Towards A Socioanalysis Of Money Finance And Capitalism

The current global financial crisis has raised awareness of the impact the world of finance has on the economy and the future of democracy. Following the crisis, this book aims at a deep understanding of the human psycho-social dynamics beneath the surface of the financial industry, its markets and institutions. It seeks to understand why the seemingly rational world of economic behavior, with its calculated models and predictions, at times goes horribly wrong. This book uses the discipline of socio-analysis to explore the meaning of money, markets and the broad financial world that so strongly affects our daily lives. Socio-analysis contributes to an awareness and understanding of underlying unconscious desires, fantasies and illusions that bring about the irrational inflation of faith and trust in the world of money, finance and capital(ism). The insight that the financial crisis ‘was essentially psychological in origin’ (Robert Shiller) and that the world of finance is broadly shaped if not determined by irrational often unconscious factors is not yet broadly shared. This book appears to be one of the first, if not the first contribution that explicitly focuses on what is beneath the surface of money, finance and capital. It invites the reader to explore the financial world in depth. The aim of this book is to provide businesses, organizational consultants, students, researchers and interested persons more broadly with a detailed exploration of the psycho-social dynamics of the financial industry as it exists currently within the capitalist system. The contributors to this book come from Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK, and USA.

Shareholder engagement with publicly listed companies is often seen as a key means to monitor corporate malpractices. In this book, the authors examine the corporate governance roles of key institutional investors in UK corporate equity, including pension funds, insurance companies, collective investment funds, hedge and private equity funds and sovereign wealth funds. They argue that institutions’ corporate governance roles are an instrument ultimately shaped by private interests and market forces, as well as law and regulatory obligations, and that policy-makers should not readily make assumptions regarding their effectiveness, or their alignment with public interest or social good.

Extraordinary growth of the financial relative to the nonfinancial sector has marked the development of mature capitalism during the last four decades. The changing balance between the two sectors has altered the outlook of the economy and facilitated the spread of financial concerns, practices, and outlooks across society. The result has been the gradual transformation of contemporary capitalism – namely, its financialization since the late 1970s. There are similarities between the Marxian, the Post-Keynesian and other heterodox approaches to analyzing the profound changes in money and finance in the global economy since the 1980s. Prominent among them is a common focus on financialization but also on the limits of monetary policy, the transformation of banking, the tendency to crisis related to financial excess, and the problematic role of neoliberalism in finance. Furthermore, the complexity of the interrelationship between finance and the rest of the economy has increased since the great crisis of 2007-9. This book tackles several of these developments as well as engaging in debate among different currents of heterodox economics. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Japanese Political Economy.

Conventional explanations of the nature of money are weighed down by bad ideas and irrelevant historical evidence. The standard theory of finance is hampered by the lack of both sociological and ethical contextualization, and by sloppy thinking about numbers and time. Money, Finance, Reality, Morality addresses those weaknesses with truly novel models of how the economy, money, and finance actually work. The book analyses the perception of money as an economic tool (as compared to a symbolic and sociological object) as a highly functional quantitative token that assigns numerical values to the inherently unmeasurable economic activities of labour and consumption. It looks at finance as an often inferior solution to economic problems and a tool for helping the poor support the rich. And it explains how the tolerance of greed makes the money-finance system the weakest link in modern economies. Money, Finance, Reality, Morality, written without jargon or maths, will be of interest to students, teachers and practitioners in economics and finance, government and politics, religion, philosophy, and sociology. Author: Edward Hadas is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University (UK). He was formerly an economics editor and columnist for Reuters Breakingviews. He also worked on the Financial Times' influential Lex column, following 25 years as a financial analyst with firms such as Morgan Stanley and Putnam Investments.

This book provides a detailed overview of ecological money and finance. The functioning and development of the monetary and financial systems are analysed in relation to sustainability constraints to highlight the actions required to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Empirical case studies are utilized to give insight into the failure of the traditional financial system, with ways in which they can be overcome also considered. This book adopts a pluralist perspective to revisit the foundations of financial and monetary economics from a sustainability perspective, and examines the economic and financial instruments that can be used to combat ecological challenges. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in ecological economics and sustainable finance.

This highly original book aims to broaden the discussion about risk, the management of risk and regulation, especially in the financial industry. By using terms of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, Peter Pelzer employs philosophical concepts to enrich the understanding of what risk is about and what is necessarily excluded in contemporary risk management.

This volume is a debate about a sociology and economics of money: a form of positive trespassing. It is unique in being written by scholars of both disciplines committed to this mutual venture and in starting from the original groundwork laid by Geoffrey Ingham. The contributors look critically at money's institutions and the meanings and history of money-creation and show the cross cutting purposes or incommensurable sides of money and its crises. These arise from severe tensions and social conflicts about the production of money and its many purposes. We demonstrate the centrality of money to capitalism and consider social disorders since the 2007 crisis, which marks the timeliness and need for dialogue. Both disciplines have far too much to offer to remain in the former, damaging standoff. While we are thankful to see a possible diminution of this split, remnants are maintained by mainstream economic and sociological theorists who, after all the crises of the past 30 years, and many before, still hold to an argument that money really does not 'matter'. We suggest, to many different and interested audiences, that since money is a promise, understanding this social relation must be a joint though plural task between economics and sociology at the very least.

The Global Financial Crisis has reshuffled the cards for central banks throughout the world. In the wake of the biggest crisis since the Great Depression, this volume traces the evolution of modern central banking over the last fifty years. It takes in the inflationary chaos of the 1970s and the monetarist experiments of the 1980s, eventually leading to the New Monetary Consensus, which took shape in the 1990s and prevailed until 2007. The book then goes on to review the limitations placed on monetary policy in the aftermath of the global meltdown, arguing that the financial crisis has shaken the new monetary consensus. In the aftermath of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the book investigates the nature of present and future monetary policy. Is the Taylor rule still a satisfactory monetary precept for central bankers? Has the New Monetary Consensus been shaken by the Global Financial Crisis? What are the fundamental issues raised by the latter cataclysmic chain of events? How should central banks conceptualize monetary policy anew in a post-crisis scenario? Existing books have dwelt extensively on the characteristics of the New Monetary Consensus, but few have cast light on its relevance in a post-crisis scenario. This book seeks to fill this gap, drawing on the lessons from five decades of contrasted theoretical approaches ranging from Keynesianism, monetarism, new classical macroeconomics, inflation targeting and more recently, pragmatic global crisis management.