The Mystery Of Overend And Gurney

In May 1866, Overend and Gurney, the City of London's leading discount house suspended all payments and provoked a panic in the city. The owners were put on trial and investors in the bank were outraged at the events which resulted in many lost fortunes. This book gives an account of the downfall of a once much respected bank.

This Treasury Committee report examines the first run on the retail deposits of a United Kingdom bank since Victorian Times and analyses the causes and the consequences of the run on Northern Rock and what lessons can be learned. The Committee states the following: that the directors of Northern Rock were the principal authors of the difficulties that the company faced since August 2007; that the directors had pursued a reckless business model which was excessively reliant on wholesale funding; that the Financial Services Authority systematically failed in its regulatory duty; that the Chancellor of the Exchequer was right to view Northern Rock as posing a systemic risk to the financial system and to authorise the Bank of England's support. The Committee sets out 83 conclusions and recommendations, including: a series of measures for handling failing banks in an orderly manner to insulate taxpayers and small depositors; that a relevant authority be given power to acquire information relating to individual financial institutions and take action in specified circumstances; also that a special resolution regime should be established for failing banks to enable smooth administration of the bank and that this is combined with arrangements ensuring insured deposits are safe and accessible; that a Deposit Protection Fund be set up, that will ensure easy release of funds under any scheme; that a new post of Deputy Governor of the Bank of England and Head of Financial Stability should be created, with responsibility for handling failing banks and the proposed Deposit Protection Fund.

An engaging look at how modern finance almost destroyed our global economy Over the last thirty years, capital markets have been restructured through the tenets of modern finance. This has been enormously profitable for the financial services sector. However, these innovations, coupled with unsound risk and regulatory practices have proved disastrous for the global economy. In a clear and accessible style, ex-investment banker and financial journalist Martin Hutchinson, and highly respected academic, Kevin Dowd show how modern finance combined with easy money threatened to bring down the world financial system. At the heart of the book is modern finance as a U.S. invention, the theories and practices associated with them, and the changes they made in business models and risk management on Wall Street and other major financial centers. Breaks down the events involved in the 2007-08 financial collapse Reveals how botched policy response made a bad situation worse Focuses on lessons that the practice of finance must learn from recent events The Alchemists of Loss will help you to understand how our financial system crashed and show you what it will take to make sure this won't happen again as we move forward.

When the first fissures became visible to the naked eye in August 2007, suddenly the most powerful men in the world were three men who were never elected to public office. They were the leaders of the world’s three most important central banks: Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Mervyn King of the Bank of England, and Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank. Over the next five years, they and their fellow central bankers deployed trillions of dollars, pounds and euros to contain the waves of panic that threatened to bring down the global financial system, moving on a scale and with a speed that had no precedent. Neil Irwin’s The Alchemists is a gripping account of the most intense exercise in economic crisis management we’ve ever seen, a poker game in which the stakes have run into the trillions of dollars. The book begins in, of all places, Stockholm, Sweden, in the seventeenth century, where central banking had its rocky birth, and then progresses through a brisk but dazzling tutorial on how the central banker came to exert such vast influence over our world, from its troubled beginnings to the Age of Greenspan, bringing the reader into the present with a marvelous handle on how these figures and institutions became what they are – the possessors of extraordinary power over our collective fate. What they chose to do with those powers is the heart of the story Irwin tells. Irwin covered the Fed and other central banks from the earliest days of the crisis for the Washington Post, enjoying privileged access to leading central bankers and people close to them. His account, based on reporting that took place in 27 cities in 11 countries, is the holistic, truly global story of the central bankers’ role in the world economy we have been missing. It is a landmark reckoning with central bankers and their power, with the great financial crisis of our time, and with the history of the relationship between capitalism and the state. Definitive, revelatory, and riveting, The Alchemists shows us where money comes from—and where it may well be going.

Draws on archival research to tell the story of the nineteenth and twentieth-century development of commercial law through practice.

Combining commercial success with philanthropy and social activism, ‘Quakernomics’ offers a compelling model for corporate social responsibility in the modern world. Mike King explores the ethical capitalism of Quaker enterprises from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, testing this theory against those of prominent economists. With a foreword by Sir Adrian Cadbury, this book proves that the Quaker practice of ‘total capitalism’ is not a historically remote nicety but an immediately relevant guide for today’s global economy.

The Global Financial Crisis made its first appearance in Britain towards the end of 2007 with the failure of the Northern Rock Bank. It then reached an unparalleled intensity a year later when the government was forced to intervene to prevent the collapse of Lloyds/HBOS and RBS/Natwest. Before these events the British banking system possessed a long established reputation for resilience and competence that made it one of the most admired and trusted in the world. The financial crisis of 2007/8, and the subsequent revelations about the behaviour of bankers, destroyed that reputation and drove a desire for a complete reform of the British banking system. Forgotten in this headlong rush towards radical restructuring were the reasons why the British banking system had become so admired and trusted. The aim of this book is to explain why the British banking system gained its reputation for resilience and competence, maintained it for over 100 years, and then lost it in such a rapid and spectacular fashion. To achieve that aim requires a study of the entire banking system. Banks are key components of a complex financial system continually interacting with each other, and constantly changing over time, This makes the conventional distinctions drawn between different types of banks, including those specialising in international finance, savings and loans, corporate lending, and retail deposits and borrowing, inappropriate for any long-term analysis. The distinctions between different types of banks were neither absolute nor permanent but relative and temporary. Banks were also central to both the payments system and the money market without which no modern economy could function. What this book is about is the development of the British banking system as a whole over more than three centuries. Only with such an understanding is it possible to appreciate what the British banking system achieved and then maintained from the middle of the 19th century onwards, why it was lost in such a short space of time, and what needs to be done to return it to the position it once occupied. Without such an understanding the mistakes of the recent past are destined to be repeated time and gain.

'Heroic Disobedience: The Forced Marriage Plot and the British Novel, 1747-1880' shows the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels used what the author terms the forced marriage plot - a plot arc in which a greedy father tries to force his daughter into a marriage she does not want but that would be financially expedient to himself - to explore capitalism’s detrimental impacts on women’s right to autonomy. As capitalist economic practices replaced mercantilism, a woman’s value was seen primarily in the economic sense. That is, men came to recognize that women – especially young, marriageable women – could be used as objects of exchange between men. Recognizing this phenomenon, the novelists considered in 'Heroic Disobedience' – Samuel Richardson, Charlotte Lennox, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Smith, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Stone, and Anthony Trollope – depict the very specific ways in which women were raised to become willing pawns in this system. Religious discourse, conduct guides, marriage and property laws, wages, lack of meaningful education, and inheritance practices combined to leave women with no other options besides dependence on their patriarchs. Importantly, authors who use the forced marriage plot go beyond exposing women’s subjugation by creating – and celebrating – heroically disobedient heroines who believe, above all else, that they have the right to determine their own futures: futures in which they are autonomous agents, not subjected objects.