous volumes in this series, serious banking problems have plagued the large majority of countries globally be they industrial, emerging or transition economies. The problems arose because of both market failures and regulatory or government policy failures. The costs of these problems in terms of reduction in real output, misallocations of both real and financial resources, and transfer payments and cross-subsidies, particularly from taxpayers to protected stakeholders in failed banks, have been large and burdensome. Thus, a better understanding of the causes of the problems in both the private and government sectors and their potential solutions is a prerequisite for avoiding, or at least minimizing repetitions in the future. The papers in this volume contribute to this effort and add to our storehouse of knowledge. The emphasis on global in the title is reinforced by including papers by authors from Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States.

As financial markets are liberalized, bank management and bank regulators and supervisors are faced with new and complex challenges. In general, bank management is faced with the challenge of managing in a competitive and volatile market environment; bank supervisors have the challenge of establishing the framework that permits risk-taking without endangering the banks' safety and soundness. The book identifies and discusses a set of specific challenges, and suggests approaches that may be used by management and supervisors to surmount them.

Equal treatment in access to credit has long been a fundamental social goal in the United States. However, despite the passage of several laws in the U.S. prohibiting discrimination in the provision of financial services on the basis of race, gender, and marital status, among other factors, questions concerning the existence of racial discrimination in such areas as home mortgage loans and small business credit continue, and confound public policy makers. This book is composed of nine articles and a panel discussion, originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Financial Services Research. These contributions explore the complex issue of discrimination in financial services.

In this volume the authors provide a survey and an examination of the roots of Swiss banking in order to explain the phenomenal success of Switzerland's banks. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Swiss banking did not originate with the exiled Hugenot bankers of Geneva. Centuries before Louis XIV, Basle had become a principal banking centre although it was not yet part of the Swiss Confederation. From historical beginnings to contemporary comparative analysis, the book offers an authoritative explanation and analysis of the success of the Swiss banks.

Investing in Corporate Bonds and Credit Risk is a valuable tool for any corporate bond investor. All the most recent developments and strategies in investment in corporate bonds are analyzed included with qualitative and quantitative approaches. A complete and up-to-date investment process is developed through the book, using many examples taken from banking practice. The growing significance of derivative instruments and credit diversification to bond investors is also analyzed in detail. Investment professionals; Corporate finance staff; Portfolio Managers; Senior Managers; Risk Managers; Consultants; Trading and Sales Staff; Quantitative Analysts; Credit Analysts; Regulators MBA courses

This book contains original readings on Reserves Management for central banks and sovereign wealth funds. It aims to outline best practice in respect of strategic asset allocation, facilitating knowledge-sharing across organizations and encouraging collaboration and dialogue between reserves and asset management specialists in the organizations.

Market volatility and competition have each played a significant role in altering the state of banking over the last twenty years. During the 1980s and 1990s banks have been exposed to new types of risks with far different characteristics and magnitudes than those dealt with in the early days of banking. Erik Banks seeks to explore the qualitative and quantitative aspects of risks attributable to financial instruments in today's markets, which are so much a part of banking business throughout the world. Banks describes the credit risks encountered in dealing with financial instruments and establishes a framework for quantifying the risks and applies framework and concepts on a product-by-product basis.

Marking the 30th anniversary of the formation of Orion Bank in 1970, financial historian Richard Roberts has written a history of Orion and the rise and decline of the consortium banking movement. Consortium banks were formed as joint ventures to enable banks to operate in the booming Euromarkets, with virtually every major international bank participating in a consortium bank during their heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. Orion Bank was one of the leading players in the Euromarkets in those decades: its shareholders were six of the biggest banks in the world from the three major trading blocks: Chase Manhattan, Royal Bank of Canada, NatWest, Westdeutsche Landesbank, Credito Italiano and Mitsubishi Bank. Like other consortiums banks, Orion Bank was prominent in Eurocurrency syndicated lending, but more unusually, it was also a top Eurobond lead manager. The story of Orion exemplifies the tensions inherent in the joint venture approach to business development and the strategic dilemmas facing consortium bank managements and shareholders. Richard Roberts uses primary archival papers and interviews with former Orion executives and other bankers prominent in consortium and investment banking to present an authoritative case study with great topical relevance as today's European banking industry continues to integrate across borders. Take Your Partners is also an invaluable source of reference for anyone with an interest in the Euromarkets and the development of international banking.

Service activities such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, business auditing, distribution, trading, and other services have been at the forefront of the transformation process in East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. These reforms, though far from complete, are now sufficiently advanced to draw lessons and to identify strategic options for foreign service firms expanding in the region. In this volume, leading analysts and practitioners offer an appraisal of the service markets and the challenges related to foreign entry into the services sector in Central and Eastern Europe during the "second wave" of transformation. What is the emerging pattern of change? What is the outlook for promising business in the area of services? Which entry strategies have proven particularly successful? How do the leading service providers from the West deal with the challenges confronting them in service markets of the region?

This collective volume used case studies, field research and industry studies to consider strategic options for foreign service firms in East Central and Eastern Europe for the late nineties and beyond.

The financial crisis has exposed severe shortcomings in mainstream monetary economics and modern finance. It is surprising that these shortcomings have not led to a wider debate about the need to overhaul these theories. Instead, mainstream economists have closed ranks to defend existing theories and public authorities have expanded their interference in markets. This book investigates the problems associated with mainstream monetary economics and finance, and proposes alternatives based on the Austrian school of economics. This school emanated from the work of the nineteenth-century Austrian economist Carl Menger and was developed further by Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich August von Hayek. In monetary economics, the Austrian school regards the creation of money by banks through credit extension as a key source of economic instability. From this follows the need for a comprehensive reform of our present monetary system. In a new monetary order, money could be issued by both public and private institutions, and there would be no need for fractional reserve banking. Instead of creating money, banks would intermediate it. In finance, the Austrian school rejects the notion of rational expectations and measurable risk. Individuals use their subjective knowledge to gather and evaluate information, and they act in a world of radical uncertainty. Hence, markets are not "efficient" nor can portfolios be built on the basis of known probability distributions of asset prices as described in the modern finance literature. This book explores the need for a new theoretical foundation for asset pricing and investment management that will give practitioners more useful orientation.

If America's tangible cash could be transformed into federal electronic currency (FEDEC), the social and economic benefits would be profound. Warwick argues eloquently why government should mandate cashlessness, then demonstrates not only why it can be done, but how to go about doing it. He shows that because the private sector will not and can not replace cash, government must do it; indeed, government FEDEC is superior to a system of private currencies. Cash handling costs the nation between one and two percent of the GDP, and cash is the lubricant for most of America's crime. By eliminating cash the saving from crime reduction alone would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars yearly. But naturally there would be issues of special concern if a FEDEC system were to become a hot public debate. Privacy, security, practicality, convenience are just some. Warwick tackles them here and, as no other books attempts to do, offers a practical plan for creating cashlessness. Well reasoned, meticulously documented, "Ending Cash" is a major contribution to what could soon become an important social debate--a debate that should, in the author's judgment, be started now.

"Ending Cash" argues that America's tangible cash should be transformed into a new federal electronic currency (FEDEC). Although Warwick admits that private bank card systems and/or the Internet may some day supplant cash, he explains why this will not happen soon, certainly not in our lifetime. Warwick emphasizes that the unrealized benefits of cashlessness far exceed the mere convenience that citizens generally look for and enjoy in bank card usage. While stressing the relative inefficiency of cash, said to run $60 billion a year just in handling costs, he illustrates the profound role cash plays in most crimes, including tax evasion, all of which could be prevented with a resultant public savings in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year if a federal system were created.

Against the background of consumer-oriented EFT systems, including credit-, debit-, and smart-card systems, Warwick explains the disinterest of industry in achieving cashlessness, as well as its organizational incapacity to carry it out. He thus argues the need for government involvement. Among the many facets he covers are privacy, security, technical requirements, and operational costs. He also explains the issue of employing private currencies as a replacement for cash, and how federal e-currency might impact the banking and bank card industries.

This book, first published in 1985, is a study of the functioning of one sector of American capital markets - non-reserve city national banks - between 1870 and 1900. The unusually wide and deep expansion of the American economy in this period was impelled in part by the growth and development of agriculture, and this study examines the role of one source of loanable funds - banks chartered under the National Banking Acts - in providing American farmers with loans to expand and capitalize.

An inside view of the forces which shaped SEPA and the PSD written from the unique perspective of someone closely involved throughout the process. It uncovers the strategic, legal and practical implications of the full harmonization agenda and provides an assessment of where these initiatives stand today, including key lessons learned.

This contribution applies the cointegrated vector autoregressive (CVAR) model to analyze the long-run behavior and short-run dynamics of stock markets across five developed and three emerging economies. The main objective is to check whether liquidity conditions play an important role in stock market developments. As an innovation, liquidity conditions enter the analysis from three angles: in the form of a broad monetary aggregate, the interbank overnight rate and net capital flows, which represent the share of global liquidity that arrives in the respective country. A second aim is to understand whether central banks are able to influence the stock market.

This comprehensive book presents an accessible guide to Risk Management and Trading applications for the Electricity Markets in a practical manner. Various methodologies developed over the last few years are considered and current literature is reviewed. Fiorenzani emphasizes the relationships between trading, hedging and generation asset management. With its clear structure and well researched text, this is an invaluable asset to Investment Professionals, Research Analysts, Energy CEO's & Risk Management Professionals. It would also be an invaluable text for postgraduates in energy finance.

Creating Value in Financial Services is a compilation of state-of-the-art views of leading academics and practitioners on how financial service firms can succeed in today's competitive environment. The book is based on two conferences held at New York University: the first, Creating Value in Financial Services', held in March 1997, and the second, Operations and Productivity in Financial Services', in April 1998. The book is essentially designed to be a compendium of leading edge thinking and practice in the management of financial services firms. There is no book today that has this focus. It contains ideas that can apply to other service industries. Topics addressed are increasingly important worldwide as the financial services industries consolidate and search for innovative new directions and ways to create value in a fiercely competitive environment.

This volume focuses on constructing a safer and more efficient financial system based on the lessons learned from the financial debacles of the 1980s. The first essay discusses the economic and political forces both propelling and opposing widespread banking reform. The next two essays describe the intellectual history of the deposit insurance reform provisions of FDICIA, arguably the most important banking legislation since the Banking Act of 1933, discuss the weaknesses and strengths of these provisions and make recommendations for improving the effectiveness of the reforms. Theoretical and empirical evidence is then summarized and evaluated with respect to the costs and benefits of regulators granting forbearance to economically insolvent institutions. An analysis is given of the whys and hows of privatizing federal deposit insurance in case the reforms in FDICIA prove ineffective. An examination follows of the causes and consequences of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) debacle of the early 1990s and the implications for the supervision of foreign banks in the United States and elsewhere. Next the broader issue is discussed of whether U.S. financial markets affect the behavior of U.S. corporate managers, particularly whether they encourage managerial myopia. Without concluding whether such myopia exists, policy options are examined that would make financial markets more conducive to longer-term planning, including permitting banks to invest in corporate equity and thus monitor firms as owners as well as creditors.

This timely collection presents an authoritative overview of one of the three key currencies of the second half of the twentieth century, the German Mark. Charles A.E.Goodhart reflects on the future of the Euro against the background of the success story of the Deutsche Mark. Hans Tietmeyer reviews the 50 years lifetime of the German Mark, pointing out that the Bundesbank will continue to have a say within the European Central Bank. In particular he emphasizes the vital part of the Deutsche Mark as cornerstone of the so-called Social Market Economy in postwar Germany.

Capital flows from Asia into the US challenge many assumptions of international financial analysis. This book presents a novel geography of these flows, revealing their driving forces and assessing the market mechanisms necessary for a smooth global flow of funds. It is essential for all those interested in international finance.

Chinese state banks, which were considered technically insolvent in the 1990s, are at present among the largest and most important banks in the world. This book, based on the author's research and also on his extensive experience of working in Chinese banks, explores how Chinese banks' technical efficiency and organisational flexibility have been achieved whilst ownership and control by the Chinese Communist Party have continued. The author reveals a distinctly non-Western approach to corporate governance, but one that has nevertheless worked very well.

The author investigates the strategies of eight publicly listed banks in Britain and Germany in the context of European financial integration. Evidence is provided that banks with defensive strategies fared better than those which attempted to break out of a coherent financial system in order to embrace new business opportunities.

This is the first book to collect academic studies examining issues related to the potential internationalization of the remninbi. It considers polisy implications, documents the rising regional importance of the renminbi and discusses key issues in the increasing use of the renminbi in international trade and finance.