Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises studies the causes of the current oil and global financial crisis and shows how America s and the world s growing dependence on oil has created a repeating pattern of banking, currency, and energy-price crises. Unlike other books on the current financial crisis, which have focused on U.S. indebtedness and American trade and economic policy, Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crises shows the reader a more complex picture in which transfers of wealth to and from the Middle East result in a perfect storm of global asset and financial market bubbles, increased unrest, terrorism and geopolitical conflicts, and eventually rising costs for energy. Only by addressing long-term energy policy challenges in the West, economic development challenges in the Middle East, and the investment horizons of financial market players can policy makers ameliorate the forces that have been causing repeating global economic crises.

An indispensable and absolutely accessible explanation of the causes of the world economic crisis and how we should respond to it In this urgent and timely book, the man the "Daily Telegraph" calls "the sage of the credit crunch" shows that although the downturn is global, the complacency of the British government towards the huge "bubble" in property prices and high levels of personal debt, combined with increasingly exotic trading within the financial markets, has left Britain badly exposed. This paperback edition has been fully revised and updated to include Vince Cable's latest assessment of the recession.

The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. Bringing together three leading financial economists to provide an international perspective, Balancing the Banks draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future. While some recent policy moves go in the right direction, others, the book argues, are not sufficient to prevent another crisis. The authors show the necessity of an adaptive prudential regulatory system that can better address financial innovation. Stressing the numerous and complex challenges faced by politicians, finance professionals, and regulators, and calling for reinforced international coordination (for example, in the treatment of distressed banks), the authors put forth a number of principles to deal with issues regarding the economic incentives of financial institutions, the impact of economic shocks, and the role of political constraints. Offering a global perspective, Balancing the Banks should be read by anyone concerned with solving the current crisis and preventing another such calamity in the future.

What can or should be done to ward off or alleviate the effect of financial crises? The papers in this book examine this question, focusing on particular crises, notably those of 1836, 1873, 1920 and 1929. Based on a historical consideration of the nature and propagation of financial crises, the major theoretical issues raised by the contributors centre on whether a financial system, of a nation or of the capitalist world as a whole, is fragile or robust. Although no precise definitions are agreed upon, financial crises are distinguished from crises of unemployment or crises of wartime devastation. The book is based on the papers and proceedings of a conference held in Bad Homberg, West Germany, in May 1979 under the auspices of the Maison de Science de I'Homme and with the support of the Werner-Reimers Stiftung.

A penetrating critique tracing how under-regulated trading between European and U.S. banks led to the 2008 financial crisis--with a prescription for preventing another meltdown There have been numerous books examining the 2008 financial crisis from either a U.S. or European perspective. Tamim Bayoumi is the first to explain how the Euro crisis and U.S. housing crash were, in fact, parasitically intertwined. Starting in the 1980s, Bayoumi outlines the cumulative policy errors that undermined the stability of both the European and U.S. financial sectors, highlighting the catalytic role played by European mega banks that exploited lax regulation to expand into the U.S. market and financed unsustainable bubbles on both continents. U.S. banks increasingly sold sub-par loans to under-regulated European and U.S. shadow banks and, when the bubbles burst, the losses whipsawed back to the core of the European banking system. A much-needed, fresh look at the origins of the crisis, Bayoumi's analysis concludes that policy makers are ignorant of what still needs to be done both to complete the cleanup and to prevent future crises.

This Book Set of A & B. Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This has been driven by a shift away from the study of organizations, politics, and society and towards a more narrow focus on instrumental exchange and performance. As a result, our field has become increasingly impotent as a critical voice and contributor to policy. For a contemporary example, witness our inability as a field to make sense of the recent U.S. mortgage meltdown and concomitant global financial crisis. It is not that economic and organizational sociologists have nothing to say. The problem is that while we have a great deal of knowledge about finance, the economy, entrepreneurship and corporations, we fail to address how the knowledge in our field can be used to contribute to important policy issues of the day. This double-volume brings together some of the very top scholars in the world in economic and organizational sociology to address the recent global financial crisis debates and struggles around how to organize economies and societies around the world.

A highly original account, 'Global Slump' analyses the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. It argues that, far from having ended, the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence.

If you’ve got some money in the bank, chances are you’ve never seriously worried about not being able to withdraw it. But there was a time in the United States, an era that ended just over a hundred years ago, in which bank customers had to pay close attention to whether the banking system would remain solvent, knowing they might have to rush to retrieve their savings before the bank collapsed. During the National Banking Era (1863–1914), before the establishment of the Federal Reserve, widespread banking panics were indeed rather common. Yet these pre-Fed banking panics, as Gary B. Gorton and Ellis W. Tallman show, bear striking similarities to our recent financial crisis. In both cases, something happened to make depositors—whether individual customers or corporate investors—“act differently” and find reason to question the value of their bank debt. Fighting Financial Crises thus turns to the past for a fuller understanding of our uncertain present, investigating how panics during the National Banking Era played out and how they were eventually quelled and prevented. Gorton and Tallman open with a survey of the period’s “information environment,” tracing the development of national bank notes, checks, and clearing houses to show how the key to keeping order was to disseminate information very carefully. Identifying the most effective responses based on the framework of the National Banking Era, they then consider the Fed’s and the SEC’s reactions to the recent crisis, building an informative new perspective on how the modern economy works.

Recent world events have created a compelling need for new perspectives and realistic solutions to the problem of sovereign debt. The success of the Jubilee 2000 movement in raising public awareness of the devastating effects of debt, coupled with the highly publicized Bono/O'Neill tour of Africa, and the spectacular default and economic implosion of Argentina have helped spur a global debate over debt. A growing chorus of globalization critics, galvanized by the Catholic Church's demand for forgiveness and bolstered by recent defaults, has put debt near the top of the international agenda. Creditor governments and international financial institutions have belatedly recognized the need for more sustainable progress on debt as an inescapable step towards economic recovery in many parts of the world. This book is intended to advance the dialogue around these issues by providing a comprehensive overview of the problems raised by debt and describing new and practical approaches to overcoming them. It will be the first in more than a decade to bring together under one cover the voices of prominent members of the international debt community. It will include pieces from the most relevant constituencies: from creditors (the IMF/World Bank, government lenders, private investors) to critics (debtor representatives, activists, and academics) and analysis from economists, bankers, lawyers, social scientists, and politicians. As contributions come from such leading thinkers across a range of disciplines, this book will offer a timely guide for understanding and influencing the debt debate.

The Theft of a Decade is a contrarian, revelatory analysis of how one generation pulled the rug out from under another, and the myriad consequences that has set in store for all of us. The millennial generation was the unfortunate victim of several generations of economic theories that made life harder for them than it was for their grandparents. Then came the crash of 2008, and the Boomer generation's reaction to it was brutal: politicians and policy makers made deliberate decisions that favored the interests of the Boomer generation over their heirs, the most egregious being over the use of monetary policy, fiscal policy and regulation. For the first time in recent history, policy makers gave up on investing for the future and instead mortgaged that future to pay for the ugly economic sins of the present. This book describes a new economic crisis, a sinister tectonic shift that is stealing a generation's future.

Neil Shephard has brought together a set of classic and central papers that have contributed to our understanding of financial volatility. They cover stocks, bonds and currencies and range from 1973 up to 2001. Shephard, a leading researcher in the field, provides a substantial introduction in which he discusses all major issues involved.

Dramatic increases in food prices, as witnessed on a global scale in recent years, threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of the rural poor in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. This book focuses on recent food and financial crises as they have affected Africa, illustrating the problems using country case studies, that cover their origins, effects on agriculture and rural poverty, their underlying factors and making recommendations as to how such crises could best be addressed in the future.

Today's top financial professionals have come to rely on ever-more sophisticated mathematics in their attempts to come to grips with financial risk. But this excessive reliance on quantitative precision is misleading--and puts everyone at risk. In "Plight of the Fortune Tellers," Riccardo Rebonato forcefully argues that we must restore genuine decision making to our financial planning. Presenting a financial model that uses probability, experimental psychology, and decision theory, Rebonato challenges us to rethink the standard wisdom about risk management. He offers a radical yet surprisingly commonsense solution: managing risk comes down to real people making decisions under uncertainty.

"Plight of the Fortune Tellers" is a must-read for anyone concerned about how today's financial markets are run. In a new preface, Rebonato explains how the ideas presented in this book fit into the context of the global financial crisis that followed its original publication. He argues that risk managers are still stuck in a probabilistic rut, and need to engage with the structural causes of real events.

The financial crisis that began in 2007 in the United States swept the world, producing substantial bank failures and forcing unprecedented state aid for the crippled global financial system. Bringing together three leading financial economists to provide an international perspective, "Balancing the Banks" draws critical lessons from the causes of the crisis and proposes important regulatory reforms, including sound guidelines for the ways in which distressed banks might be dealt with in the future.

While some recent policy moves go in the right direction, others, the book argues, are not sufficient to prevent another crisis. The authors show the necessity of an "adaptive" prudential regulatory system that can better address financial innovation. Stressing the numerous and complex challenges faced by politicians, finance professionals, and regulators, and calling for reinforced international coordination (for example, in the treatment of distressed banks), the authors put forth a number of principles to deal with issues regarding the economic incentives of financial institutions, the impact of economic shocks, and the role of political constraints.

Offering a global perspective, "Balancing the Banks" should be read by anyone concerned with solving the current crisis and preventing another such calamity in the future.

Many of the problems that lie at the heart of the current financial crisis stem from a significant but little-known development that occurred in the early 1980s: investors changed their investment criteria. This change gave rise to a conflict - a silent war - between executives in charge of the world's largest corporations, on the one hand, and credit agencies whose task it is to enforce the criteria on investors' behalf, on the other. The credit agencies that flourished in New York, London and elsewhere acquired a great deal of power because their ratings now reflected investors new priorities, and so controlled the ability of corporations to gain access to capital. The rise of the credit agencies thereby also represented a new model of capitalism, quite different from the old model of the risk-taking entrepreneur. To attract investment capital, corporations now have to employ enormous resources to create the illusion that capital is directed in line with the new expectations imposed by the credit agencies. The result is that devious reporting on companies' activities has become endemic. Drawing on more than six years of fieldwork carried out in some of the world's most powerful corporations and credit rating agencies on Wall Street, this short book describes, for the first time, the unspoken conflict that shapes the global economy. Anthropologist Alexandra Ouroussoff describes with startling clarity the effects of Wall Street's silent war: from the financial community's inability to price risk accurately (now recognised as a major cause of the financial crisis) to the deep reasons behind credit analysts' misplaced faith in numbers. Yet the book's most important contribution is its path-breaking analysis of the conditions of the conflict itself, here revealed as an unintended consequence of a much deeper transformation in the conditions underlying capitalism's success.

Throughout their long history, the primary concern of central banks has oscillated between price stability in normal times and financial stability in extraordinary times. In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, central banks have been given additional responsibilities to ensure financial stability, which has sparked intense debate over the nature of their role. Bankers and policy makers face an enormous challenge finding the right balance of power between the central bank and the state. This volume is the result of an international conference held at Norges Bank (the central bank of Norway). International experts and policy makers present research and historical analysis on the evolution of the central bank. They specifically focus on four key aspects: its role as an institution, the part it plays within the international monetary system, how to delineate and limit its functions, and how to apply the lessons of the past two centuries.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, governments worldwide undertook massive fiscal interventions to stave off what otherwise would have likely been a system-wide financial and economic meltdown. The policy responses engendered significant shifts in growth trajectories and debt sustainability outlooks of both mature and developing economies. For Low Income Countries, post-crisis debt sustainability analyses show an average deterioration of 5-7 percentage points in the present value of public debt-to-GDP ratio in 2009-10 compared with pre-crisis projections, and stay in the area of 30 per cent until 2014. Among the LICs, 40 per cent face high risk of (or are in) debt distress. In the G20 countries, government debt-to-GDP ratios are expected reach 85 per cent by 2014. The magnitude of public liabilities incurred and the uncertainty surrounding the exit from unprecedented discretionary fiscal stimulus have become a major source of concern about a future crisis. Will the current stringent financial conditions lead to a wave of sovereign debt problems around the world? Or will countries, given their stronger fundamentals compared with previous crises' episodes, successfully muddle through the crisis? The objective of the book is to present and discuss policy-relevant research on the current debt challenges which developing, emerging market, and developed economies face. Its value added lies in the integrated approach of drawing on theoretical research and evidence from practitioners' experience in developing, emerging market, and developed countries. The study is partially funded by the Debt Management Facility for Low-Income Countries. Contributors involve World Bank staff, other international and multilateral institutions, external researchers.

Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of 'ordinary' structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life. In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of 'surplus populations' worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts - both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression. Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.

It often seems that different crises are competing to devastate civilization. This book argues that financial meltdown, dwindling oil reserves, terrorism and food shortages need to be considered as part of the same ailing system. Most accounts of our contemporary global crises such as climate change, or the threat of terrorism, focus on one area, or another, to the exclusion of others. Nafeez Ahmed argues that the unwillingness of experts to look outside their specialisations explains why there is so much disagreement and misunderstanding about particular crises. This book attempts to investigate all of these crises, not as isolated events, but as trends and processes that belong to a single global system. We are therefore not dealing with a "clash of civilizations," as Huntington argued. Rather, we are dealing with a fundamental crisis of civilization itself. This book provides a stark warning of the consequences of failing to take a broad view of the problems facing the world.

This book addresses the question of the extent of and responses to inequalities in the UK in 2017 in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. Inequality is the issue that won't go away, a real world issue affecting all facets of society with political and economic developments such as austerity measures, Brexit and changes in political leadership impacting the inequality landscape. Six of the chapters examine the extent of economic inequalities and poverty using quantitative and qualitative methods that help map regional differences, compare the UK with the rest of the EU and go beyond the traditional measures and concepts. Seven chapters explore how inequalities have evolved since 2008 and have been tackled by policy makers in five policy areas (health, housing, education, gender and immigration) taking into account the new legislative framework and in one party (labour). Finally, six others address the issue of the governance of inequality by looking at how inequality features in the political agenda of the devolved assemblies in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales as well as at a local level in Ipswich and London. Based on recent surveys and current academic thinking, this book provides an up-to-date account of the extent and distribution of inequalities in the UK, of the evolving ways in which inequalities are measured and addressed as well as the changing perception of inequalities by the general public and policy-makers.

In the last thirty-five years, politicians of all parties in government ceded power over fundamental sectors of our economy to a new oligarchy of corporations. Government has become the servant, not the master, of corporate interests. Andrew Fisher describes this as a failed political experiment; an analysis that makes this book very different. It is not about blaming the bankers, or even high powered financiers - though much blame and opprobrium has rightly been apportioned to them. Nor is it a partisan attack on the failures of Conservative or Labour governments. Instead, this is a book about the much larger political crisis that still threatens our living standards - and how we can resolve it.

This book is based on ethnographic research from 2001-2, during Bank of Scotland's first year of merger with Halifax to form HBOS. The research is revisited from the present perspective in the wake of the global banking and financial crisis that undermined HBOS in 2008. This historical perspective on the ethnographic data is used to explore: people's responses to the pressures of heightened competition and organisational change; mutual and sometimes antagonistic perceptions of Scottish and English identities across the two merged banks; conflicting evaluations of national and organisational cultures; and the challenges of integrating ethnographic and historical perspectives in a single study. As an historical ethnography it 'salvages' a disappearing culture of Scottish and UK banking, disintegrated by neoliberal processes. -- .

The global financial crisis in 2008 brought central banking to the centre stage, prompting questions about the role of national central banks and - in Europe - of the multi-country European Central Bank. What can central banks do, and what are their limitations? How have they performed? Currency, Credit and Crisis seeks to provide a coherent perspective on the functions of a central bank in a small country by assessing the way in which Ireland's financial crisis from 2010 to 2013 was handled. Drawing on his experiences as Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and in research and policy work at the World Bank, Patrick Honohan offers a detailed analytical narrative of the origins of the crisis and of policy makers' conduct during its most fraught moments.