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Ten original essays examine the political and institutional factors that influence the initiation and efficiency of preferential credit policies in Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil.
Since 2008, the financial sector has been the subject of extensive criticism. Much of this criticism has focused on the morality of the actors involved in the crisis and its extended aftermath. This book analyses the key moral and political philosophical issues of the crisis and relates them to the political economy of finance. It also examines to what extent the financial sector can or should be reformed. This book is unified by the view that the financial sector had been a self-serving and self-regulating elite consumed by greed, speculation and even lawlessness, with little sense of responsibility to the wider society or common good. In light of critical analysis by authors from a variety of backgrounds and persuasions, suggestions for reform and improvement are proposed, in some cases radical reform. By placing the world of finance under a microscope, this book analyses the assumptions that have led from hubris to disgrace as it provides suggestions for an improved society. Rooted in philosophical reflection, this book invites a critical reassessment of finance and its societal role in the 21st century. This book will be of interest to academics, politicians, central bankers and financial regulators who wish to improve the morality of finance.
Can the contemporary Islamic finance movement be shown to meet the requirements of modern commerce? In the wake of the terrorist attacks on America the UN Security Council passed a resolution targeting transnational sources of terrorist funds. The United States and the International Monetary Fund are encouraging the governments of the Middle East to adopt policies of economic liberalism and a new type of capitalism, based on Islamic values and beliefs, is emerging.The aims of the book are:* to explore the political implications of the slow but steady accumulation of Islamic capital* to analyse the connections between Islamic finance and Islamic political movements in Middle Eastern and North African countries* to show that the commonly-perceived connection between Islamic finance and money laundering and terrorism is by no means the complete picture. Readers will learn to appreciate the various political contexts in which Islamic finance operates in the Middle East and North Africa and will acquire some understanding of its political as well as economic constraints. Hopefully possible misunderstandings about Islamic banking and finance will be corrected.The book is divided into two parts - part one is thematic and lays the ground for the country-specific case studies in part two (covering the Sudan, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt). The contributors include political scientists, economists and historians.Key Features:* A major topical issue* Written by the world's leading experts on Islamic Political Economy* Explores the connections between Islamic finance and Islamic political movements* Includes country-specific case studies
A ball of hot money rolls around the world. It seeks anonymity and political refuge. It dodges taxes and sidesteps currency controls. It rolls through offshore shell companies and secret bank accounts, phoney charities and fraudulent religious foundations. It is kept rolling by white-collar criminals, gun-runners, drug dealers, insurgent groups, scam artists, tax evaders, gold and gem smugglers, and, not least, secret service agents plotting coups and financing revolutions. R.T. Naylor explains the origins of this pool of hot and homeless money, its origins, its uses and abuses, how the world of high finance, corporate and governmental, became hostage to it, and the price the world is paying and will continue to pay until the hostages are released. This book was one of the first, and remains the most comprehensive, to dissect the world of offshore finance, capital flight, money laundering, and tax evasion. Once a subject of concern principally to tax authorities and finance ministries, since the September 11, 2001 hot and homeless money has now become a central preoccupation for police forces and intelligence services around the world.
Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money.
The current financial and sovereign debt crisis of the European Union and the United States can be regarded as the most recent of a wave of financial and sovereign debt crises that have affected different regions of the world over the past quarter century. While there is a large and growing body of literature on the economic aspects of financial crises, its political elements remain surprisingly under-studied. Moments of Truth: The Politics of Financial Crises in Comparative Perspective fills this gap in the literature by looking at the political repercussions and policy implications of financial crises in comparative perspective, using case studies in Latin America, Korea, and Russia, as well as the contemporary crises in the US and in key European countries. Contributors to this volume look at the crises as critical junctures that generate high levels of uncertainty while calling for decisive action. The chapters emphasize structural or agency based explanations and give relevance to the role of ideas, interests, and institutions in explaining different outcomes. The questions addressed by the case studies include: how the crises were defined by key actors, the range of political and policy options available to deal with their impact, the role of ideas in policy shifts, how political and economic actors redefine their interests in contexts of uncertainty, how political institutions mediate reactions to the crises, what explains the choice of a certain option over other alternatives, and whether the crisis has (so far) resulted in significant political and policy changes or in incremental adjustments to the status quo. The first book to comparatively analyze the political dimensions of financial crises across different global regions, Moments of Truth will be highly significant for any scholars interested in the contemporary debate on financial crises.
What if our financial system were organized to the benefit of the many rather than simply empowering the few? Robert Hockett and Fred Block argue that an entirely different financial system is both desirable and possible. They outline concrete steps that could get us there. Financial systems move the worlds savings from investment to investment, chasing the highest rates of return. They run on profit. But what if investment went to the enterprises or institutions that provided things that the majority of people would prioritize? Democratizing Finance includes six responses that seek to amend, elaborate, and challenge the arguments developed by Hockett and Block. Some of the core arguments put forward by other contributors include calls for the rapid elimination of private financial entities, the dilemmas of the politics associated with financial reforms, and the fate of parallel proposals advanced in the US in the 1930s.
Dark Finance offers one of the first ethnographic accounts of financial expansion and its political impacts in Eastern Europe. Following workers, managers, and investors in the Macedonian construction sector, Fabio Mattioli shows how financialization can empower authoritarian regimes—not by making money accessible to everyone, but by allowing a small group of oligarchs to monopolize access to international credit and promote a cascade of exploitative domestic debt relations. The landscape of failed deals and unrealizable dreams that is captured in this book portrays finance not as a singular, technical process. Instead, Mattioli argues that finance is a set of political and economic relations that entangles citizens, Eurocrats, and workers in tense paradoxes. Mattioli traces the origins of illiquidity in the reorganization of the European project and the postsocialist perversion of socialist financial practices—a dangerous mix that hid the Macedonian regime's weakness behind a façade of urban renewal and, for a decade, made it seem omnipresent and invincible. Dark Finance chronicles how, one bad deal at a time, Macedonia's authoritarian regime rode a wave of financial expansion that deepened its reach into Macedonian society, only to discover that its domination, like all speculative bubbles, was teetering on the verge of collapse.
One of the most troubling critiques of contemporary democracy is the inability of representative governments to regulate the deluge of money in politics. If it is impossible to conceive of democracies without elections, it is equally impractical to imagine elections without money. Costs of Democracy is an exhaustive, ground-breaking study of money in Indian politics that opens readers’ eyes to the opaque and enigmatic ways in which money flows through the political veins of the world’s largest democracy. Through original, in-depth investigation—drawing from extensive fieldwork on political campaigns, pioneering surveys, and innovative data analysis—the contributors in this volume uncover the institutional and regulatory contexts governing the torrent of money in politics; the sources of political finance; the reasons for such large spending; and how money flows, influences, and interacts with different tiers of government. The book raises uncomfortable questions about whether the flood of money risks washing away electoral democracy itself.
Capitalism has become 'financialized'. Since the 1970s, the swelling of financial markets and asset price bubbles has occurred alongside weaker underlying economic growth. Yet financialization was not a spontaneous market development - it was deeply political. States fuelled this process through policies of financial liberalization, and the British state lies at the heart of the story. Britain's radical financial liberalizations in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in creating a financialized global economic order in which the City of London emerged as a central hub. But why did the British state propel financialization? The conventional wisdom points to the lobbying power of financial elites and the strength of neoliberal ideology. However, Governing Financialization offers an alternative explanation through an in-depth exploration of declassified state archives. By examining key financial liberalizations in the 1970s and 1980s - including the notorious 'Big Bang' - this book argues that these policies were not part of an intentional scheme to create a new finance-led economic model. Instead, they were designed to address immediate governing dilemmas related to the grinding 'stagflation' crisis and its aftershocks. In this era, British governments found themselves trapped between global competitive pressures to enforce painful domestic adjustment and national political pressures to maintain existing living standards. Financial liberalization was pursued in a trial-and-error manner to navigate this dilemma. By unleashing financial markets, the state hoped to either postpone the worst effects of the crisis, or enact tough economic restructuring in an arm's-length fashion. Financialization was an accidental outcome, not an intentional result.