The Bankers’ New Clothes

The Bankers’ New Clothes PDF Author: Anat Admati
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691251703
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Book Description
A Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek Book of the Year Why our banking system is broken—and what we must do to fix it New bank failures have been a rude awakening for everyone who believed that the banking industry was reformed after the Global Financial Crisis—and that we’d never again have to choose between massive bailouts and financial havoc. The Bankers’ New Clothes uncovers just how little things have changed—and why banks are still so dangerous. Writing in clear language that anyone can understand, Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig debunk the false and misleading claims of bankers, regulators, politicians, academics, and others who oppose effective reform, and they explain how the banking system can be made safer and healthier. Thoroughly updated for a world where bank failures have made a dramatic return, this acclaimed and important book now features a new preface and four new chapters that expose the shortcomings of current policies and reveal how the dominance of banking even presents dangers to the rule of law and democracy itself.

Better Bankers, Better Banks

Better Bankers, Better Banks PDF Author: Claire A. Hill
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022629305X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Taking financial risks is an essential part of what banks do, but there’s no clear sense of what constitutes responsible risk. Taking legal risks seems to have become part of what banks do as well. Since the financial crisis, Congress has passed copious amounts of legislation aimed at curbing banks’ risky behavior. Lawsuits against large banks have cost them billions. Yet bad behavior continues to plague the industry. Why isn’t there more change? In Better Bankers, Better Banks, Claire A. Hill and Richard W. Painter look back at the history of banking and show how the current culture of bad behavior—dramatized by the corrupt, cocaine-snorting bankers of The Wolf of Wall Street—came to be. In the early 1980s, banks went from partnerships whose partners had personal liability to corporations whose managers had no such liability and could take risks with other people’s money. A major reason bankers remain resistant to change, Hill and Painter argue, is that while banks have been faced with large fines, penalties, and legal fees—which have exceeded one hundred billion dollars since the onset of the crisis—the banks (which really means the banks’shareholders) have paid them, not the bankers themselves. The problem also extends well beyond the pursuit of profit to the issue of how success is defined within the banking industry, where highly paid bankers clamor for status and clients may regard as inevitable bankers who prioritize their own self-interest. While many solutions have been proposed, Hill and Painter show that a successful transformation of banker behavior must begin with the bankers themselves. Bankers must be personally liable from their own assets for some portion of the bank’s losses from excessive risk-taking and illegal behavior. This would instill a culture that discourages such behavior and in turn influence the sorts of behavior society celebrates or condemns. Despite many sensible proposals seeking to reign in excessive risk-taking, the continuing trajectory of scandals suggests that we’re far from ready to avert the next crisis. Better Bankers, Better Banks is a refreshing call for bankers to return to the idea that theirs is a noble profession.

Fragile by Design

Fragile by Design PDF Author: Charles W. Calomiris
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168350
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 584

Book Description
Why stable banking systems are so rare Why are banking systems unstable in so many countries—but not in others? The United States has had twelve systemic banking crises since 1840, while Canada has had none. The banking systems of Mexico and Brazil have not only been crisis prone but have provided miniscule amounts of credit to business enterprises and households. Analyzing the political and banking history of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil through several centuries, Fragile by Design demonstrates that chronic banking crises and scarce credit are not accidents. Calomiris and Haber combine political history and economics to examine how coalitions of politicians, bankers, and other interest groups form, why they endure, and how they generate policies that determine who gets to be a banker, who has access to credit, and who pays for bank bailouts and rescues. Fragile by Design is a revealing exploration of the ways that politics inevitably intrudes into bank regulation.

13 Bankers

13 Bankers PDF Author: Simon Johnson
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307379221
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
In spite of its key role in creating the ruinous financial crisis of 2008, the American banking industry has grown bigger, more profitable, and more resistant to regulation than ever. Anchored by six megabanks whose assets amount to more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, this oligarchy proved it could first hold the global economy hostage and then use its political muscle to fight off meaningful reform. 13 Bankers brilliantly charts the rise to power of the financial sector and forcefully argues that we must break up the big banks if we want to avoid future financial catastrophes. Updated, with additional analysis of the government’s recent attempt to reform the banking industry, this is a timely and expert account of our troubled political economy.

Bankers and Empire

Bankers and Empire PDF Author: Peter James Hudson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645925X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
From the end of the nineteenth century until the onset of the Great Depression, Wall Street embarked on a stunning, unprecedented, and often bloody period of international expansion in the Caribbean. A host of financial entities sought to control banking, trade, and finance in the region. In the process, they not only trampled local sovereignty, grappled with domestic banking regulation, and backed US imperialism—but they also set the model for bad behavior by banks, visible still today. In Bankers and Empire, Peter James Hudson tells the provocative story of this period, taking a close look at both the institutions and individuals who defined this era of American capitalism in the West Indies. Whether in Wall Street minstrel shows or in dubious practices across the Caribbean, the behavior of the banks was deeply conditioned by bankers’ racial views and prejudices. Drawing deeply on a broad range of sources, Hudson reveals that the banks’ experimental practices and projects in the Caribbean often led to embarrassing failure, and, eventually, literal erasure from the archives.

Young Money

Young Money PDF Author: Kevin Roose
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 1455572322
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
Becoming a young Wall Street banker is like pledging the world's most lucrative and soul-crushing fraternity. Every year, thousands of eager college graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money-- as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers. Young Money is the inside story of this well-guarded world. Kevin Roose, New York magazine business writer and author of the critically acclaimed The Unlikely Disciple, spent more than three years shadowing eight entry-level workers at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and other leading investment firms. Roose chronicled their triumphs and disappointments, their million-dollar trades and runaway Excel spreadsheets, and got an unprecedented (and unauthorized) glimpse of the financial world's initiation process. Roose's young bankers are exposed to the exhausting workloads, huge bonuses, and recreational drugs that have always characterized Wall Street life. But they experience something new, too: an industry forever changed by the massive financial collapse of 2008. And as they get their Wall Street educations, they face hard questions about morality, prestige, and the value of their work. Young Money is more than an expose of excess; it's the story of how the financial crisis changed a generation-and remade Wall Street from the bottom up.

Lords of Finance

Lords of Finance PDF Author: Liaquat Ahamed
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594201820
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 584

Book Description
Argues that the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Depression occurred as a result of poor decisions on the part of four central bankers who jointly attempted to reconstruct international finance by reinstating the gold standard.

Banks on the Brink

Banks on the Brink PDF Author: Mark Copelovitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108489885
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
International capital flow and domestic financial market structures explain why some countries are more vulnerable to banking crises.

Bad Money

Bad Money PDF Author: Vivek Kaul
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9353577225
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Book Description
Over the last decade, Indian banks in general and the government-owned public sector ones in particular have gradually got themselves into a big mess. Their bad loans, or loans which haven't been repaid for ninety days or more, crossed Rs 10 lakh crore as of 31 March 2018. To put it in perspective, this figure is approximately seven times the value of farm loan waivers given by all state governments in India put together. And this became the bad money of the Indian financial system. Why were the corporates unable to return these loans? Was it because they had no intention of doing so?Who were the biggest defaulters of them all? Are Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi just the tip of the iceberg?How much money has the government spent trying to rescue these banks?How are the private sector banks gradually taking over Indian banking?Is your money in public sector banks safe?How are you paying for this in different ways?And what are the solutions to deal with this? In Bad Money, Vivek Kaul answers these and many more questions, peeling layer after layer of the NPA (non-performing assets) problem. He goes back to the history of Indian banking, providing a long, deep and hard look at the overall Indian economy. The result is a gripping financial thriller that is a must for understanding a crisis that threatens our banking system and economy.

Banker To The Poor

Banker To The Poor PDF Author: Muhammad Yunus
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1586485466
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
The inspirational story of how Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus invented microcredit, founded the Grameen Bank, and transformed the fortunes of millions of poor people around the world. Muhammad Yunus was a professor of economics in Bangladesh, who realized that the most impoverished members of his community were systematically neglected by the banking system -- no one would loan them any money. Yunus conceived of a new form of banking -- microcredit -- that would offer very small loans to the poorest people without collateral, and teach them how to manage and use their loans to create successful small businesses. He founded Grameen Bank based on the belief that credit is a basic human right, not the privilege of a fortunate few, and it now provides $24 billion of micro-loans to more than nine million families. Ninety-seven percent of its clients are women, and repayment rates are over 90 percent. Outside of Bangladesh, micro-lending programs inspired by Grameen have blossomed, and serve hundreds of millions of people around the world. The definitive history of micro-credit direct from the man that conceived of it, Banker to the Poor is the moving story of someone who dreamed of changing the world -- and did.