The deregulation, increasing regionalization, and keen competition that have characterized the banking industry in recent years have made this a challenging period for bank managers and directors alike. Today, more than ever, directors need a readable, comprehensive reference, not only for their day-to-day responsibilities, but also to guide them through the unprecedented changes that are transforming the financial services industry. The information and insights in "The Bank Director's Handbook" enable board members to take the active, responsible role that promotes a bank's success.

The Pyramid of Lies by international financial journalist Duncan Mavin, is the true story of Lex Greensill, the Australian farmer who became a hi-flying billionaire banker before crashing back down to earth, exposing a tangled network of flawed financiers, politicians and industrialists. Lex Greensill had a simple, billion-dollar idea - democratising supply chain finance. Suppliers want to get their invoices paid as soon as possible. Companies want to hold off as long as they can. Greensill bridged the two, it's mundane, boring even, but he saw an opportunity to profit. However, margins are thin and Lex, ever the risk taker, made lucrative loans with other people's money: to a Russian cargo plane linked to Vladmir Putin, to former Special Forces who ran a private army, and crucially to companies that were fraudulent or had no revenue. When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill's doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan's SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk. What Bad Blood did for Silicon Valley and The Smartest Guys in the Room did for Wall Street, The Pyramid of Lies will do for the world of shadow banking and supply chain finance. It is a world populated with some of the most outlandish characters in business and some of the most outrageous examples of excess. It is a story of greed and ambition that shines a light on the murky intersection between politics and business, where lavish fortunes can be made and lost.

The commercial banking industry in the United States has dramatically restructured. While concentration has increased, banks no longer dominate financial services. Instead, they have become part of holding companies that own a broad range of closely related financial services companies that are both complementary and competitive. Historical prohibitions against interstate banking have been liberalized as have the regulatory barriers that strictly separate banking, insurance, and securities market activities. As risk and complexity in the financial system increases and traditional sources of returns in banking diminish, pressure for further change will mount.
While the facts of regulatory change in U.S. commercial banking are not entirely new, we have a limited understanding of how it actually happened. And how it happened holds important lessons for future change as well as for other banking systems that are facing similar pressures. The Invisible Hands of U.S. Commercial Banking Reform shows how to analyze incentives for economic and institutional change and then demonstrates how incentives shape beliefs and choices. Contrary to commonly held assumptions, U.S. commercial banking is governed by a closely integrated combination of markets and governments and large-scale adaptation appears to require both relatively unfettered private action and government guarantees.

Banking/Trading-Operations Management is aimed at the practitioner and covers all the issues an operations manager has to address. Gerrit Jan van den Brink and a team of highly experienced contributors examine the current situation and extract best practice from a variety of situations. They look at trends in operations management, and at how operations link into risk and risk adjusted performance measurement, and examine the impact of e-business and the Internet on operational processes.

International financial markets play an increasing role in the mind of the general public, much more than they did a few decades ago. There can be no doubt that the size of financial markets has grown at a faster pace than the markets for goods and services in the past ten or twenty years. However, it is still unclear whether this is a desirable development, or whether it indicates looming risks. The book documents and classifies the debate about the potential decoupling of the financial sector from the real economy, and then to introduce it into the context of established scientific lines of research. We try to provide a logical structuring of the heterogeneous arguments by postulating a decoupling hypothesis (phenomena, causes, consequences). Various models are presented in this structure and stylized facts can be isolated.

Policy makers around the globe will find that Restructuring Regulation and Financial Institutions offers a cogent assessment of the contemporary regulatory environment in the U.S. financial markets, and a blueprint for action in evolving global financial markets. Financial markets are among the most highly-regulated markets in the world. Nevertheless, financial crises still occur, witness the U.S. savings-and-loan fiasco of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the Mexican and East Asian Financial implosions of 1994 and 1997. What role does regulation play in stabilizing-or-destabilizing financial markets? Restructuring Regulation and Financial Institutions answers this question with incisive analysis of financial market regulation in the United States. Each paper considers how regulation enhances or impedes the efficiency of a particular financial sector, and is followed by comments by two or three noted experts. The result of this approach is a wealth of useful information that may be applied by policy makers contemplating the restructuring of regulations and financial institutions. The contributors to this volume are distinguished economists, many of whom have careers not just in business, government, or academia, but have held influential positions in all three. Such varied backgrounds enable the contributors to offer remarkable insights based on the best of theory and practice. Never before has understanding the workings of U.S. financial market regulation been so important to the development of world financial markets. The ramifications of financial regulation in the United States extend far beyond the nation's borders. World financial markets are undergoing dramatic change, driven by the rapid development and deployment of new technology that enables information-and money-to travel farther, faster. However, a Byzantine array of regulatory structures in the international arena hinders the development of efficient global financial markets. Policy makers around the world are attempting to address the issues by emulating the financial markets of the United States.

This is the first comprehensive book on the politics and economics of financial sector consolidation in an emerging market in West Africa. It draws on the author's twenty years experience working with multinationals in this oil-rich zone, to address key issues and examine banking reform in one of the world's fastest-growing economies.

The European Union is an increasingly important influence on our daily lives with important political, economic and cultural implications. To understand how to bridge the gaps between national cultures and economic systems is an imperative. This book considers in depth from the inside out, one such Franco-German collaboration in the banking sector and sheds light on these imperatives. The practitioner-academic collaboration provides detailed insights into a real cross-border alliance in an accessible manner.

face. As myoid boss when I joined the discout market - who had worked as a "bond-salesman" on Wall Street during the "Great Crash" of 1929, through the Credit Anstalt crash, and served in British military intelligence during the Second World War - always used to say: "Remember The telephone is not a secure instrument. " During the 1960s, foreign banks had flooded into London in pursuit of Eurodollar deposits. Arabs were spending their new found oil wealth in West End casinos. Ex change Control regulations were tight. In 1971, when our story begins, new "banks" on the fringe took advantage of the property boom, fuelled by Tory Chancellor Barber's first Budget. The discount houses (whose functions and special privileges at the Bank were soon arcane) became active traders in US dollar and foreign currency paper, and took stakes in the new money brokers (or "barrow boys," as the snobs called them, since the sharpest brokers were mainly Cockney Eastenders). While the "gentleman's club" was quickly being replaced by the fast growing "interbank swaps" market (now LIFFE), the discount houses had found a new role to pla- opening representative offices overseas (Gillett Brothers, where I was then chairman, in Southern Africa, UAE, Australia and Singapore, with brokering subsidiaries in Europe, Far East, and North America) - gathering market intelligence around the world, as the invisible "eyes and ears" of the Bank of England."

The focus of this study is the supervisory and regulatory framework for bank supervision in Thailand and the Thai authorities' efforts to modernize and restructure the Thai banking system. It examines the obstacles to this restructuring, which include economic difficulties in Thailand and the East Asia region in the 1990s as well as more fundamental historical, cultural and socio-economic factors that underpin Thai society. The book looks at the numerous banking statutes put in place in Thailand since the early 20th century, including legislation of the 1980s in response to problems involving fraud, insider dealing and solvency concerns. It examines how historically ambiguous structures of governmental responsibility and power, and a heavy emphasis on government discretion in regulation, have so far inhibited the effectiveness of this extensive body of legislation in developing a sound modern banking system. There follows an analysis of the 1997-1998 Thai Banking Crisis and ways in which lessons can be learned to avoid similar crises in future. The author argues for a greater degree of transparency in the regulatory process to bring it into line with internationally accepted standards, for increased supervisory implementation and enforcement by Thai governmental authorities, and for the ultimate depoliticization of the bank regulatory and supervisory processes.

In a world where conventional interest-based finance is the dominant framework, Islamic banking faces many challenges. This text is the first to address different Islamic banking issues from both the researchers and practitioners' perspective across the world, reviewing their past experiences of Islamic banks.

This book examines the banking crisis of July/August 2007 and its ensuing after-effects in 2008-2009: economic crisis, credit crunch, massive recapitalization of some banks and nationalization of other banks. The author offers his views on the factors which led to this global financial catastrophe and how it could have been avoided.

Hong Kong SAR is now highly unusual as a large economy running a currency board system that pegs the Hong Kong Dollar to the US Dollar. While usually credited with providing stability and prosperity for Hong Kong, the system has become controversial since the decline of the US Dollar since 2002 and the adoption of a flexible basket peg system for the Renminbi in 2005. Why was this system adopted in the first place? Why did Hong Kong go back to a currency board in 1983 after a decade of floating exchange rates? This volume explores the origins and persistence of the system in the context of the long term monetary integration with mainland China and presents the viewpoint of several of those involved in the restoration of the currency board system in 1983. It also explains the changes made since the 1990s and looks to Hong Kong's future prospects.

Until recently, central bank independence was confined to just two major capitalist countries, the USA and Germany. As a result of stagflation and the voguish espousal of neo-liberalism in the 1980s, the institution has been adopted in most OECD and in many other countries. This book questions the principle of autonomy, examining the Bundesbank in historical context and exposing the flaws in both the technical and the political case for the wholesale adoption of the Bundesbank model by other states.

Procyclicality of the financial system is a feature of any normally functioning economy. However, procyclicality can sometimes become 'excessive' leading to undesired effects on the real economy. The challenge that this volume addresses is to define 'excessive' and to identify policy actions that could produce superior outcomes.

This volume contains contributions on a range of important issues in current research in finance and economics. Topics include the design of a country's financial safety nets, the effective policies of acquiring failed banks in reducing moral hazard problems, the voluntary disclosure of real options by corporate managers, and the interrelationship between the housing and general economic activities. Some important topics such as the choice between stock and options as compensation vehicles in the presence of bankruptcy risk, the NUA tax benefits in asset allocation in the retirement accounts, the heuristic approach of using ri/stdi to select securities in forming efficient portfolio, and the arbitrage opportunity in index options at the initial stage are also included in this volume. Finally, the contributions to this volume also address some problems that include the explanations of risk premiums on futures contracts, the optimal hedging decision in futures markets, and the pricing of Asian options subject to credit risk.

This book deals with the political philosophy that underpins theories of European integration and develops an understanding of Europeanization based on downloading and up-loading. Downloading is the means by which EU policy is amalgamated with domestic legislation and institutions. Up-loading indicates the use of national governments or sub-national interests in the development of European integration processes. European integration takes place at the supranational level and in general, is distinct from Europeanization. Through a study of financial services regulation these processes are made explicit.

Restructuring the balance sheets of Western governments, banks and households is an important issue in the recovery after the recent crisis. Chorafas' latest book focuses on sovereign debt, sovereign risk and the developing economic and financial business climate and explains why the year of the big crisis may fall in the middle of this decade.

This book is a cutting-edge exploration of the UK commercial banking industry, as reflected primarily in the experience of the four main clearing banks: Barclays, Lloyds, Midland and NatWest. What will the industry look like in the future? What strategies, cultures and organisational forms will distinguish the survivors from the non-survivors? Will the dominant form be the highly diversified, global, financial supermarket, the so-called universal bank, the more focused niche player, both, or some other type? To answer these questions, David Rogers draws upon very high level access to the leading players in this evolving industry.

The horizontalist perspective is an extension of the post-Keynesian approach, that has hitherto focused on a theory of credit and money. This book extends horizontalism beyond its traditional boundaries and makes it consistent with the post-Keynesian theories of output and the open economy. The authors compare and contrast the horizontalist position with various orthodox and non-orthodox views on money. They argue that horizontalism is perfectly compatible with liquidity preference, credit constraints, and a flexible interest-rate mark-up, and address recent developments in banking that reinforce the validity of a horizontal schedule of credit-money. The overall intention is to place horizontalism within the current heterodox tradition as a general theory of the creation of money that is consistent with the post-Keynesian view on macroeconomic policy. Credit, Interest Rates and the Open Economy is essential reading for those who wish to expand their theoretical understanding of international financial issues and will be of great interest to those involved in macroeconomics, money and banking and radical economics.

Named a Best Book of 2018 by the Financial Times and Fortune, this New York Times-bestseller exposes how a 'modern Gatsby' swindled over $5 billion with the aid of Goldman Sachs in 'the heist of the century'.

Now a #1 international bestseller, Billion Dollar Whale is 'an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale' (Publishers Weekly, starred review), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.

In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude -- one that would come to symbolise the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund -- right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street.

By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the US Department of Justice continued its investigation.

Billion Dollar Whale has joined the ranks of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood as a classic harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world.