This book analyzes the highly contentious payday lending industry, presenting valuable new data collected during Canada's recent regulatory reviews and demonstrating its relevance to payday lending conversations taking place worldwide. The authors treat the industry with a balanced hand by establishing its importance as an example of financialization and acknowledging the complex impact of payday lending services on low-income and credit-constrained clients. Up-to-date data from an interdisciplinary mix of financial, econometric, legal, behavioral economic, and socioeconomic sources-all in the context of an established Canadian industry-provide both proponents and opponents of payday lending with valuable evidence for their discussions of how much regulation is required to minimize harmful consequences. These insights from Canada expand a US-centric conversation and provide a key resource for the growing list of countries in which the industry is present, from the UK and Poland to South Africa and Australia.

This book examines financial vulnerability: a state in which a person or household cannot absorb any substantial spending or negative income shock without substantial financial and ultimately broader harm such as job loss, emotional harm, or mental illness. The focus of the book is on the experiences of low- income and modest income Canadian families - families which, by virtue of being in the lower income brackets, are particularly at risk of experiencing financial hardship. Looking at vulnerability from a conceptual and empirical lens, this book offers a framework to better understand the complex and interdependent ways in which financial vulnerability emerge and can be addressed. By locating its analysis of individual and household financial management in wider community, cultural, and economic contexts, this book seeks to offer holistic policy recommendations to reduce financial vulnerability, with implications that go beyond Canada and to other developed countries.

This study explores the major patterns of change in the evolution of financial crises as enduring phenomena and analyzes the paradoxical position that crises are at once similar to and different from each other. Brenda Spotton-Visano examines economic, psychological and social elements intrinsic to the process of capitalist accumulation and innovation to explain the enduring similarities of crises across historical episodes. She also assesses the impact that changing financial and economic structures have on determining the specific nature of crises and the differential effect these have in focal point, manner and extent of transmission to other, otherwise unrelated, parts of the economy. Financial Crises offers a consistent method for interpreting variations in financial crises through time and allows for a better overall appreciation for both the transitory fragility and enduring flexibility of financial capitalism and the potential vulnerability created by on-going financial development. Topical and informative, this key book is of keen interest to all those studying and researching international economics and political economy.

The financial crisis is a recurring phenomenon, yet its various instances have differed greatly in nature. Crises have punctuated the history of Western financial systems since the early eighteenth century variously appearing in the guise of stock market crashes, large-scale failures of financial enterprises, collapses in the external value of a nation's currency, or some combination of the three.
This study explores the major patterns of change in the evolution of financial crises as enduring phenomena, and analyzes the paradoxical position that crises are at once similar to and different from each other. Brenda Spotton-Visano examines economic, psychological and social elements intrinsic to the process of capitalist accumulation and innovation to explain the enduring similarities of crises across historical episodes. She also assesses the impact that changing financial and economic structures have on determining the specific nature of crises and the differential effect these have in focal point, manner and extent of transmission to other, otherwise unrelated, parts of the economy.
"Financial Crises "offers a consistent method for interpreting variations in financial crises through time and allows for a better overall appreciation for both the transitory fragility and enduring flexibility of financial capitalism and the potential vulnerability created by on-going financial development.

This book analyzes the highly contentious payday lending industry, presenting valuable new data collected during Canada's recent regulatory reviews and demonstrating its relevance to payday lending conversations taking place worldwide. The authors treat the industry with a balanced hand by establishing its importance as an example of financialization and acknowledging the complex impact of payday lending services on low-income and credit-constrained clients. Up-to-date data from an interdisciplinary mix of financial, econometric, legal, behavioral economic, and socioeconomic sources-all in the context of an established Canadian industry-provide both proponents and opponents of payday lending with valuable evidence for their discussions of how much regulation is required to minimize harmful consequences. These insights from Canada expand a US-centric conversation and provide a key resource for the growing list of countries in which the industry is present, from the UK and Poland to South Africa and Australia.