Banking On Failure

Banks seem all too often involved in cases of misconduct, particularly involving the exploitation of tax systems. Banking on Failure explains why and how banks "game the system", accounting for these misconduct cases and analysing the wider implications for financial markets and tax systems. Banking on Failure: Cum-Ex and Why and How Banks Game the System explains why banks design and use structured products to exploit tax systems. It describes one of the biggest and most complex cases - the "cum-ex" scandal - in which hundreds of banks and funds from across the globe participated in the raid on the public exchequers of a number of countries, with losses in the tens of billions of euros. The book then draws on the significance of this case study, and what this tells us about modern banks and their interactions with tax systems. Banking on Failure demonstrates why the exploitation of tax systems by banks is an inevitable feature of the financial markets landscape, and suggests possible responses.

Banks seem all too often involved in cases of misconduct, particularly involving the exploitation of tax systems. Banking on Failure explains why and how banks "game the system", accounting for these misconduct cases and analysing the wider implications for financial markets and tax systems. Banking on Failure: Cum-Ex and Why and How Banks Game the System explains why banks design and use structured products to exploit tax systems. It describes one of the biggest and most complex cases - the "cum-ex" scandal - in which hundreds of banks and funds from across the globe participated in the raid on the public exchequers of a number of countries, with losses in the tens of billions of euros. The book then draws on the significance of this case study, and what this tells us about modern banks and their interactions with tax systems. Banking on Failure demonstrates why the exploitation of tax systems by banks is an inevitable feature of the financial markets landscape, and suggests possible responses.

Based on reporting for which the author was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award, this book traces the rise and spectacular fall of Washington Mutual.

With the recent credit crisis there is a renewed interest in how banks operate and sometimes fail. This book offers an understandable explanation of the complex banking system and how to prevent unreasonable risk.

The potential failure of a large bank presents vexing questions for policymakers. It poses significant risks to other financial institutions, to the financial system as a whole, and possibly to the economic and social order. Because of such fears, policymakers in many countries—developed and less developed, democratic and autocratic—respond by protecting bank creditors from all or some of the losses they otherwise would face. Failing banks are labeled "too big to fail" (or TBTF). This important new book examines the issues surrounding TBTF, explaining why it is a problem and discussing ways of dealing with it more effectively. Gary Stern and Ron Feldman, officers with the Federal Reserve, warn that not enough has been done to reduce creditors' expectations of TBTF protection. Many of the existing pledges and policies meant to convince creditors that they will bear market losses when large banks fail are not credible, resulting in significant net costs to the economy. The authors recommend that policymakers enact a series of reforms to reduce expectations of bailouts when large banks fail.

In this short but ambitious book, Arjun Appadurai argues that the failure of the financial system in 2007-08 in the United States was primarily a failure of language. This argument does not deny that greed, ignorance, weak regulation, and irresponsible risk-taking were important factors in the collapse. But the new role of language in the marketplace, for Appadurai, is the condition of possibility for all these more easily identifiable flaws. Attempts to rectify the social pathologies of contemporary finance must address that failure of language. "Banking on Words "focuses on derivatives as the distinctive innovation of our financial era. Derivatives are written promises concerning the uncertain future prices of financial assets and the substance of these contracts is expressed in terms of money. The recent failure of derivatives markets was systematic and should be understood as failed promises. While it is well-known that derivatives pile risk on risk with little basis in real production and trade, Appadurai reveals this process in a fresh light from which some policy conclusions may be drawn. While critical of derivative finance s present social infrastructure and supporting ideology, Appadurai acknowledges its capacity for creating vast new forms of wealth and asks the crucial question: if we want access to that wealth, what kind of social arrangements would we need to make sure that it benefits all of society rather than reinforcing a system that benefits the few who are already well off? His bold answer involves not the repair of the force of promises but rather the repair and reconstruction of the idea of the individual to enable new sorts of solidarity between dividuals, agents whose very partiality may allow for new aggregations of aspiration, interest and affiliation. This amounts to nothing less than a new ideology of sociality."