Out of Crisis

David A. Westbrook is Floyd H. and Hilda L. Hurst Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo. His books include City of Gold: An Apology for Globalization in a Time of Discontent (2003) and Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets (2009).

“The recent crisis involved an extraordinary sequence of financial market failures. Too many economists had assumed that that could never happen, partly because they had not appreciated the wider social, legal, and institutional context which normally enables such markets to operate. In this beautifully written and gripping book, David Westbrook employs wide-ranging social science skills to make us aware of this wider context, and thereby to see markets, and their occasional failures, in a new light. I found it fascinating, original and illuminating.” —Charles Goodhart is an expert in money and banking, with a long career in the Bank of England, on the UK Monetary Policy Committee, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science “Professor Westbrook’s fascinating new book is not just an exegesis of the recent financial crisis—it is a compelling and entertaining diatribe against some of the sacred cows of finance, among them the notions that markets are presumed efficient, corporations can self-regulate, sophistication matters, risk management reduces risk, and securities regulation makes markets transparent. Westbrook takes all of these ideas out back behind their once-sturdy intellectual shed and pumps them full of lead. He then provides a regulatory roadmap that will be an important part of the debate about the future of market capitalism.” —Frank Partnoy, Professor of Law at the University of San Diego and author of Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets “Out of Crisis: Rethinking our Financial Markets provides clear elucidation on the shaky foundations upon which our financial system was built. … Westbrook points to the need for a rethink of finance and suggests in this respect a better interdisciplinary dialogue between law and finance.” —International Finance

• Part I On Our Situation; Chapter 1 The Suddenly Obvious and the Already Decided; Chapter 2 Melodramatic Narratives; Chapter 3 Blue Water; Chapter 4 Tragedy and Law; Part II On Rethinking; Chapter 5 Policy Thought, Regulation, and Innovation; Chapter 6 Constructing Healthy Markets; Chapter 7 Metaphors for Thinking Socially about Capitalism; Part III On Policy; Chapter 8 Restoring Confidence after a Crash; Chapter 9 Confronting Systemic Risk; Chapter 10 The Old Questions, the Old Answers; conclusion Conclusion;