Iain Hardie - Böcker

Investment is no longer a matter of individual savers directly choosing which shares or bonds to buy. Rather, most of their money flows through a 'chain': an often extended sequence of intermediaries. What goes on in that chain is of huge importance: The world's investment managers, who are now almost as well paid as top bankers, control assets equivalent in value to around a year of total global economic output. In Chains of Finance, five social scientists discuss the ways in which the intermediaries in the chain influence each other, channel the flows of savers' money, enhance investment decisions, and form audiences for each other's performances of financially competent selves. The central argument of the book is that investment management is fashioned profoundly by the opportunities and constraints this chain creates. Whether chains constrain or enable, however, they always entangle, tying intermediaries to each other - silently and profoundly shaping the investment management industry. Chains of Finance is a novel analysis that will make students, social scientists, financial professionals, and regulators looking at the workings of financial markets in a new light. A must-read for anyone looking for insights into the decision-making processes of investment managers and those influenced by and working for them.

Economics and political economy lack the analytical tools to explain the differing impact of the recent international financial crisis that erupted in 2007 on developed economies. The principal contribution of this edited volume is to offer a 'market-based banking' framework which transcends the dominant dichotomous understanding of financial systems in terms of credit-based and capital-based. It demonstrates why this dichotomy is obsolete through an appreciation of the activities of banks. Further, it employs 'market-based banking' to overcome the inability of existing typologies to explain financial system change. 'Market-based banking' provides a framework that is more reflective of banking in modern financial systems, and one that provides a more successful explanation of the differential impact of the recent financial crisis. The comparative and single-country chapters in this volume compare the extent of 'market-based banking' across eleven countries, including all of the G7 economies. The chapters also consider the impact of the financial crisis in terms of necessary government support and lending to non-financial companies. The edited volume includes work by authors who are widely respected experts in national political economies, finance, financial regulation, banking, central banking, and monetary policy. This volume is one of the first book-length comparative studies of the financial crisis and its impact and one of the few recent comparative studies of national banking / financial systems in any discipline.