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We invited eighteen leading British thinkers on the reform of the world financial system and what a financial system is for to form a Future of Finance Group. They included journalists, academics, financiers and officials from the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and the Treasury. The result is this book.
The financial crash of 2008-9 has been the most damaging economic event since the Great Depression – affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The most immediate problem now is to prevent a repeat performance.
Much has been written about reforming the world financial system. But it is rarely based on a searching in-depth analysis of the underlying weaknesses within the system. Nor does it usually tackle the key question of what a financial system is for. To correct this omission, we invited eighteen leading British thinkers on these issues to form a Future of Finance Group. They included journalists, academics, financiers and officials from the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and the Treasury. We have met twelve times, for what many of those present described as the best and most searching discussions they had ever participated in. The result is this book.
The issues at stake are extraordinarily difficult and profound. The central question is what the financial system is for? Standard texts list five main functions – channelling savings into real investment, transferring risk, maturity transformation (including smoothing of life-cycle consumption), effecting payments and making markets. But if we study how financial companies make their money, it is extraordinarily difficult to see how closely this corresponds to the stated functions, and it is often difficult to explain why the rewards are often so high. Any explanation must also explain why the system is so prone to boom and bust.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the transport system. It looks at how it has developed, at how it will need to evolve to meet our need for travel – sustainably and economically – and at what our options are for meeting those needs.
The gap between important real-word problems and the workhorse mathematical model-based economics being taught to students has become a chasm. This book examines what economists need to bring to their jobs, and the way in which economics education in universities could be improved to fit them better for the real world.
A book of innovation and entrepreneurship case studies, all related to work in developing countries.
Focusing on Britain’s premier spa at Bath, this book examines how and why ‘taking the waters’ was regarded as an efficacious therapy by both patients and practitioners; and how and why Bath’s Mineral Water Hospital, one of the earliest voluntary hospitals to be established in the UK, ultimately became a world-renowned centre for the study and treatment of rheumatic diseases.
