Global Finance

Popular anger against bankers and financial speculators has never been greater, yet the practical workings of the system remain opaque to many people. The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance aims to bridge the gap between protest slogans and practical proposals for reform. As a stockbroker turned campaigner, Brett Scott has a unique understanding of life inside and outside the system. The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance is a practical handbook for campaigners, academics and students who wish to deepen their understanding of the inner workings of the financial sector. It shows how financial knowledge can be used to build effective social and environmental campaigns. Scott covers topics frequently overlooked, such as the cultural aspects of the financial sector, and considers major issues such as agricultural speculation, carbon markets and tar sands financing. The book shows how activists can use the internal dynamics of the sector to reform it and showcases the growing alternative finance movement.

Exploring Russia's reentry into global capital markets at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Global Finance, Local Control shows how economic integration became deeply entangled with a bare-knuckled struggle for control over the vestiges of the Soviet empire. Igor Logvinenko reveals how the post-communist Russian economy became a full-fledged participant in the international financial sector without significantly improving the local rule of law. By the end of Vladimir Putin's second presidential term, Russia was more integrated into the global financial system than at any point in the past. However, the country's longstanding deficiencies—including widespread corruption, administration of justice, and an increasingly overbearing state—continued unabated. Scrutinizing stock-market restrictions on foreign ownership during the first fifteen years of Russia's economic transition, Logvinenko concludes that financial internationalization allowed local elites to raise capital from foreign investors while maintaining control over local assets. They legitimized their wealth using Western institutions, but they did so on their terms. Global Finance, Local Control delivers a somber lesson about the integration of emerging markets: without strong domestic rule-of-law protections, financial internationalization entrenches oligarchic capitalism and strengthens authoritarian regimes.

Since 2008, when Fixing Global Finance was first published, the collapse of the housing and credit bubbles of the 2000s has crippled the world’s economy. In this updated edition, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf explains how global imbalances helped cause the financial crises now ravaging the U.S. economy and outlines steps for ending this destructive cycle—of which this is the latest and biggest. An expanded conclusion recommends near- and long-term measures to stabilize and protect financial markets in the future. Reviewing global financial crises since 1980, Wolf lays bare the links between the microeconomics of finance and the macroeconomics of the balance of payments, demonstrating how the subprime lending crisis in the United States fits into a pattern that includes the economic shocks of 1997, 1998, and early 1999 in Latin America, Russia, and Asia. He explains why the United States became the “borrower and spender of last resort,” makes the case that this was an untenable arrangement, and argues that global economic security depends on radical reforms in the international monetary system and the ability of emerging economies to borrow sustainably in domestic currencies. Sharply and clearly argued, Wolf’s prescription for fixing global finance illustrates why he has been described as "the world's preeminent financial journalist."

In 2011 the World Bank—with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—launched the Global Findex database, the world's most comprehensive data set on how adults save, borrow, make payments, and manage risk. Drawing on survey data collected in collaboration with Gallup, Inc., the Global Findex database covers more than 140 economies around the world. The initial survey round was followed by a second one in 2014 and by a third in 2017. Compiled using nationally representative surveys of more than 150,000 adults age 15 and above in over 140 economies, The Global Findex Database 2017: Measuring Financial Inclusion and the Fintech Revolution includes updated indicators on access to and use of formal and informal financial services. It has additional data on the use of financial technology (or fintech), including the use of mobile phones and the Internet to conduct financial transactions. The data reveal opportunities to expand access to financial services among people who do not have an account—the unbanked—as well as to promote greater use of digital financial services among those who do have an account. The Global Findex database has become a mainstay of global efforts to promote financial inclusion. In addition to being widely cited by scholars and development practitioners, Global Findex data are used to track progress toward the World Bank goal of Universal Financial Access by 2020 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The database, the full text of the report, and the underlying country-level data for all figures—along with the questionnaire, the survey methodology, and other relevant materials—are available at www.worldbank.org/globalfindex.

Recent developments in finance are raising complex social and ethical questions concerning the legitimate scope and limits of the global economy. In this short, compelling book, acclaimed sociologist Robert Holton considers afresh our twenty-first century world of global finance. The book is a brilliant introduction to global finance and its consequences, highlighting the connections between finance, economy and society.

This is an elementary, up-to-date text and reference book in global finance. It has been especially designed for beginning students in economics and finance, and also for self-study by anyone with a knowledge of secondary school algebra and an interest in finance and financial markets. The subjects taken up in some details are stocks (shares), bonds, interest rates and derivatives, particularly futures, options, and swaps. There are also chapters on exchange rates and banking, and readers are provided with an elementary introduction to risk and uncertainty. The book is also an easily read supplement to more technical presentations, in that it introduces all categories of readers to real world financial markets.

Argues for a world financial authority with the power to establish worldwide, best-practice financial regulation and risk management, citing historical situations that were resolved by similar agencies. Reprint.

"The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy. In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s—trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies—had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier. How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, “managed” globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today."