The Future Of Financial Markets

This book provides a comprehensive review of the prospects for financial markets in the face of rapid technological development and international integration. It offers a revolutionary perspective, exploring the challenges for regulators and demonstrating a network economics approach to explain the failure of e-money to develop.

An insider's account of the rise of digital money and cryptocurrencies Dubbed "CryptoDad" for his impassioned plea to Congress to acknowledge and respect cryptocurrencies as the inevitable product of a fast-growing technological wave and a free marketplace, Chris Giancarlo is considered one of "the most influential individuals in financial regulation." CryptoDad: The Fight for the Future of Money describes Giancarlo’s own reckoning with the future of the global economy—at the intersection of markets, technology, and public policy—and lays out the fight for a Digital Dollar. CryptoDad is Giancarlo's own personal story, detailing his forays into the world of Wall Street to his tenure as the 13th Chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), where he pushed for the agency to recognize the digitization of markets. His growing fame as a Twitter presence in this essential debate has given Giancarlo a platform to makes a case for the future of cryptocurrencies as the natural successor to America’s current failing financial market infrastructure. CryptoDad provides readers with: A thorough exploration of digital change and how it affects the lives of everyone in a global economy A revolutionary consideration of regulatory responses to the rapid pace of technological innovation A call to update our aging financial organizations, particularly the infrastructure of money itself, and focus on renewed faith and confidence in free market innovation A foreword by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two of the biggest names in cryptocurrencies CryptoDad argues that the next digital wave will be the coming Internet of Value, where cryptocurrencies will do the Internet of Information did to immaterial things: make them accessible, distributable, and movable instantly across the globe. This book is an ideal introduction to the importance of technology in the marketplace.

'Within the cacophony of voices trying to explain the recent financial crisis, Elena Esposito's voice sounds clear and deep. Steering away from simplistic condemnations and equally simplistic prescriptions for betterment, she connects the very invention of derivatives to that eternal human hope – of controlling the future. While the task is impossible, the attempts never stop, and the very process of attempting it brings some consolation. And while derivatives can be seen, claim sociologists of finance, as performative, that is shaping the future they promise to control, even this is far from certain. Esposito's fascinating and beautiful work is an important contribution to the sociology of finance, a subdiscipline of sociology that took on itself an extremely important task of explaining how the finance markets really work.'– Barbara Czarniawska, University of Gothenburg, Sweden'This is a brilliant and timely book that shows how financing is centrally implicated in the very unpredictability and uncertainty it purports to master. With the incisiveness characteristic of her style and writing, Esposito reads economics in innovative ways that disclose the hidden premises by which financial instruments trade and consume the prospects of the future.' – Jannis Kallinikos, London School of Economics, UK'Elena Esposito's analysis of financial markets and of their recent decline is radically different from the analyses which can be found in economic journals or books. Financial operations are reduced to their basic dimensions: time and money. Under this perspective, what is sold on financial markets is the possibility for the creation of commitments in the course of time, the possibility for the combination of these commitments with one another, and the identification of chances for the achievement of profit opportunities through the creation of specific combinations. The author argues that the recent crisis of the financial system was caused by oversimplified visions of the future and of risk leading to the consequence that options were not available in the present because all possibilities had been used up by the future. This oversimplified vision of the future imploded, and trust with it. The state tried to reconstruct options for the future in order to open up new possibilities and chances for learning. The author does not deliver recipes on how to prevent severe crises of the financial system in the future. Yet, her concept facilitates understanding of how financial futures are opened up or closed and thus provides insights into basic principles on whose basis future opportunities can be kept open and trust can be maintained. Innovative reforms of the financial system can only develop on the basis of unconventional analyses. Elena Esposito's book contains an analysis of this kind.'– Alfred Kieser, Mannheim University, Germany'Elena Esposito's book is a fundamental analysis of time in economics. With economic rigour underpinned by sociological reasoning, she explains the futures market more clearly than is possible with economic analysis alone. Economic concepts are considered in terms of time – actors deal in the present with future risks by transferring these risks to the present situation. As a result, we get more options and more risks at the same time: at present. No equilibrium will balance these trades because of the asymmetry of time: our actual decisions deal with our imagination of the future, that is, with the future of the present, but the results will be realized in the presence of the future – different modalities of time. The book is a sound reflection on modelling time in economic theory, a "must" for economists.'– Birger P. Priddat, Witten/Herdecke University, Germany'The Future of Futures is an original and intellectually provocative book which forces the reader to think. Esposito's essay fulfils two rather different functions. On the one hand, it brings new and persuasive arguments to bear against the erroneous thesis that the present financial crisis is merely due to human mistakes and to some specific government failures. On the other hand, the book suggests that only by reconsidering the role of time in the economy is it possible to make full sense of the crisis and to re-orient in a desired direction the future movements of money. It is a well-known fact that traditional economics has always adhered to a spatial conception of time, according to which time, like space, is perfectly reversible. Whence its inability both to understand how economies develop and to prescribe adequate policies. The author's proposal is to move steps ahead in the direction of an analysis of an economy in time, where both historical time and time as duration can find a place. Esposito's well-written, jargon-free book will capture the attention of anyone seriously interested in the future of our market systems.'– Stefano Zamagni, University of Bologna and Johns Hopkins University, Bologna Center, Italy This book reconstructs the dynamics of economics, beginning explicitly with the role and the relevance of time: money uses the future in order to generate present wealth. Financial markets sell and buy risk, thereby binding the future. Elena Esposito explains that complex risk management techniques of structured finance produce new and uncontrolled risks because they use a simplified idea of the future, failing to account for how the future reacts to attempts at controlling it. During the recent financial crisis, the future had already been used (through securitizations, derivatives and other tools) to the extent that we had many futures, but no open future available.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, a resurgence of interest in economic and financial history has occurred among investment professionals. This book discusses some of the lessons drawn from the past that may help practitioners when thinking about their portfolios. The book’s editors, David Chambers and Elroy Dimson, are the academic leaders of the Newton Centre for Endowment Asset Management at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behavior Half of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can’t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe. The debate is one of the biggest in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hangs on the answer. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo transforms the debate with a powerful new framework in which rationality and irrationality coexist—the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency is incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo’s new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought—a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions about economics and investing, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how markets really work.

New banking and investment business models to navigate the post-financial crisis environment The financial crisis of 2007-2008 has discredited business models in the banking and fund management industries. In The Future of Finance, Moorad Choudhry and Gino Landuyt argue that banks must realign their business models, implying a lower return-on-equity; diversifying their funding sources; and increasing liquidity reserves. On the investment side, the authors discuss how diversification did not reduce risk, but rather amplified it, and failed to stabilize returns. The authors conclude that the clear lesson from the crisis is to know one's risk. A lesson that is best served by concentrating on assets and sectors that you understand. Examines the weaknesses in the business models of many institutions, as well as the theoretical foundation for professionals in the field of finance Identifies the shortcomings of Modern Portfolio Theory Addresses how investment managers can find new strategies for creating "alpha" and why they need to re-vamp their fee structures Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, The Future of Finance will provide bankers and investment managers with a guide to realigning their businesses in order to prosper in the post-crisis financial markets.

The revised and updated 7th edition of this highly regarded book brings the reader right up to speed with the latest financial market developments, and provides a clear and incisive guide to a complex world that even those who work in it often find hard to understand. In chapters on the markets that deal with money, foreign exchange, equities, bonds, commodities, financial futures, options and other derivatives, the book examines why these markets exist, how they work, and who trades in them, and gives a run-down of the factors that affect prices and rates. Business history is littered with disasters that occurred because people involved their firms with financial instruments they didn't properly understand. If they had had this book they might have avoided their mistakes. For anyone wishing to understand financial markets, there is no better guide.

The traditional role of a bank was to transfer funds from savers to investors, engaging in maturity transformation, screening for borrower risk and monitoring for borrower effort in doing so. A typical loan contract was set up along six simple dimensions: the amount, the interest rate, the expected credit risk (determining both the probability of default for the loan and the expected loss given default), the required collateral, the currency, and the lending technology. However, the modern banking industry today has a broad scope, offering a range of sophisticated financial products, a wider geography -- including exposure to countries with various currencies, regulation and monetary policy regimes -- and an increased reliance on financial innovation and technology. These new bank business models have had repercussions on the loan contract. In particular, the main components and risks of a loan contract can now be hedged on the market, by means of interest rate swaps, foreign exchange transactions, credit default swaps and securitization. Securitized loans can often be pledged as collateral, thus facilitating new lending. And the lending technology is evolving from one-to-one meetings between a loan officer and a borrower, at a bank branch, towards potentially disruptive technologies such as peer-to-peer lending, crowd funding or digital wallet services. This book studies the interaction between traditional and modern banking and the economic benefits and costs of this new financial ecosystem, by relying on recent empirical research in banking and finance and exploring the effects of increased financial sophistication on a particular dimension of the loan contract.