financial innovation

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Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better by Andrew Palmer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, break the buck, Bretton Woods, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Innovator's Dilemma, interest rate swap, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, Northern Rock, obamacare, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, transaction costs, Tunguska event, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vanguard fund, web application

For more on the role of technology in propelling financial innovation, see Stelios Michalopoulos, Luc Laeven, and Ross Levine, “Financial Innovation and Endogenous Growth” (NBER Working Paper 51356, September 2009). 16. Richard Sylla, “A Historical Primer on the Business of Credit Ratings” (paper prepared for a conference of the World Bank, Washington, DC, March 2001). 17. Andrew Odlyzko, “Collective Hallucinations and Inefficient Markets: The British Railway Mania of the 1840s,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2010). 18. Peter Tufano, “Business Failure, Judicial Intervention and Financial Innovation: Restructuring US Railroads in the Nineteenth Century,” Business History Review (1997). 19.

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Oscar Gelderblom and Joost Jonker, “Completing a Financial Revolution: The Finance of the Dutch East India Trade and the Rise of the Amsterdam Capital Market, 1595–1612,” Journal of Economic History (2004). 4. Peter Tufano, “Financial Innovation and First-Mover Advantages,” Journal of Financial Economics (1989); Peter Tufano, “Financial Innovation,” Handbook of the Economics of Finance (2003). 5. “The Dojima Rice Market and the Origins of Futures Trading” (Harvard Business School Case Study, November 2010). 6. Minos Zombanakis, “The Life and Good Times of Libor,” Financial World (June 2012). 7. Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility,” Journal of Financial Economics (2012). 8.

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The thread running through the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was bad information—about the quality of borrowers, about who had exposure to whom, about how a default in one place would affect other loans—and it brought down every type of institution, simple and complex.2 The second misconception concerns the benefits of financial creativity. Few areas of human activity now have a worse image than “financial innovation.” The financial crisis of 2007–2008 brought a host of arcane financial processes and products to wider attention. Paul Volcker, one former chairman of the Federal Reserve whose postcrisis reputation remains intact, has implied that no financial innovation of the past twenty-five years matches up to the automatic teller machine in terms of usefulness. Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist-cum-polemicist, has written that it is hard to think of any major recent financial breakthroughs that aided society.3 A conference held by the Economist in New York in late 2013 debated whether talented graduates should head to Google or Goldman Sachs.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 56–64. 4. Goetzmann, William N., and K. Geert Rouwenhorst. 2005. The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 62. 5. Elman, Benjamin A. 2013. Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 176. 6. Von Glahn, Richard, “The Origins of Paper Money in China,” in William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (eds.), The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets.

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Left to its own, without the incursion of Western powers in the nineteenth century, would China ever have become a capitalist power? China has a long history of financial innovation. The Chinese invented metallic coinage, paper money, bills of exchange, transferable rights certificates, sophisticated accounting and management systems, and securitized lending. Examples of wealthy entrepreneurs, financial institutions, private partnerships, and business organizations can be found throughout China’s history. Given all these financial innovations, why were the first global corporations European in origin, not Chinese? I argue in Part II of this book that the answer is rooted fundamentally in the relationship between government and private enterprise in Chinese history.

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Song mulberry bark paper—developed and perfected in Sichuan, where mulberry trees were used in the silk industry—became the first durable medium for bills that could be passed from hand to hand and could circulate for years. Financial innovation relies on the technology of documentation, recording, and contracting. Along with the Mesopotamian invention of clay tablets and the apparently simultaneous Eurasian discovery of metallic coinage, the Chinese development of metal-plate printing on durable paper is one of the most enduring legacies of financial innovation. HEAVY CASH Despite being a golden age of Chinese culture, the Song was also a period during which the country fought a constant and ultimately losing battle against rival states, particularly the steppe peoples to the north and west—the Mongols and related groups.

13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson, James Kwak

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, business cycle, business logic, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency risk, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, yield curve

Eventually even Greenspan was forced to admit his mistake in a congressional hearing.55 The recent orgy of financial innovation turned out so badly because financial innovation is not like technological innovation. There are financial innovations that do benefit society, such as the debit card. And derivatives, as discussed earlier, can be useful tools to help companies hedge their operational risks. But there is no law of physics or economics that dictates that all financial innovations are beneficial, simply because someone can be convinced to buy them. The core function of finance is financial intermediation—moving money from a place where it is not currently needed to a place where it is needed.

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Even Summers, a brilliant and notoriously skeptical academic economist (later to become treasury secretary and eventually President Obama’s chief economic counselor), was won over by the siren song of financial innovation and deregulation. By 1998, it was part of the worldview of the Washington elite that what was good for Wall Street was good for America. The aftermath is well known. Although Born’s concept paper did not cause a financial crisis, the failure to regulate not only derivatives, but many other financial innovations, made possible a decade-long financial frenzy that ultimately created the worst financial crisis and deepest recession the world has endured since World War II.

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Particularly severe episodes of wrongdoing often lead to the implementation of new rules that at least close the particular barn door that had been left open in the past; the most important example was the new regulatory scheme created during the Great Depression. The failures and scandals of the late 1980s and 1990s were closely linked to recent deregulatory policies or financial innovations: expansion of savings and loans into new businesses; junk bonds and leveraged buyouts; quantitative arbitrage trading; and over-the-counter derivatives. Someone familiar with the history of the financial system might have expected this record of disaster to lead to greater skepticism of financial innovation and closer oversight of the industry. Instead, the 1990s witnessed the final dismantling of the regulatory system constructed in the 1930s.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business by Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ronen Palan

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business process, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, critique of consumerism, cryptocurrency, currency risk, democratizing finance, digital capitalism, distributed ledger, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, independent contractor, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ross Ulbricht, shareholder value, short selling, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail

Commonly known as the paradox of aggregation,30 the phenomenon has many facets, with a direct implication for our understanding of the role of financial innovation. First, new financial products and processes tend to be shrouded in complexity, meaning that the full spectrum of information about them may never be available to buyer, client or the regulator.31 Second, always and everywhere, financial innovations are transactions in futurity. This means that buyers often discover an unwanted or risky element far too late, and it may be impossible to correct the outcome due to the conditions of the contract. Third, financial innovations increasingly span several markets, making oversight and regulation of the process extremely challenging.

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A combination of the three tactics, according to John Tuld, would probably constitute the Holy Grail of truly big money in finance. Alas, it appears that such a Holy Grail does exist, and it is linked to the phenomenon of financial innovation. ‘Innovation’ has a nice ring to it. ‘New’ is probably the most popular word in advertising campaigns. Innovation has long defined human progress. The innovation of the internal-combustion engine changed human life beyond recognition. So did the innovation of the personal computer and the smartphone, and most medical innovations. We know comparatively little about financial innovation: in fact, there is only a thin academic literature on the concept, with most studies published after 2009.

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A wide definition comes from the regulators, who describe financial innovation as the introduction of ‘something new that reduces costs, reduces risks or provides an improved product/service/instrument that better satisfies participants’ demands’ within a financial system.2 Who can object to that? What could possibly be wrong with improving services to clients? Alas, somehow innovation, at least in finance, often leaves a bitter aftertaste, not least among the many who have been sabotaged by the ‘innovation’. One sceptic recently described financial innovation as, simply, regulatory arbitrage.3 Or, put differently, a technique for sabotaging the public welfare and the government.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

The same variety will appear in relation to the nature of innovations. Table 13.1 proposes a typology of financial innovations, classifying them according to their main purposes and ranking them from the most useful for the ‘real’ economy to the least useful. The top ones provide the life-blood for entrepreneurship and production; the lowest ones take blood out of the economy through manipulating paper wealth. 138 The Changing Nature of Financial and Institutional Innovations Table 13.1 139 A tentative typology of financial innovations Type and purpose of financial innovations A Instruments to provide capital for new products or services For radical innovations (bank loans, venture capital and others) To enable large investments and/or spread risks (joint stocks, bank syndicates and so on) To accommodate the financial requirements of new infrastructures (for both construction and operation) To facilitate investment or trade in novel goods or services B Instruments to help growth or expansion For incremental innovations or production expansion (like bonds) To facilitate government funding in different circumstances (war, colonial conquest, infrastructural investment, welfare spending) For moving (or creating) production capacity abroad C Modernization of the financial services themselves Incorporation of new technologies (communications, transport, security, printing and so on) Development of better forms of organization and service to clients (from telegraph transfers, through personal checking accounts and high street banking to automatic tellers and E-banking) Introduction of new financial instruments or methods (from checks to virtual money, local, national and international services and various types of loans and mortgages) D Profit-taking and spreading investment and risk Instruments to attract small investors (various forms of mutual funds, certificates of deposit, bonds, IPOs, ‘junk bonds’) New instruments to encourage and facilitate big risk taking (derivatives, hedge funds and similar) E Instruments to refinance obligations or mobilize assets To reschedule debts or restructure existing obligations (re-engineering, Brady Bonds, swaps and others) To buy active production assets (acquisitions, incorporations, mergers, takeovers, junk bonds) To acquire and mobilize ‘rent’-type assets (real estate, valuables, futures and similar) F Questionable innovations Discovering and taking advantage of legal loopholes (fiscal havens, off-the-record deals and so on) Discovering and taking advantage of incomplete information: ‘making money from money’ (foreign exchange arbitrage, leads and lags and similar) Making money without money (from pyramid schemes to insider trading and outright swindles) 140 Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital Type A and B innovations are those related to the basic role of finance as an intermediary in relation to production investment, either to initiate activities (A), or for growth, expansion and extension (B).

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Yet, the irruption phase is also a time when the revolution is still only a minor part of the economy, while the bulk of the industries of the old paradigm are mature and offer few good investment opportunities, so idle money piles up and fosters innovations of types D, E and F. So Irruption witnesses the maximum variety and intensity in financial innovation. Table 13.2 Phase The shifting behavior of financial capital from phase to phase of each surge Prevalent types of innovation A B C D E Prevalent characteristics of finance during the phase F Irruption ❐ ❐ ❐ ❐ ❐ ❐ Maximum intensity of real financial innovation ❐ ❐ ❐ Escape control, attract funds, speculate, inflate assets Synergy ❐ ❐ ❐ Adaptive innovations to accompany growth Maturity ❐ ❐ ❐ Accompany outspreading, escape control and manipulate Frenzy In fact, the whole of the installation period is one of intense experimentation and innovation not only in technology but also in financial practices.

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Among the consequences was the Glass–Owen Act, creating a timid forerunner of the Federal Reserve System, as another attempt to create a sort of central bank in the United States.224 Many of those manipulative practices will overflow into the irruption phase, after the next big-bang, as parts of the rationalization and the survival tactics of the existing production structure that continues battling for profits and markets behind the astounding economic success of the technological revolution. B. Financial Innovations from Paradigm to Paradigm As financial innovations change in nature and purpose, following the life cycle of each revolution, they are deeply molded by the nature of the specific technoeconomic paradigm being deployed. This involves not just the adaptation of financial instruments and services to the specific changes in the production sphere, but also the application of the paradigm as a generic technology and as new organizational and operational principles in the financial firms themselves.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Then as now, speculative bubbles in real estate and stocks, minimal financial regulation, and a flurry of financial innovation conspired to create a bubble that, when it burst, set the stage for the near collapse of the financial system on Wall Street, a brutal economic downturn on Main Street, and a worldwide bust. That the recent crisis bears so many eerie similarities to a catastrophe that unfolded decades ago is not a coincidence: the same forces that gave rise to the Great Depression were at work in the years leading up to our very own Great Recession. Even more striking, the irrational euphoria, the pyramids of leverage, the financial innovations, the asset price bubbles, the panics, and the runs on banks and other financial institutions shared by these two episodes are common to many other financial disasters as well.

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Alan Greenspan, perhaps the most visible advocate of letting the financial system regulate itself, claimed that markets would sort things out, warning in 1997 that when it came to financial innovation, “we should be quite cautious in enacting legislation or creating regulations that unnecessarily fetter market development.” Greenspan even defended the rise of subprime lending, claiming in 2005 that “lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately.” In retrospect, these remarks seem laughable. In fact, financial innovations rendered irrelevant the question of whether lenders bothered to assess risk: rather than make loans and hold them on their books, banks and other financial institutions made loans regardless of the applicants’ creditworthiness, then proceeded to funnel the loans—mortgages, auto loans, student loans, and even credit card debt—to Wall Street, where they were turned into increasingly complex and esoteric securities and sold around the world to credulous investors incapable of assessing the risk inherent in the original loans.

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In fact, there was plenty of innovation—that’s the good news. The bad news is that most of it percolated in one sector of the economy, the financial services industry. In itself, this was not a problem. After all, plenty of financial innovations in centuries past—insurance, for example, and commodity options—have proved their value again and again, enabling market participants to manage and contain risk. At first that same spirit animated the current crop of financial innovations. Indeed, they were attempts to improve on the older model of making loans. Several decades ago banks that made home loans followed the “originate and hold” model. A prospective homeowner would apply for a mortgage, and the bank would lend the money, then sit back and collect payments on the principal and interest.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

Of course, MacKenzie realized that the narrative of “technological error” seems on its face implausible (pp. 1830–32); but by focusing so intently upon the narrowly confined world of the low-level analysts and traders, he misses most of the action surveyed in this volume. 43 Shiller, Finance and the Good Society, p. 13. 44 In Norris, “The Crisis Is Over, but Where’s the Fix?” 45 See Litan, “In Defense of Much, but Not All, Financial Innovation” and The Derivatives Dealer’s Club and Derivates Markets Reform; Litan and Wallison, Competitive Equity; Eichengreen, “The Crisis in Financial Innovation”; Shiller, “Radical Financial Innovation,” “In Defense of Financial Innovation,” and Finance and the Good Society. 46 Shiller, “Radical Financial Innovation” and “In Defense of Financial Innovation.” 47 Shiller, Interview on Finance and the Good Society. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 The fact that Shiller has a conflict of interest in promoting the Case-Shiller index and his other financial contraptions is revealed by the mission statement of his company, at www.macromarkets.com/index.shtml.

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39 See MacKenzie and Demos, “Credit Default Swap Trading Drops.” This estimate may be limited in its geographic range, and is probably too low. 40 Miller, “Financial Innovation.” 41 Some examples of the “social studies of finance” are MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera; MacKenzie et al., Do Economists Make Markets?; and Preda and Knorr-Cetina, Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. The critique of the role of science studies in helping reify this interpretation of financial innovation can be found in Engelen et al., “Reconceptualizing Financial Innovation.” 42 I refer here to a paper by Donald MacKenzie (“The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge”), who argues that a shift in cultures of evaluation within the ratings agencies, from older corporate collateralized debt obligations to the newer CDOs composed of mortgage-backed securities, accounted for a number of “slips” when it came to evaluation of the dangers posed by the latter.

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The prospect of the government serving as market-maker of last resort presumably cannot be extended indefinitely, which brings us to the final long-game component of the full-spectrum brace of policies: the crisis analogue of geoengineering for neoliberals is the equally science-fiction prospect of financial innovation as the mode of ultimate deliverance from economic stagnation. Just as with geoengineering, the policy consists more of insubstantial promise than in demonstrated capabilities; but it plays an important pivotal political role nonetheless. The prophets of financial innovation are at pains to portray the invention of new pecuniary instruments, practices, and products as on a par with the science-based innovation of new physical technologies; in other words, it is the very apotheosis of the market coming to terms with an evolving nature.

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Little did he know that he was about to be a guinea pig for the latest tricks of love-to-win investment bankers and their ratings agency accomplices. Driven by short-term gains, they found in people like Smith the ultimate twist in a challenge that had spurred financial innovation for centuries. The assurance of liquidity that Extine and Smith craved—the idea that their investments could be redeemed, dollar for dollar, whenever cash was needed—was nothing new. It was behind one of the oldest financial innovations of all, the invention of banking. How do banks get away with taking depositors’ cash and lending it out to borrowers who won’t pay the money back for years? Like the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man getting green spectacles from the Wizard of Oz, the depositors happily walk around thinking their cash is available whenever they want it.

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Next came their easy seduction of traditional bankers and consumers, which led to a corruption of the ratings agencies, all of which was encouraged—either openly or through benign neglect—by the regulatory agencies charged with monitoring these people. Add several trillion dollars, and you have a recipe for disaster. It took a final, crucial ingredient—a catalyst, an ingenious and insidious financial innovation that made it all possible. A helpful tool that upended the distinction between banking and markets. An enabler of a massive shift of power toward love-to-win traders that traditionalists barely understood despite their insistence that they too were “sophisticated.” A mechanism for replicating reality and synthesizing financial robots that allowed complexity to go viral.

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There was the pressure on senior bankers such as Chase’s Marc Shapiro and J.P. Morgan’s Peter Hancock to shift credit risk off their balance sheets, and the pressure on investment banks to respond to the threat of commercial banks’ breaking into the securities business. But what really rocked both of these worlds was a radical financial innovation: credit derivatives. Imagine a bank looking to make corporate loans or to own bonds—but without the credit risk. How does it strip out the risk? Easy: think of the loan as two separate parts. Pretend the loan is made to a borrower as safe as the government, which will repay the money without fail, and pays a “risk-free” rate of interest in compensation.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

As soon as both banks and Wall Street realized that the securitization ‘‘financial sausage machine’’ could be tweaked to manufacture marketable debt securities out of almost any type of loan, a wholesale migration of credit from bank balance sheets into the financial 57 58 FINANCIAL MARKET MELTDOWN markets was set off. In the late twentieth century, the big brains in finance all thought that financial market intermediation had permanently gained the upper hand on bank balance sheet intermediation through the ‘‘financial innovation’’ that started with mortgages. They were wrong. It turns out that the asset securitization model provided the explosives to blow up the global economy. 3 t FINANCIAL INNOVATION MADE EASY ‘‘The business of banking ought to be simple; if it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.’’

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Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America To my wife Judy, who has always patiently supported my writing ventures and both typed the handwritten drafts of the text and suggested important changes in direction and tone throughout the project, and to my historian daughter Elizabeth who offered great encouragement and good advice to her dad. CONTENTS t INTRODUCTION: Money, Markets, Manias, and You ix CHAPTER 1: A Tour of the Financial World and Its Inhabitants CHAPTER 2: The Financial Market Made Simple 29 CHAPTER 3: Financial Innovation Made Easy 59 CHAPTER 4: How We Got Here 75 CHAPTER 5: The Fed Demystified 101 CHAPTER 6: The Limits of Financial Regulation 117 CHAPTER 7: The Natural History of Financial Folly 135 CHAPTER 8: What Should Be Done? 161 Conclusion 179 Index 191 vii 1 INTRODUCTION Money, Markets, Manias, and You t The purpose of this book is to help you understand what is happening in the global financial economy, why it is happening, and what can be done about it.

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If things turn out as badly as it looks like they might, people will also wonder why somebody didn’t stop it in its tracks. The answer is, in part, because ‘‘innovation’’ is genuinely viewed as a good thing in our culture— change is a good word. The other answer is that this was a quarter century of remarkably benign financial circumstances. Above all, it was a great party, and lots of people got very rich. Financial Innovation Made Easy BANKS DISCOVER CONSUMER LENDING The early 1980s witnessed something that has been called the retail banking revolution. This started in the United States and spread to the United Kingdom and other rich countries. Traditionally, banks only looked to consumers like you and me for deposits.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

And, while the mysteries of this technology have fascinated the public, other imminent changes in the world of finance herald the arrival of a more significant if less glitzy revolution. The recent and ongoing innovations in financial technologies have come to be encapsulated by the portmanteau term Fintech. Later, we will see how the Fintech revolution is touching different aspects of finance. Financial innovation is nothing new, of course, and it is worth bearing in mind that revolutions have dark sides as well. When Innovation Ended in a Crash During the early 2000s, financial markets in advanced economies experienced major developments that were ostensibly going to make finance safer and more efficient.

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And because banks could package their loans into securities and sell them off to investors, they would be more willing to relax eligibility requirements for loans, giving borrowers easier access to credit for purchasing houses and automobiles. Updated and less stringent regulatory standards were expected to encourage financial innovations by unshackling the sector from onerous oversight. Regulators could take a more hands-off approach because the private sector would now have more effective ways of managing risk by itself, without the government’s involvement and supervision. After all, who knew better than private banks, corporations, and households themselves about the sorts of risks they faced and were willing to tolerate?

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Regulatory agencies will struggle to keep up with the coming rapid changes in financial markets as new and nontraditional financial platforms rise in importance, threatening banks and other existing financial institutions. How governments respond to these developments, especially in how they assess and address the potential benefits and risks of financial innovations, will have a pronounced impact on the risk / benefit balance. Taking Stock of Looming Changes Recent Fintech innovations—including those underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin—herald broader access to the financial system, quicker and more easily verifiable settlement of transactions and payments, and lower transaction costs.

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Attendees included Ben Bernanke and Mervyn King, future heads of the Fed and Bank of England, respectively, and Paul Krugman, future Nobel laureate. None needed convincing that finance had become more treacherous. The puzzle was why the economy kept humming. Larry Summers, who would later serve as Treasury secretary to Bill Clinton and adviser to Barack Obama, had a theory. Technological and financial innovation, he told the group, had indeed made finance more bubble-prone. He sketched out a scenario of how a crisis and deep recession could recur. Still, he concluded, since the Great Depression, the federal government had erected firewalls between the financial system and the real economy where ordinary people worked and invested: the vast federal budget, deposit insurance, and, most important, an activist Federal Reserve: “It is now nearly inconceivable that there would be no active lender of last resort in time of crisis.”

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Minsky agreed with Keynes that the economy needed a big, active government to avoid depressions. But he also thought Keynesian models gave short shrift to the financial system. They assumed that the central bank had full control of the money supply, credit, and interest rates. Minsky argued that the volume of money and credit didn’t depend just on the central bank but on financial innovation. If, to control inflation, the Fed restricted the growth of lending by banks, then Wall Street’s innovators would come up with mechanisms to go around banks and get credit to those who wanted to borrow. Innovation, he predicted, proceeded through three stages: the first, “hedge” stage, when it served business’s legitimate need to manage risk; the second, “speculative” phase, when it served mostly to finance rising asset prices; and a final, “Ponzi” stage, when investors had to borrow more simply to pay the interest on past borrowings.

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In 2008 lenders were nervous enough about AAA-rated MBSs to refuse to refinance repo loans that used them. Bear Stearns collapsed in 2008 largely because it couldn’t refinance its maturing repo loans, which, given the lessons learned from Drexel, simply wasn’t supposed to happen. Drexel’s experience amply illustrated how a financial innovation that seemed at the time to reduce risk once it became widespread enough, did the opposite, and raised risk throughout the system. Another example was the use of mortgage-backed securities. Because American banks tended to be regional, they were acutely vulnerable to localized housing busts.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Stavins, “Technological Change and the Environment,” in K-G Maler and J. R. Vincent (eds.), Handbook of Environmental Economics, Volume 1 (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Science B.V., 2003): 461–516. b. This is based on the Financial Times Lexicon definition of financial innovation, http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=financial-innovation. c. See Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine, “Four Paths to Business Model Innovation,” Harvard Business Review (July/August 2014): https://hbr.org/2014/07/four-paths-to-business-model-innovation. d. See Theocharis D. Tsoutsos and Yeoryios A. Stamboulis, “The Sustainable Diffusion of Renewable Energy Technologies as an Example of an Innovation-Focused Policy,” Technovation 25 (2005): doi:10.1016/j.technovation.2003.12.003.

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All of this suggests that it is only a matter of time before new approaches dramatically expand the pool of capital available to fund solar power. The financial innovation needed to expand this pool of capital does not require reinventing the wheel. Under Schumpeter’s paradigm (see box 3.1 in chapter 3), an innovation is an invention that has been brought to market. So adapting novel financial instruments from other sectors and popularizing them for the first time in the solar sector exemplifies financial innovation. According to New York’s energy czar, Richard Kauffman, there is plenty of inspiration to be drawn from other sectors of the economy to augment funding sources for solar projects: Projects in the [United States] rely upon an old-fashioned and anachronistic form of financing that is different than how other parts of the U.S. economy are financed.

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But the drop makes it harder for emerging technologies that might not be cost-competitive before economies of scale kick in at mass production to break into the market in the long run. What’s more, the financial innovation discussed in chapters 4 and 5 could aid this lock-in. Silicon solar projects might soon be able to tap into public capital markets and access cheap finance, thanks to the existence of decades of performance data and thirty-year manufacturer warranties. That ability would add another cost advantage to silicon over emerging technology competitors that public investors, having just gotten comfortable with silicon technology, would be loath to bet on. As a result, financial innovation could act as a barrier, rather than a bridge, to technological innovation.

Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kickstarter, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, McMansion, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Plato's cave, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, value at risk, yield curve

Morgan management was resisting strongly, and Hancock sketched out its alternative vision for revitalizing the bank, maintaining its hallowed role as an independent player. Morgan would continue harnessing the power of financial innovation, such as derivatives, to make itself into a sharp, focused investment bank that could continually serve its clients with new products. His listeners were unmoved. At the end of the meeting, another electronic vote was conducted, and the proportion in the crowd who believed in the bank’s strategy had not risen at all. Most of the staff—the junior staff at least—shared Hancock’s belief in the power of financial innovation. But they also knew that the rest of Wall Street was making much higher returns from the internet and financial merger boom than J.P.

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It would be the second feature that would come to dominate the business a decade later, eventually leading to a worldwide financial catastrophe. [ TWO ] DANCING AROUND THE REGULATORS There was a critical juncture, around the time that Peter Hancock’s team seized on the idea of credit derivatives, when financial innovation might have followed a subtly different path. In the few years leading up to Hancock’s Boca off-site, regulators and many prominent banking experts grew concerned about the boom in derivatives and the proliferation of exotic new types. They fiercely debated whether regulations should be imposed.

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Events would have turned out quite differently. They felt as if the fates were laughing at them. But even as they reeled from the carnage, the innovation cycle was about to heat up again, and with the wonders of dot-coms soundly repudiated, attention would turn anew to the marvelous potential of credit derivatives and other forms of financial innovation. On January 3, 2001, the US Federal Reserve suddenly announced a 50-basis-point cut in interest rates, reducing them to 6 percent. That news stunned the markets almost as much as the internet collapse. In the prior eight years, Alan Greenspan had made a virtue out of running monetary policy in a calm, controlled manner, decreasing rates steadily but slowly at just 25 basis points a shot.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

To adapt a phrase from Jacob Bronowski (whose marvellous television history of scientific progress I watched avidly as a schoolboy), the ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man. Far from being the work of mere leeches intent on sucking the life’s blood out of indebted families or gambling with the savings of widows and orphans, financial innovation has been an indispensable factor in man’s advance from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that so many people know today. The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong.

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Emerging market bonds also rose strongly and real estate markets, especially in the English-speaking world, saw remarkable capital appreciation. Whether they put their money into commodities, works of art, vintage wine or exotic asset-backed securities, investors made money. How were these wonders to be explained? According to one school of thought, the latest financial innovations had brought about a fundamental improvement in the efficiency of the global capital market, allowing risk to be allocated to those best able to bear it. Enthusiasts spoke of the death of volatility. Self-satisfied bankers held conferences with titles like ‘The Evolution of Excellence’. In November 2006 I found myself at one such conference in the characteristically luxurious venue of Lyford Cay in the Bahamas.

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And by engaging in currency trading as well as lending, they reduced their vulnerability to defaults. The Italian banking system became the model for those North European nations that would achieve the greatest commercial success in the coming centuries, notably the Dutch and the English, but also the Swedes. It was in Amsterdam, London and Stockholm that the next decisive wave of financial innovation occurred, as the forerunners of modern central banks made their first appearance. The seventeenth century saw the foundation of three distinctly novel institutions that, in their different ways, were intended to serve a public as well as a private financial function. The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins.

Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, Apple II, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, bonus culture, break the buck, buttonwood tree, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, financial repression, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Potemkin village, quantitative easing, secular stagnation, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tontine, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

If a banker or trader creates and sells a squirrelly financial product or makes a terrible and risky bet knowing full well when he or she did it that it was likely to go wrong, then there is little question, if convicted, that the expensive art should be sold off the walls in his or her home and that the home itself should be sold and the proceeds given to the victims. There should be no equivocating on this point. But then, we also must reward Wall Street for financial innovation because it is financial innovation that has led to what I call the “democratization of capital,” the ability of more and more people to get access to capital at a fair price—whether in the form of a mortgage, an auto loan, or a credit card. These are important innovations that Wall Street has pioneered. They have given us the country and way of life that if it were suddenly stripped away, we would demand back.

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What we need on Wall Street is smart regulation, not political, retaliatory regulation. What Tarullo is doing in trying to prevent another financial crisis is unwinding decades of financial innovations that have actually benefited the American people by allowing them access to capital at lower prices than would otherwise have been possible. Tarullo is no doubt sincere in his mission to make financial markets safer, but at what cost? We need a way to reward bankers, traders, and executives for taking prudent financial risks and developing new financial innovations while also holding them accountable for their bad behavior. The days of socializing the risks and privatizing the gains, which should have come to an end after the 2008 financial crisis, have to be stopped.

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The anonymous person would pay annual premiums to an insurance company—money out the door every year—and the only way the bet would pay off would be if your house burned to the ground. Talk about a perverse set of incentives. What could possibly go wrong? The combination on Wall Street of a relative explosion of financial innovation, firms flush with new capital from outside investors, and a revamped incentive system that rewarded bankers, traders, and executives for the first time to take big risks with other people’s money led quickly—and perhaps not unsurprisingly, especially in retrospect—to a rapid and virulent increase in the number and frequency of financial crises.

The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy by Dani Rodrik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, George Akerlof, guest worker program, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Multi Fibre Arrangement, night-watchman state, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, World Values Survey

Indeed, the mortal blow to the “collateral benefits” argument was struck by the subprime mortgage meltdown, which demonstrated finance’s remarkable ability to undermine governance—and to do so in the richest and oldest democracy in the world. In its wake, it would be very difficult to argue that banking interests contribute to better institutions. The Seductions of Financial Innovation In the aftermath of the subprime mortgage meltdown no one has to break a sweat to be a finance skeptic. But we should give hedgehog economists their due. To most of us, their narrative on the financial innovation that led to the crisis seemed quite compelling when we first heard it. Everyone wanted credit markets to serve the cause of home ownership, so we started by introducing real competition into the mortgage lending business.

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And just in case anyone was still nervous, we created derivatives that allowed investors to purchase insurance against default by issuers of those securities. If we had wanted to showcase the benefits of financial innovation, we could not have devised a better set of arrangements. Thanks to them, millions of poorer and hitherto excluded families were made homeowners, investors made high returns, and financial intermediaries pocketed the fees and commissions. It might have worked like a dream—and until the crisis struck, many financiers, economists, and policy makers thought that it did. The narrative they all relied on was appealing. Financial innovation can allow people to access credit in ways they could not before by pooling risk and passing it on to those in the best position to bear it.

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Treasury and Federal Reserve had to mount makes emerging market crises look like footnotes by comparison. And the benefits of financial innovation? They were hard to see amidst the rubble. As Paul Volcker would say afterwards in all seriousness, the automated teller machine had brought far more gains to most people than any asset-backed bond.19 Or as Ben Bernanke put it, much more diplomatically, “One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be.”20 Where exactly did it all go wrong? The subprime mortgage crisis demonstrated once again how difficult it is to tame finance, an industry which is both the lifeline of all modern economies and the gravest threat to their stability.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

A country can be prosperous only if it has a well-functioning financial system, but that does not imply that the larger the financial system a country has, the more prosperous it is likely to be. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. Financial innovation was critical to the creation of an industrial society; it does not follow that every modern financial innovation contributes to economic growth. Many good ideas become bad ideas when pursued to excess. And so it is with finance. The finance sector today plays a major role in politics: it is the most powerful industrial lobby and a major provider of campaign finance.

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Fourth, finance helps both individuals and businesses to manage the risks inevitably associated with everyday life and economic activity. These four functions – the payments system, the matching of borrowers and lenders, the management of our household financial affairs and the control of risk – are the services that finance does, or at least can, provide. The utility of financial innovation is measured by the degree to which it advances the goals of making payments, allocating capital, managing personal finances and handling risk. The economic significance of the finance industry is often described in other ways: by the number of jobs it provides, the incomes that are earned from it, even the tax revenue derived from it.

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There has always been a need for a parallel investment channel, to facilitate the deployment of longer-term savings. In 1812, with Britain at war with both Napoleon and the USA, some public-spirited Edinburgh gentlemen founded the Scottish Widows’ Fund to make provision for their dependants. Scotland has played a disproportionately large role in the history of financial innovation for a small country on Europe’s periphery. The Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland are among the oldest surviving institutions in the deposit channel (even if their survival was a close call). The Bank of England, which saved them, was also founded by a Scot. My parents and teachers, believing my destiny was to be an actuary, sent me to work at Scottish Widows in the school holidays.

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Yet relatively few of us seem bothered by this statistic. Financial Capitalism and the Challenge of Financial Innovation While nancial capitalism inevitably must be made to serve the good society, it cannot be summarized in simple terms. This is so because it represents a bewilderingly broad and cross-cutting array of institutions, instruments, and markets, each element of which evolved through a process of invention not unlike the processes that produced our automobiles and airplanes, and through which they continue to evolve. Financial innovation is an underappreciated phenomenon. According to Google Ngrams, the term nancial innovation was hardly ever used until the late 1970s and 1980s.

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By 2007 this decline had brought prices of home mortgage securities down far enough to create a crisis for investors in these securities. It was called the subprime crisis because the price falls were especially striking among mortgages issued to subprime borrowers, that is, home buyers who are judged more likely to default because of factors including their past payment and employment histories. Financial innovations related to these subprime loans were blamed for the crisis. But the crisis did not remain con ned to subprime mortgages; that was only the initial shock in a vast catastrophe. The consequence was a drop in real estate prices and the collapse of nancial institutions, not only in the United States but also in Europe and elsewhere.

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As such we tend to associate nance with recent problems, such as the mortgage and debt hangovers in the United States and Europe, and with the legal and regulatory errors that preceded these events. But we should not lose sight of the bigger picture. The more important story is the proliferation and transformation of successful nancial ideas. Financial innovations emanating from Amsterdam, London, and New York are developing further in Buenos Aires, Dubai, and Tokyo. The socialist market economy, with its increasingly advanced nancial structures, was introduced to China by Deng Xiaoping starting in 1978, adapting to the Chinese environment the examples of other highly successful Chinese-speaking cities: Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In 2009 Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, questioned the role of finance: “I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth—one shred of evidence.... [U.S. financial services increased its share of value-added from 2 percent to 6.5 percent] Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”2 The only financial innovation over the past 20 years that impressed Volcker was the automated teller machine. In the financial centers, high rewards enjoyed by people associated with finance trickled down.

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Writer Robert Frank observed that the wealthy inhabited a different country—Richistan.3 Gains from recent economic growth flowed disproportionately to the wealthy, who benefited from market-friendly governments, favorable tax regimes, protection of property rights, globalization, and technological change, and financial innovation and deregulation. The top 10 percent of earners received the majority of the benefits of the productivity miracle of 1996–2005.4 Wealthy plutocrats both powered and benefited from economic growth. The Forbes 400 richest people in 2006 controlled $1,250 billion, up $92 billion from 1982. To make it on to the list in 2006 you had to have a billion, compared to $75 million in 1982.

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Stern Stewart published an annual Billboard Top 100 Chart that analyzed corporations’ EVA™—economic value added or estimate of economic profit. The idea gained traction when executive remuneration was linked to EVA and companies awarded stock or stock options to executives to align the interests of shareholders and management. Shareholder value fueled financial innovation, new debt and equity securities, allowing companies to raise cheap equity or increase borrowing. Companies repurchased the firm’s shares to boost share prices. Traditionally, companies favored modest borrowing and high credit ratings. Now, they increased debt to reduce their cost of capital.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

The financial institutions collectively controlled both the supply of, and demand for, housing! The same story occurred with all forms of consumer credit on everything from automobiles and lawnmowers to loading down with Christmas gifts at Toys ‘R’ Us and Wal-Mart. All this indebtedness was obviously risky, but that could be taken care of by the wondrous financial innovations of securitisation that supposedly spread the risk around and even created the illusion that risk had disappeared. Fictitious financial capital took control and nobody wanted to stop it because everyone who mattered seemed to be making lots of money. In the US, political contributions from Wall Street soared.

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Krieger’s figures turned out to be faulty by $80 million but, rather than admit its profitability had disappeared, the bank tried all manner of ‘creative’ accounting practices to cover over the discrepancy before finally having to admit that it had been wrong. Notice the elements in this tale. First, unregulated over-the-counter trading permits all sorts of financial innovation and shady practices which nevertheless make a lot of money. Secondly, the bank supports such practices, even though they don’t understand them (the mathematics in particular), because they are often so profitable relative to their core business and hence improve share value. Third, creative accounting enters the picture, and fourth, the valuation of assets for accounting practices is extremely uncertain in volatile markets.

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Global shifts in production capacity accompanied by highly competitive technological innovations, many of which were labour-saving, contributed further to the disciplining of global labour. The United States still retained immense financial power, even as it lost its earlier dominance (though not significance) in the realm of production. Increasingly, the US relied upon the extraction of rents, either on the basis of its advantages in technological and financial innovation or from intellectual property rights. But this meant that finance should not be burdened by excessive regulation. The crash of the US financial sector in 2008–9 has jeopardised US hegemony. The ability of the US to launch a go-it-alone debt-financed recovery plan is limited politically by staunch conservative opposition at home as well as by the huge debt-overhang accumulated from the 1990s on.

The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Asian financial crisis, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, confounding variable, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, income inequality, indoor plumbing, life extension, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, scientific management, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban renewal

Contemporary innovation often takes the form of expanding positions of economic and political privilege, extracting resources from the government by lobbying, seeking the sometimes extreme protections of intellectual property laws, and producing goods that are exclusive or status related rather than universal, private rather than public; think twenty-five seasons of new, fall season Gucci handbags. The dubious financial innovations connected to our recent financial crisis are another (perhaps less obvious) example of discoveries that benefit some individuals but are not public goods more generally. A lot of the gains from recent financial innovations are captured by a relatively small number of individuals. Top American earners are increasingly concentrated in the financial sector of the economy. For 2004, nonfinancial executives of publicly traded companies comprised less than 6 percent of the top 0.01 percent income bracket.

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In that same year, the top twenty-five hedge fund managers combined earned more than all of the CEOs from the entire S&P 500. The number of Wall Street investors earning over $100 million a year was nine times higher than the public-company executives earning that amount. When I look back at the last decade, I think the following: There are some very wealthy people, but a lot of their incomes are from financial innovations that do not translate to gains for the average American citizen. The slowdown in ideas production mirrors the well-known rise in income inequality. Labor and capital are fairly plentiful in today’s global economy, and so their returns have been somewhat stagnant. Valuable new ideas have become quite scarce, and so the small number of people who hold the rights to new ideas—whether it be the useful Facebook or the more dubious forms of mortgage-backed securities—earned higher relative returns than in earlier periods.

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I know what the numbers say, but what was the financial sector really producing during those years? The published figures do not pick up the problematic nature of financial sector growth, which of course culminated in a major crash. What we measured as value creation actually may have been value destruction, namely too many homes and too much financial innovation of the wrong kind. Keep in mind that median income growth has been slow, and stock prices—the valuation of capital—haven’t made lasting progress in a long time. As of the fall of 2010, the S&P 500 is more or less back where it had been in the mid-1990s. As economist Michael Mandel puts it, if neither labor nor capital is reaping much gain, can we really trust the productivity numbers?

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History by Diana B. Henriques

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Myron Scholes, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, web of trust

Those who subscribed to the efficient market hypothesis believed that markets should be left alone to practice their beehive brilliance without government interference. After all, if everyone was smarter than anyone, everyone was certainly smarter than Uncle Sam. That notion, too, would shape the financial landscape far into the future. In the San Francisco Bay area of the early 1970s, lightbulbs of financial innovation were burning bright everywhere, not just at Berkeley. A remarkable team of computer geeks and misfit bankers, working in a small unit at Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco, had seized on the “random walk” concept and were trying to build portfolios for their pension fund clients that would behave as much as possible like the overall market.

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The simple question “Who regulates options?” could only be answered, “It depends.” However, the answer to the question “Who regulates stock index futures contracts?” was finally clear, and it was the CFTC. Shad and Johnson had made their deal and had gotten government out of the way of the financial innovation sweeping the marketplace—innovation that would tie the futures market and the stock market together tighter than either man could have imagined. Unfortunately, Shad and Johnson were not traders, and their accord ignored the facts of daily life that traders confronted in the stock market: Stocks didn’t trade constantly throughout the day, without interruption or limitation.

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That may have been how most of Chicago’s financial community thought of the new Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center, which opened for business on the Monday after Thanksgiving 1983. The Merc’s tireless and creative leader, Leo Melamed, had played a pivotal role in turning a struggling market for pork bellies into the roaring hive of prosperous financial innovation that underwrote the new structure. The $57 million building had a million square feet of office space and a forty-thousand-square-foot trading floor, the largest column-free trading floor in the world, hardwired with about fourteen thousand miles of telephone cable. A soaring forty-story office tower rose on the south side of the gigantic rectangle of the trading complex; a twin would eventually stand on the north side.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Finnerty, who compiled the Whitmanic catalogue of financial innovations since the 1960s reproduced on page 51, listed 10 stimuli to such creative enterprise. They include risk reduction or the shifting of risk towards one party or the other, reduction of agency costs (lender supervision of management) and issuance costs, tax angles, compliance with or evasion of regulation, changes in the level and volatility of interest and exchange rates, "academic and other research that result in advances in financial theories," accounting gimmickry, and technological advances. This little survey of financial innovation would be incomplete without notice paid to the ease with which nearly anything can be absorbed into the circuit of money.

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From these elements, however, infinitely strange creatures can be made. Or, "Rather than developing new generic instruments," "financial innovation since the mid-1980s has tended to take the form of novel combinations of existing products to support complex and highly sophisticated investment strategies.... At the same time, a growing range of 'custom-tailored' investment products has been developed to maximise possibilities for matching actual portfolio structures to theoretically-based invesment models" (Bank for International Settlements 1993, P- 86). The more reality INSTRUMENTS financial innovations adjustable rate convertible notes • adjustable rate preferred stock • adjustable/variable rate mortgages • All-Saver certificates • Annericus trust • annuity notes • auction rate capital notes • auction rate notes/debentures • auction rate preferred stock • bull and bear CDs • capped floating rate notes • collateralized connmercial paper • collateralized nnortgage obligations/real estate mortgage investment conduits • collateralized preferred stock • commercial real estate-backed bonds • commodity-linked bonds • convertible adjustable preferred stock • convertible exchangeable preferred stock • convertible mortgages/reduction option loans • convertible reset debentures • currency swaps • deep discount/zero coupon bonds • deferred interest debentures • direct public sale of securities • dividend reinvestment plan • dollar BILS • dual currency bonds • employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) • Eurocurrency bonds • Euronotes/Euro-commercial paper • exchangeable auction rate preferred stock • exchangeable remarketed preferred stock • exchangeable variable rate notes • exchange-traded options • extendible notes • financial futures • floating rate/adjustable rate notes • floating rate extendible notes • floating rate, rating sensitive notes • floating rate tax-exempt notes • foreign-currency-denominated bonds • foreign currency futures and options • forward rate agreements • gold loans • high-yield (junk) bonds • increasing rate notes • indexed currency option notes/ principal exchange linked securities • indexed floating rate preferred stock • indexed sinking fund debentures • interest rate caps/collars/floors • interest rate futures • interest rate reset notes • interest rate swaps • letter of credit/surety bond support • mandatory convertible/equity contract notes • master limited partnership • medium-term notes • money market notes • mortgage-backed bonds • mortgage pass-through securities • negotiable CDs • noncallable long-term bonds • options on futures contracts • paired common stock • participating bonds • pay-in-kind debentures • perpetual bonds • poison put bonds • puttable/adjustable tender bonds • puttable common stock • puttable convertible bonds • puttable-extendible notes • real estate-backed bonds • real yield securities • receivable-backed securities • remarketed preferred stock • remarketed reset notes • serial zero-coupon bonds • shelf registration process • single-point adjustable rate stock • Standard & Poor's indexed notes • state rate auction preferred stock • step-up put bonds • stock index futures and options • stripped mortgage-backed securities • stripped municipal securities • stripped U.S.

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If interest could be forced to zero, then accumulation would accelerate and universal prosperity would be our reward. But of course interest rates can't be forced to zero, nor can the rentier be euthanized, nor can financial innovation be snuffed, without transforming capitalism in ways far more radical than Keynes envisioned. Recall Schumpeter's (1939, vol. 2, p. 6l3) observation that financial innovation "is one of the most characteristic features of the financial side of capitalist evolution.... This is not mere technique. This is part of the core of the capitalist process." An attack on liquidity and innovation is an attack on the core of the capitalist process, which is why Keynes's suggestions have been so thoroughly repressed by mainstream economics— rarely even argued with, but simply ignored.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

To understand what those conditions are, we look to the one corner of the economy where competition is “red in tooth and claw”: the hedge fund industry. CHAPTER 7 The Galapagos Islands of Finance QUANTUM MECHANICS For three hundred years, London has been one of the world’s great financial centers, a paragon of financial innovation and stability. Nevertheless, in 1992, the forces of evolutionary change were hard at work in that historic city. The fall of Communism in Eastern Europe had shocked the international financial environment. This geopolitical surprise appeared to open up a new path for the greater economic integration of the nations of Europe—including the United Kingdom.

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THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF INVESTING Passive investing—the idea that you can’t beat the market and should invest in index funds—is now such an important part of the traditional investment paradigm, it’s hard to appreciate just how revolutionary the idea of an index fund once was. These days, however, there seem to be nearly as many indexes as there are stocks. Where did the idea of the index come from, and where is it going? The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis can also explain the evolving nature of passive investing and indexation. As with many financial innovations, the genealogy of passive investing can be traced to academic research, in this case two different programs. We already described one of them: the CAPM, developed by Bill Sharpe (and simultaneously by John Lintner, Jan Mossin, and Jack Treynor). The other is, of course, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis.

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The emergence of the multi-trillion-dollar index fund industry was an evolutionary process driven by competition, innovation, and natural selection. This is the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis at work. NEW SPECIES OF INDEX FUNDS The success of the index mutual fund, beginning with the Vanguard Index Trust, led to an evolutionary explosion of financial innovation. Three different stock market index futures debuted in 1982, based on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) Composite, the S&P 500, and the Value Line index, respectively. Indexes for each asset class emerged, and additional index funds to track them: the first bond index fund for retail investors in 1986, the first international share index funds in 1990, and the first exchange-traded fund in 1993.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Table of Contents Cover Acknowledgements Note About the Author Preface Introduction Notes Part I: Lessons from the Past: What Cycles Look Like and What Drives Them Chapter 1: Riding the Cycle under Very Different Conditions Notes Chapter 2: Returns over the Long Run Returns over Different Holding Periods The Reward for Risk and the Equity Risk Premium The Power of Dividends Factors That Affect Returns for Investors The Impact of Diversification on the Cycle Notes Chapter 3: The Equities Cycle: Identifying the Phases The Four Phases of the Equity Cycle Mini/High-Frequency Cycles within the Investment Cycle The Interplay between the Cycle and Bond Yields Note Chapter 4: Asset Returns through the Cycle Assets across the Economic Cycle Assets across the Investment Cycle The Impact of Changes in Bond Yields on Equities Structural Shifts in the Value of Equities and Bonds Notes Chapter 5: Investment Styles over the Cycle Sectors and the Cycle Cyclical versus Defensive Companies Value versus Growth Companies Value, Growth and Duration Notes Part II: The Nature and Causes of Bull and Bear Markets: What Triggers Them and What to Look out For Chapter 6: Bear Necessities: The Nature and Shape of Bear Markets Bear Markets Are Not All the Same Cyclical Bear Markets Event-Driven Bear Markets Structural Bear Markets The Relationship between Bear Markets and Corporate Profits A Summary of Bear Market Characteristics Defining the Financial Crisis: A Structural Bear Market with a Difference Finding an Indicator to Flag Bear Market Risk Notes Chapter 7: Bull's Eye: The Nature and Shape of Bull Markets The ‘Super Cycle’ Secular Bull Market Cyclical Bull Markets Variations in the Length of Bull Markets Non-trending Bull Markets Notes Chapter 8: Blowing Bubbles: Signs of Excess Spectacular Price Appreciation … and Collapse Belief in a ‘New Era’ … This Time Is Different Deregulation and Financial Innovation Easy Credit New Valuation Approaches Accounting Problems and Scandals Notes Part III: Lessons for the Future: A Focus on the Post-Financial Crisis Era; What Has Changed and What It Means for Investors Chapter 9: How the Cycle Has Changed Post the Financial Crisis Three Waves of the Financial Crisis The Unusual Gap between Financial Markets and Economies All Boats Were Lifted by the Liquidity Wave The Unusual Drivers of the Return Lower Inflation and Interest Rates A Downtrend in Global Growth Expectations The Fall in Unemployment and Rise in Employment The Rise in Profit Margins Falling Volatility of Macro Variables The Rising Influence of Technology The Extraordinary Gap between Growth and Value Lessons from Japan Notes Chapter 10: Below Zero: The Impact of Ultra-Low Bond Yields Zero Rates and Equity Valuations Zero Rates and Growth Expectations Zero Rates: Backing Out Future Growth Zero Rates and Demographics Zero Rates and the Demand for Risk Assets Notes Chapter 11: The Impact of Technology on the Cycle The Ascent of Technology and Historical Parallels Technology and Growth in the Cycle How Long Can Stocks and Sectors Dominate?

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Also in common with many subsequent bubbles, it is not entirely clear what triggered its ultimate collapse. In this case, there were probably many contributory factors. At the height of the boom in 1636 and early 1637, when demand was at its highest, the bulbs themselves were still in the ground and could not be physically delivered until the following spring. Financial innovation played a part in driving prices ever higher. A futures market in bulbs developed that enabled sellers to sell forward tulips at a given price for a particular quality and weight. The risks compounded when most of these contracts were paid for by credit notes, making the system vulnerable to collapse and, eventually, contagion.

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As with the excitement about the possibilities of faster communications following the first transcontinental calls in 1915, expectations were boosted by dramatic falls in the cost of communication in the 1990s, when the speed of communication accelerated at an even faster rate than before, and with similar consequences. The cost of a three-minute telephone call from New York to London fell from $4.37 in 1990 (in 2000 dollars) to $0.40 in 2000.19 Deregulation and Financial Innovation Light touch regulation, or deregulation, is often an ingredient in the buildup of financial bubbles. In the railway boom of the early 19th century in Great Britain, for example, the repeal of the Bubble Act in 1825, introduced after the collapse of the South Sea bubble in 1720, was an important development.

Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

If you are keen to understand in more depth exactly how money is created by the banking system today, then you may wish to skip ahead to Chapter 4. However, it is important to see how money and banking have developed over time to give us the current system. In the next chapter we shall see that political and economic developments, coupled with financial innovations, led to a situation where bank-created credit-money (henceforth ‘commercial bank money’) came to be accepted by the state and eventually came to dominate the monetary system. References 1 Defoe, D. (1690). Essay on Projects (London), quoted in Davies, G. (2002). A History of Money.

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Key historical developments: promissory notes, fractional reserves and bonds The origins of modern banking in Europe and the UK are a complex mixture of constitutional, fiscal, and monetary developments and there is not room for an in-depth historical account in this book.58 Instead, we will review briefly three key financial innovations that have given rise to the modern monetary system: The emergence of private media of exchange (Bills of Exchange) in the form of promissory notes that circulated independently of state money, which at the time was mainly gold and silver coinage. The practice, by the custodians and exchangers of precious metals and coinage, of issuing deposit receipts to a value greater than the value of deposits the custodians actually possessed – a practice that would later be described as fractional reserve banking.

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These countries were engaged in wars at the time and were short of money. As a result, they took to issuing bonds (Box 3) to the rich merchants and goldsmiths of their respective countries. The practice of bond issuance had begun much earlier in the city states of northern Italy and was another transformative financial innovation – a way for the state and later companies to fund expansionary trade through long-term borrowing without the need for additional metal coinage.75 Box 3: Bonds, securities and gilts A bond is a debt instrument which enables companies or states to access cash through issuing an IOU to an investor.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

What I can do is acknowledge the long-standing support and stimulus from my colleagues at the Financial Times, the enthusiastic encouragement of David Marsh, managing director of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, and of Andrew Hilton, director of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation. Anyone who writes about capitalism from a historical and cultural perspective also has to acknowledge a debt to Jerry Z. Muller, whose book The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought has been an inspiration and a delight. I offer heartfelt gratitude to my old friend Brian Reading of Lombard Street Research, who read the manuscript.

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They were the folk who believed that trade was a zero-sum game and that the way to enhance the prosperity and strength of a country was to boost exports and restrain imports in order to accumulate reserves of gold. His economic writings, of which A Discourse of Trade was the most important, were admired by Keynes, Schumpeter and Marx. He was also a pioneer of fire insurance after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and helped found England’s first mortgage bank. Barbon combined these remarkable financial innovations with a role as the biggest speculative builder in London, creating the districts around what is now the Strand, and rebuilding the Temple after a fire in 1678. He also developed much of London’s Bloomsbury. His building activities relied heavily on credit, yet he was notoriously reluctant to pay his creditors, even stipulating in his will that his debts should not be met.

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The policy of vastly increasing executive compensation was also, at least with the brilliant vision of hindsight, terribly bad social policy and perhaps even bad morals.42 A similar if less spectacular progression was under way in Europe. The escalation coincided with a power shift within banking whereby traders replaced conventional bankers at the top. They genuinely believed that financial innovations that involved packaging products such as subprime mortgages into bundles of securities that could be sold to investors were both useful and lucrative, as did the credit rating agencies that awarded triple-A status to these securitised products. So, too, did a growing band of mathematicians and scientists who left other research-intensive industries to share in the banking bonanza.

Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Why does the private sector lag in innovation in risk management? “The problem is not so much with the managers of private sector enterprises,” he observes, “as with the public nature of financial innovations. As financial innovations are not generally * The New Financial Order won the f irst Paul A. Samuelson Award from TIAA-CREF in 1996. bern_c06.qxd 82 3/23/07 9:03 AM Page 82 THE THEORETICIANS patentable, financial innovators are reluctant to spend large sums developing new products that others can use. Hence, it is difficult for private sector companies to get important new things started along the lines we suggested in Macro Markets and New Financial Order.”

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As Merton sees it, “You can bern_c04.qxd 52 3/23/07 9:02 AM Page 52 THE THEORETICIANS move from the unrealistic world of theory in which everybody agrees about asset prices and risks to the real world in which everybody agrees to use institutions.” The power of innovative institutions to change markets is clear from just a few examples, which Merton and Bodie place under the heading of “the financial innovation spiral.” Money market funds now compete with banks and thrifts for household savings. Securitization of auto loans and credit card receivables has intensified competition among financial institutions as sources for these purposes. High-yield bonds have liberated many companies from the icy grip of their commercial bankers.

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In national mortgage markets, many institutions have developed into major alternatives to thrifts as a source for residential mortgages. These institutional innovations have improved the lot of consumers and business firms by reducing the costs of the services they require. Merton is convinced that the most fruitful source for continuing the spiral of financial innovation will develop primarily from the valuation of options, or, more precisely, of contingent claims—the contribution to the theory of finance for which he earned the Nobel Prize. Merton had joined up with Fischer Black and Myron Scholes in their search for the valuation of options in the spring of 1970, because he doubted they were on the right track in their conviction that the Capital Asset Pricing Model would produce the right answer (see Capital Ideas, pp. 216–219).

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

Distribution and the Macroeconomy 293 iv. The Modern Under-consumptionist Story 298 v. Conclusion 305 11. What Was Wrong with the Banks? 307 i. Pre-crash Orthodoxy 308 ii. Theory 310 iii. Understanding Banking: Some Essential Terms 316 iv. Loosening the Regulatory Noose 318 v. Financial Innovation 322 vi. Conclusion 327 Appendix 11.1: Why Didn’t the Credit Ratings Agencies Do Their Job? 12. Global Imbalances 329 331 i. Introduction 331 ii. A Pre-crash Bird’s-eye View 334 x C on t e n t s iii. Some Basic Theory 335 iv. Current Account Imbalances as a Cause of Meltdown? 336 v.

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Finance was viewed essentially as an intermediatory, bringing together willing buyers and sellers of goods and services. In the language of the day, the financial market was an ‘efficient’ market, which needed no more regulation than any other market. The peculiar property of finance as a vent for speculation and fraud was ignored. This benign view of finance extended to the financial innovations of the 1990s. Securitization – the process of transforming non-marketable assets into marketable ones – led to a continuous lengthening of the chain of indebtedness. This ‘financialization’ of the economy – the growing share of money being made from purely financial operations – was praised (or at least justified) as ‘making capital allocation more efficient’ and therefore maximizing growth.

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Our economies are still on life-support systems, and the withdrawal of these will be exceptionally challenging. Chapters 10, 11 and 12 look at the structural causes of financial instability. Chapter 10 analyses the macroeconomic impact of the growth of inequality of income and wealth. The focus of Chapter 11 is on financial innovation, partly in response to the explosive increase in the demand for credit. Chapter 12 examines the contribution of current account imbalances to the instability of the pre-crash economic system. And so to the topic of the final part: what is to be done? The central question of political economy today is as it has always been: what does a government need to do to secure the relatively smooth – and socially and morally tolerable – functioning of a decentralized, money-using, largely privately owned economy?

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino by Jim McTague

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, computerized trading, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, housing crisis, index arbitrage, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market bubble, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, naked short selling, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, technology bubble, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, Y2K

In the midst of the journalistic feeding frenzy, it wasn’t long before reporters discovered Arnuk and Saluzzi’s white paper and launched the pair into the limelight. Saluzzi was invited to discuss his findings on Bloomberg television, a cable business channel. The interview was apparently seen by somebody at the SEC, because shortly after the broadcast, Arnuk received an invitation from Henry Hu, chief of the SEC’s Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation, to visit Washington, DC with Saluzzi and address the SEC staff. This was exactly the audience that the two traders wanted to reach. Saluzzi and Arnuk brought along a PowerPoint presentation and assumed that they would be addressing a small group of people. Much to their surprise, they were ushered into a heavily populated conference room.

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When the SEC published its concept release in January 2010, it specifically raised Kaufman’s questions. The concept release also reflected agency concern about the allegations that Arnuk and Saluzzi made. This relatively quick response was unusual for the SEC and tribute to Schapiro’s decision some months earlier to create a new Division of Risk, Strategy, and Financial Innovation. She had populated it with economists and MBAs with real Wall Street experience and academics like Henry Hu of the University of Texas whose studies had focused on market risk. This was the first new division within the SEC since the Great Depression, and it was meant to inject the agency with some vigor.

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Adeptly dealing with the Flash Crash was an opportunity for her to make up for past sins, both real and perceived. In fact, she had taken one exceptionally imaginative step upon arriving at the SEC to make sure a Madoff-style scandal never again blindsided her: She had created a new division, the first since the agency’s founding in 1934. The Division of Risk, Strategy and Financial Innovation was staffed with risk specialists, economists, and even some physicists to anticipate threats to the markets posed by new and existing investment activities and products. Schapiro recruited University of Texas professor Henry Hu to head the division. A renaissance man with degrees in science and law, Hu in 1993 had written a forward-looking piece for the Yale Law Review predicting that big financial institutions would make significant mistakes employing relatively new products called derivatives.

How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

Years passed, and the fascination of watching the dollar and the price of oil fall began to fade. I switched to a different department at the New York Fed, this one tasked with studying financial innovation. It had its origin in a Bank for International Settlements group that also had a quaint name, the Eurodollar Standing Committee. The Committee dated back to concerns about one of the first great financial innovations of the postwar financial system, the Eurodollar market. Today the Eurodollar market would hardly evoke a yawn from most observers, but at the time the central bankers meeting in Basel took an interest, it was considered a great mystery and even a threat.

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Like Fermat, what Fischer Black and Myron Scholes (and Robert Merton) added, was a way to determine the “fair” value of an option (subject to various caveats related to the reasonableness of the model’s assumptions). Once adopted, their solution replaced the prior ad hoc pricing approach. Fermat is not the only historical example of a scientist devising a financial innovation that today would label him as a quant. A particularly striking example is the role quants played in improving government finance practices as far back as the sixteenth century. A common means of financing municipal and state debt in the Renaissance was the issuance of life annuities. In return for providing a sum to the government, the provider could designate that a regular annual payment go to a designee for life.

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The Eurodollar market had arisen as a side effect of the U.S. current account deficits that had brought down the original Bretton Woods system, it JWPR007-Lindsey 298 May 7, 2007 17:27 h ow i b e cam e a quant appeared to threaten a loss of the Federal Reserve’s ability to limit the U.S. money supply, and to top things off, the Soviet Union and later the oil exporters were among the largest depositors. In my new role, I searched for reasons to worry about financial innovations that, like the Eurodollar market in its time, were poorly understood, and that with some imagination could be seen as potentially harmful. In particular, I studied newfangled currency options such as average-rate, basket and barrier options. And, like the Eurodollar market, these now seem about as threatening to financial stability as a plate of pasta.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

The second part of this book delves into the blockchain from the perspective of its transitionary role in finance. Following the financial crisis of 2008, the financial sector has been in a state of flux. On one side, governments and regulators now demand a greater level of transparency with respect to financial innovation, taxation, and cross-border transactions. On the other hand, technological progress is defragmenting the financial sector, causing incumbents to be challenged by tech firms. While the current dialogue looks at the blockchain as an independent technology, this section of the book attempts to clarify its amalgamator function when juxtaposed with other technologies that are currently fragmenting the sector of finance.

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About the Technical Reviewer Garrick Hileman is a senior research associate at the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance and a researcher at the Center for Macroeconomics. He was recently ranked as one of the 100 most influential economists in the UK and Ireland and he is regularly asked to share his research and perspective with the FT , BBC, CNBC, WSJ , Sky News , and other media. Garrick has been invited to present his research on monetary and financial innovation to government organizations, including central banks and war colleges, as well as private firms such as Visa, Black Rock, and UBS. Garrick has 20 years’ private sector experience with both startups and established companies such as Visa, Lloyd’s of London, Bank of America, The Home Depot, and Allianz.

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As an increasing number of consumers took on debt to purchase products, it meant that the growth of the non-financial institutions had to be leveraged by taking on more debt. As the spiral of debt continued, the risk attached to loans grew in volume, to the point that it was now necessary to address the situation. It is here that financial innovation came to the rescue. As the power of banks decreased due to the issuance of debt by non-financial institutions, the banks installed a new risk management practise via their activities in exchanging securities and specifically through CDOs (Collateralised Debt Obligations ), Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) and CDSs (Credit Default Swaps ).

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America by Danielle Dimartino Booth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, liquidity trap, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Navinder Sarao, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, Phillips curve, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, yield curve

“I tried to push back against complacency,” Geithner wrote, “telling a room full of bankers that the wonders of the new financial world would not necessarily prevent catastrophic failures of major institutions, and should not inspire delusions of safety on Wall Street. . . . I suggested that financial innovation was driving risk and leverage into corners of the financial system with weaker supervision, and that our tools for monitoring systemic risk weren’t keeping up.” Hmmm. Geithner’s memory doesn’t match the actual text of his speech, which painted a picture of the system’s financial stability and, yep, complacency. Though Geithner mentioned that financial innovation presented “significant challenges,” he expressed no warnings, sounded no alarms. Bankers had heard this speech a hundred times over rubber chicken.

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(At a conference, I chuckled when an economist stood at a podium deriding the rigidities of the “dismal science.” Somewhat vertically challenged with a bald head, Wells Fargo’s Mark Vitner remarked, “If you seasonally adjust me, I’m George Clooney.”) This created a weird disconnect every time I went to work. Inside the Dallas Fed, there was no housing bubble. ARMs were the greatest financial innovation to ever bless the middle class. Mortgage equity withdrawal was fueling a fantastic wealth effect. Derivatives were sophisticated financial instruments that diffused risk. All of the Fed’s eccentric econometric models showed the future was rosy, that baby boomers would retire with record levels of prosperity.

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Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington is the Fed’s brain, the imposing stone behemoth on Liberty Street is the Fed’s beating heart. When Geithner set foot in the door, neither the brain nor the heart of the Fed sensed any danger. Fed economists had “growing confidence that derivatives and other financial innovations designed to hedge and distribute risk—along with better monetary policy to respond to downturns and better technology to smooth out inventory cycles—had made devastating crises a thing of the past,” Geithner said in his memoir, Stress Test. A protégé of Rubin and Summers, Geithner had no experience on Wall Street or in banking.

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Volcker lost no time in lashing out with the words: ‘I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth; one shred of evidence.’ One hapless banker retorted that the financial sector in the United States had increased its share of value-added from 2 per cent to 6.5 per cent. Volcker responded with a killer question: ‘Is that a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?’ To finish off the banker, he added: ‘The only financial innovation I recall in my long career was the invention of the ATM.’ The combination of options to buy, hedging and leveraging is such risky business that, had it been a pharmaceutical, never in a million years would it have secured approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.

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Together, these sins fed into the self-congratulatory conviction that a paradigm shift had occurred, enabling the world of finance to create unlimited, benign, riskless debt. The first sin, which took the form of a mathematized rhetoric, lulled authorities and academics into a false belief that financial innovation had engineered risk out of the system; that the new instruments allowed a new form of debt with the properties of quicksilver. Once loans were originated, they were then sliced up into tiny pieces, blended together in packages that contained different degrees of risk,3 and sold all over the globe.

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Any fair-minded investigator of these episodes must, many believe, conclude that the economic theories that dominated the thinking of influential people (in the banking sector, the hedge funds, the Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB) – everywhere) were no more than thinly veiled forms of intellectual fraud, which provided the ‘scientific’ fig leaves behind which Wall Street tried to conceal the truth about its ‘financial innovations’. They came with impressive names, like the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) and Real Business Cycle Theory (RBCT). In truth, these were no more than impressively marketed theories whose mathematical complexity succeeded for too long in hiding their feebleness.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In 2010, 3,649 patents were granted in the United States for financial or business practice innovations, one of the most important categories. Currently the American public holds a rather negative view of the social value of financial “innovation,” given the role of derivatives in triggering the Great Recession of 2008–2010. But this is probably an overreaction. While there are important exceptions, by and large financial innovation has contributed to supporting America’s economic growth. After all, the fact that planes are flying people from one corner of the country to another at affordable prices has as much to do with innovative hedges against high fuel costs as with advances in aviation technology.

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The innovation sector includes advanced manufacturing (such as designing iPhones or iPads), information technology, life sciences, medical devices, robotics, new materials, and nanotechnology. But innovation is not limited to high technology. Any job that generates new ideas and new products qualifies. There are entertainment innovators, environmental innovators, even financial innovators. What they all have in common is that they create things the world has never seen before. We tend to think of innovations as physical goods, but they can also be services—for example, new ways of reaching consumers or new ways of spending our free time. Today this is where the real money is.

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It is now a premier location for Internet portals and information services, and along with Los Angeles it accounts for a large number of digital entertainment jobs. In 2011, Google undertook a major expansion of its New York office, paying $2 billion to buy a large building near the meatpacking district. The New York region also remains the undisputed world leader in financial innovation. Historically, the Washington, D.C., area never had many high-tech jobs apart from a sizable cluster of defense contractors. But in the past twenty years the region has been remarkably successful at attracting a wide array of innovative companies to the high-tech Dulles corridor and to the downtown area.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

But the main gains from trading come from the transfer of wealth to the smart traders from the less astute who trade with them out of institutional needs or outright stupidity.’ Finance – along with the law and piracy – has always been a route to great wealth, a classic rent-seeking occupation. Today, it is even more so. In their defence, bankers and financiers usually point to ‘financial innovation’ as an attribute that society should desire and value, but their arguments are hamstrung by their own astonishing inability to distinguish between innovation that is economically and socially useful and that which is not. For example, James Kwak argues it was this blindness that lay behind the crisis in so-called ‘sub-prime’ mortgages – financing offered to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers.

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For example, James Kwak argues it was this blindness that lay behind the crisis in so-called ‘sub-prime’ mortgages – financing offered to ‘sub-prime’ borrowers. The bankers boasted that they were promoting home-ownership, but they were not. They were actually promoting home-buyership, which the buyers, with low or sometimes zero incomes, could not sustain – a socially toxic financial innovation. Other innovations that allegedly better managed risk or liquidity turned out to be illusory, as I discuss in Chapters 6 and 7. Meanwhile, other, more mundane innovations – like cashpoint machines and credit cards – have proved a great deal more useful, but banks have muddied their benefits by charging excessively for them.

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Then there is the three-masted sailing ship, which allowed large vessels to sail close to the wind, permitted the Portuguese and then their European imitators to sail around the world. Without this GPT, there would have been no circumnavigation of the globe; no discovery of the Americas, leading to new centres of power and productive capacity; no European colonisation; no long-distance sea trade; no rich European merchant class; no consequent financial innovations, such as joint stock companies and marine insurance, to deal with the risk and uncertainty of long voyages; and less possibility of the principles of magnetism being understood. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, the railway was much more than just a transport technology. It transformed companies, creating both mass consumption and mass production.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

We will not concern ourselves here with this part of the story, except for acknowledging that it is a big part of the story and that it is partly traceable to state action. The other big component of financialization has been an explosion in household credit, an explosion made possible by the financial innovation known as securitization. Between 1980 and 2007, total household credit soared from 48 percent of GDP to 99 percent, with the sharpest increases occurring during the housing bubble. Residential mortgages dominate household credit, which also includes credit cards, student loans, and other consumer borrowing.

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As of 2001, private label issuers still held only about 10 percent of the market; by 2006, their market share had jumped to almost 40 percent.10 The place where the competitive field was most open was at the bottom of the market—namely, low-quality or “subprime” mortgages with high loan-to-value ratios (i.e., low down payments) and low or no documentation of borrower income. The development of new financial products, a process once proudly called “financial innovation,” further expanded the market for mortgage-backed securities and the demand for more underlying mortgages to be issued. In a beguiling bit of alchemy, low-quality mortgages could be transformed into AAA securities by slicing pools of mortgages into “tranches” so that the senior-most slices are the last to absorb any default losses.

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In a beguiling bit of alchemy, low-quality mortgages could be transformed into AAA securities by slicing pools of mortgages into “tranches” so that the senior-most slices are the last to absorb any default losses. This alchemy could then be embellished with “synthetic” securities comprising tranches of tranches. Other derivatives, like credit default swaps, appeared to spread risk even more widely, fueling demand for even more expansion of mortgage credit. Egged on by the combination of financial innovation and expectations of ever-rising home prices, mortgage lending exploded and underwriting standards collapsed. Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber offer a good summary of that collapse: “In 1990 a mortgage applicant needed a 20 percent down payment, a good credit rating, and a stable, verifiable employment and income history in order to obtain a low-risk, 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, but by 2003 she could obtain a high-risk, negatively amortizing adjustable-rate mortgage by offering only a 3 percent down payment and simply stating her income and employment history, with no independent verification.”11 Rarities before the late 1990s, high-risk subprime and Alt-A mortgages went from 8 percent of new mortgage lending in 2001 to 36 percent in 2006.12 For a while, the deterioration in credit standards kept the home price boom going, but eventually the bubble burst, nearly taking the global economy with it.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

To employ all the money they had borrowed, banks had to search out marginal customers and extend themselves into new, riskier areas. As Minsky put it, “[T]he leverage ratio of banks and the import of speculative and Ponzi financing in the economy are two sides of a coin.” Another shortcoming in the traditional view of banking that Minsky highlighted was its failure to take adequate account of financial innovation. “Like all entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy, bankers are aware that innovation assures profits,” Minsky wrote. “Thus, bankers, whether they be brokers or dealers, are merchants of debt who strive to innovate in the assets they acquire and the liabilities they market.” One quick way for a bank to expand its revenues is by extending credit to people and firms that previously it would have turned down for loans because of doubts about their ability to repay.

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In the era when banks ordinarily held on to the loans they issued until they matured, pursuing such a risky lending strategy generally didn’t make sense: the extra income from the new loans wasn’t enough to cover the increased probability of defaults. But, beginning in the 1970s, a series of financial innovations transformed the incentive structure that banks faced. The key development was the rise of “securitization.” In 1970, the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), one of three government-sponsored agencies that guarantee certain types of home loans—the other two are the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac)—issued a new type of bond known as a residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS).

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Thus conceived, the so-called shadow banking system would grow to elephantine proportions while remaining largely beyond the purview of regulators, bank stockholders, and journalists. Minsky didn’t realize the full implications of securitization—nobody did—but he was one of the few economists to draw attention to it. After his death in 1996, some of his colleagues in the small but dedicated post-Keynesian school pursued his interest in financial innovation. In his 2002 book, Financial Markets, Money and the Real World, Paul Davidson, of the University of Tennessee, pointed out that almost half the loans that U.S. banks initiated in 2001 had subsequently been transferred to nonbank entities, mostly through securitization. “The downside aspect of this shift in the source of bank profits from interest earnings to originating and servicing fees is that bank loan officers do not worry as much about the creditworthiness of borrowers as long as there is a strong market for these loans,” Davidson wrote.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) – A type of asset-backed security that is secured by a collection of domestic mortgages. Section 106 – A section of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 which allowed local planning authorities to enter into legally binding agreements with developers, with the latter having to provide certain public benefits as part of the development. Securitisation – A financial innovation undertaken by banks involving the pooling together and repackaging a number of illiquid loans – loans that cannot easily be sold or exchanged for cash – and issuing tradable debt securities against these loans that are sold to investors. These securities are repaid as the underlying loans are repaid.

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(Feldstein, 2008) The lower rate of defaults of securitised products in Europe compared with the US may be a reflection of underlying legal differences in mortgage loans between the two countries, as well as differences in securitisation practice. 5.5 Macroeconomic effects of the liberalisation of mortgage credit The above historical review has shown how, since the 1970s, land has become ‘financialised’, as the deregulation of the financial system and financial innovation allowed for the emergence of repeated property credit booms and busts. In this section we turn to some of the important effects of mortgage credit liberalisation on the wider economy. The liberalisation of mortgage credit has revolutionised the relationship between land values, house prices and the wider economy in the UK.

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Many advanced economies enjoyed an unprecedented period of steady growth coupled with low inflation from the 1990s and up to the crisis – described as the ‘Great Moderation’ – that may have reassured central banks that policy was working (Bezemer and Grydaki, 2014). Mervyn King described the 1990s as the ‘NICE’ decade – a period of ‘non-inflationary, consistent expansion’ (King, 2003, p. 3). In the 2000s, financial innovations, including RMBS, were seen as spreading risk rather than amplifying it. The build-up of mortgage debt smoothed the business cycle but encouraged excessive leverage in both the banking and household sector which eventually resulted in fragilities that led to financial collapse (Barwell and Burrows, 2011).

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence by Stephen D. King

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, congestion charging, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, mass immigration, Minsky moment, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk free rate, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population

With world trade and international financial relationships nurtured by newly created international institutions, the protectionism and isolationism of the interwar years became but a distant memory: economic activity in the industrialized world thus began to flourish thanks to the unleashing of huge trade multipliers, with exports from Japan to the US, for example, rising at an annual rate of approaching 20 per cent throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Financial innovations that had first appeared in the 1920s – most obviously, the arrival of consumer credit – began to spread far and wide, allowing consumers to spend today and pay tomorrow. US household debt rose from less than 40 per cent of household income at the beginning of the 1950s to almost 140 per cent of household income before the onset of the financial crisis.

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This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.2 As it turned out, Malthus wrote his Essay at just the wrong time. The nineteenth century witnessed the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, an extraordinary leap forward in economic and financial affairs. New steam-related technologies emerged to deliver enormous productivity gains. Financial innovations – the growth of the joint-stock company, the development of banks and other financial institutions – allowed savings to be channelled more effectively into the new investment opportunities. Back-breaking work slowly disappeared, the children of labourers – on the land and in the factories – became the aspirational middle classes and per capita incomes went through the roof: between 1820 and 1900, the incomes of British citizens rose 167 per cent.

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Underneath all this, however, was a key assumption, namely that the ultimate ‘real’ assets underpinning all of this paper wealth – in the main, US housing – were actually worth something. Specifically, the belief was that US housing would never fall in value: after all, it had never done so since the Second World War, so there was, apparently, little reason to think that a sudden decline was imminent. Yet, as a consequence of financial innovation, combined with political momentum in favour of a wider property-owning democracy, the nature of the US housing market was changing: borrowers were becoming increasingly ‘subprime’ and, thus, were slowly but surely becoming a bigger credit risk. Yet, with the system slicing and dicing credit risk into so many tiny parts, it was difficult for any one observer to spot the risk to the system as a whole.

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

In fact, economists were starting to debate whether America’s long stretch of stability constituted a new normal, a Great Moderation, a quasi-permanent era of resilience to shocks. There was growing confidence that derivatives and other financial innovations designed to hedge and distribute risk—along with better monetary policy to respond to downturns and better technology to smooth out inventory cycles—had made devastating crises a thing of the past. I did not share that confidence. I had no particular knowledge or insight into whether the new financial innovations were stabilizing or destabilizing, but I was reflexively skeptical of excess conviction in any form, especially excess optimism. My dominant professional experiences had involved financial failures.

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And working for Secretary Rubin surely affected my view of Wall Street competence, because he was as competent as anyone I knew. I did come of age professionally at a time when financial innovation and the freer flow of capital across borders were widely seen as good things. As a young international negotiator, I pushed for open markets for the U.S. financial industry, even though I sometimes had misgivings that we were pushing too hard. I greatly admired Rubin, Summers, and Greenspan, and I shared their general approval of markets and financial innovation. But the common broad-brush caricature of that trio as unswerving free-market ideologues is unfair. For example, during the Clinton years, they all pushed for stricter regulation of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the “government-sponsored enterprises” (GSEs) that were exploiting their implicit federal backstop to load up on low-priced leverage.

…

I had seen during the emerging-market crises of the previous decade how long periods of stability and growth could breed instability and disaster. Confidence had always been an evanescent thing, and in this new age of mobile capital, trauma in one part of the world or one corner of the financial system could spread quickly. I didn’t see how a few years of calm or some clever financial innovations would cure the basic human tendency toward mania and self-delusion. History suggests that financial crises are usually preceded by proclamations that crises are a thing of the past. In my very first public speech at the New York Fed in March 2004, I tried to push back against complacency, telling a room full of bankers that the wonders of the new financial world would not necessarily prevent catastrophic failures of major institutions, and should not inspire delusions of safety on Wall Street.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency peg, diversification, Doha Development Round, energy security, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mobile money, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

Mohamed El-Erian, president of the Harvard Management Company, observed in 2007 that “Over the past two years, markets have developed powerful liquidity factories . . . as more investors have embraced debt in an attempt to increase the impact of their investments.” He cited hedge funds and private equity firms. Bond manager Bill Gross reminded clients that much as circa 1950 economics texts had described how money deposited at a local bank could be multiplied five- or sixfold by the operations of the banking system, latter-day financial innovators had done an “end run” around the banks: “Derivatives and structures with three- and four-letter abbreviations—CDOs, CLOs, ABCP, CPDOs, SIVs (the world awaits investment banking’s next creation: IOU?)—can now take a ‘depositor’s’ dollar and multiply it ten or twenty times” (see pages 108-111).

…

ONE Introduction The Panic of August We are living through the first crisis of our brave new world of securitised financial markets. It is too early to tell how economically important this upheaval will prove. But nobody can doubt its significance for the financial system. Its origins lie with credit expansion and financial innovation in the U.S. itself. It cannot be blamed on “crony capitalism” in peripheral economies, but rather on irresponsibility in the core of the world economy. —Martin Wolf, Financial Times, September 2007 The “crack cocaine” of our generation appears to be debt. We just can’t seem to get enough of it.

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It is the thesis of this book that far-reaching economic and political events and consequences began to unfold in midsummer’s melee—developments that at least in part followed the direction that many specialists had foreseen—regarding U.S. housing prices, credit-bubble risk, the instability of so many financial innovations never crisis-tested, the ever-more-apparent inadequacy of global oil production, the related vulnerability of the dollar, and, behind it all, the false assurance of American “imperial” hubris. The administration of George W. Bush, rarely known for strategic grasp, miscued again in the early days of the crisis.

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, call centre, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Thorp, Etonian, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, interest rate swap, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, moral hazard, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, pets.com, proprietary trading, Red Clydeside, shareholder value, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, value at risk, warehouse robotics

But while there are certainly people in this story and in the wider world of banking for whom avarice seems to have been the main motivation, greed on its own is an insufficient explanation for why the blow-up of the Royal Bank of Scotland was quite so spectacular. Says a senior figure in the City who came to know Goodwin: ‘Fred was building a monument and he was bloody proud of it.’ In making his monument he was building on foundations laid hundreds of years before by men who were financial innovators and patriots. Those who cared about the Royal Bank could point to an exceptional heritage and claim plausibly that it was no ordinary company, not some here today gone tomorrow firm willing to be treated as a chattel by asset-stripping foreigners. Its very history seemed to endow it with a special status.

…

His purchase, on behalf of the French government, of the Mississippi Company in Louisiana was designed to boost trade. It was inspired in part by the Company of Scotland and the mania for joint stock companies and trading in shares. Law fled France once his bubble burst. In Scotland too, periodically, restraint would also vanish in a miasma of financial innovation and greed. The Ayr Bank had liabilities of more than £1m and crashed spectacularly in 1772, stalling the Scottish economy for a while and ruining many farmers and merchants. Established just three years previously, with the aristocracy of Ayrshire and surrounding counties heavily invested, the Ayr Bank had expanded too fast, made too many loans and became overextended.

…

He received an honorary knighthood from the Queen for his ‘outstanding contribution to global economic stability’. ‘If risk is properly dispersed, shocks to the overall economic system will be better absorbed and less likely to create cascading failures that could threaten financial stability,’ he said in 2002.15 The financial innovation of recent years was, he declared, on the whole an immensely positive development because it diluted risks so that they were much more widely dispersed. This was exactly what some banks, growing in size, wanted to hear. Goodness, the complex new products they were experimenting with to expand their activities might actually make the world a safer place.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Bank of America, in particular, had a long history of consumer finance across California and easily transitioned into this new form of lending. In September 1967, for instance, 58 percent of all credit card debt was in the California Federal Reserve district. New York, that long-standing bastion of financial innovation, had only 13 percent of the balances.10 Bank of America (BofA) launched BankAmericard in 1959. It was a disaster. It grew too quickly, and its explosion meant that good as well as bad credit risks received cards. There was widespread fraud. Bank of America, confident in the program’s promise, kept up despite losses and by 1961 was able to run it profitably, proving the viability of bank credit cards.11 Regional banks looked to the BofA as a model for their programs.

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The percentage of households with credit cards rose from 35 percent in 1980 to 65 percent in 1991.9 These new borrowers were poorer and riskier than any before, but credit card companies had, so they believed, figured out a way to handle all the risk. They also believed they had found a nearly endless source of capital. Though the credit departments of department stores of the 1950s and ’60s had collapsed under their scarcity of capital, credit card and mortgage companies of the 1970s and ’80s faced no such obstacle because of a financial innovation that underpinned this debt expansion. Securitization had come to the credit card and, through its ability to repackage risk, facilitated this new group of high-risk borrowers. After John and Priscilla Myers moved into their split-level in 1984, they might have watched a shopping channel on their newly installed cable television.

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Over the 1960s and ’70s, City National became one of the leading credit card processors, offering its services to other banks, credit unions, and even finance companies. By 1977, it handled 33 million transactions annually—90 percent of which were on behalf of other banks.10 Its actual banking assets remained small, but it became a hotbed of financial innovation, always at the edge of new technologies such as point-of-sale machines, ATMS, and electronic banking. For years Banc One had offered credit cards to traditional upper-middle-class borrowers. The profits of their credit cards in the early 1980s emboldened lenders like Banc One to push into new markets such as television shopping.

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

First, the global financial crisis that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008 constitutes the first truly global manifestation of systemic risk that we see as characterizing the twenty-first century. Although many blame the bursting of the real estate bubble for starting the crisis, few have examined how economic integration and financial innovation in a deregulated environment created a financial network that was inherently vulnerable to systemic risk. Our second reason for choosing the financial sphere for our first analytical chapter is the stunning pace of innovation and technological advancement in this sector, which makes the financial system an incubator of globalization.

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For example, it has been argued that markets for securities might become fragile if investors were to demand safe assets but neglect certain tail risks.26 Such a situation closely resembles that in the period between 2003 and 2007, when large numbers of new mortgage-backed securities were issued that investors perceived as safe. It has also been shown that heterogeneous expectations and adaptive behavior can lead to a situation in which more hedging instruments can destabilize markets.27 A similar motive emerges with respect to financial innovation, which typically increases the part of portfolio variance that is due to speculation when traders do not share the same assumptions about the evolution of markets.28 All of these findings rely on models that deviate from the traditional mantra of maintaining full rationality where all agents have perfect knowledge about the economy and each other.

…

Matthew Jarzemsky, 2012, “‘Fat-Finger’ Error Caused Oil-Stock Price Swings,” Wall Street Journal, 19 September, accessed 21 January 2013, http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2012/09/19/fat-finger-error-caused-oil-stock-price-swings/?KEYWORDS=Oilwell+Varco. 16. Lawrence J. White, 1997, “Technological Change, Financial Innovation, and Financial Regulation in the U.S.: The Challenges for Public Policy,” presentation at the Conference on Performance of Financial Institutions, Wharton Financial Institutions Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, May 8–10, 24. 17. Ibid. 18. Charles Roxburgh, Susan Lund, and John Piotrowski, 2011, Updated Research: Mapping Global Capital Markets (New York: McKinsey), August, 2, accessed 21 January 2013, http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/financial_markets/mapping_global_capital_markets_2011. 19.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Taking note, every major central bank has begun to explore the potential for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), a course with significant opportunities and some pitfalls. All these financial innovations and other changes in financial markets lead to serious questions about the stability of the system in the face of megathreats. How much more unconventional will monetary policies become? What are the potential dire consequences of these experiments? Will fiat currencies survive as resilient stores of value, units of account, and mediums of exchange, or will policy actions debase them and financial innovation displace them? Will financial crises become more frequent and virulent? Will monetary unions such as the eurozone foster prosperity or eventual collapse?

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Chapter 5 The Coming Great Stagflation Fears of economic misery conjure the Great Depression for most people. We teeter now on a different precipice: not depression, but stagflation. Recall the 1970s, a decade that featured bubbles, busts, an end to the global gold exchange standard, devaluation of the dollar, mounting debt, risky financial innovation, monetary and fiscal experimentation, and oil supply shocks driven by geopolitical shocks. It all culminated in double-digit inflation, stubborn unemployment, and persistent recession. That is the corrosive condition known as stagflation, or stagnation with inflation. As economic headaches go, the seventies checked nearly every box.

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Data are still coming in. We can point now to tentative conclusions, but we absolutely must figure out the future of money, finance, and reserve currencies, stable or unstable as they may be. Two or three stumbles could trigger economic shocks that would quickly spiral out of control. If monetary and financial innovation leads to chaos and instability rather than a more stable monetary and financial system, we will indeed enter megathreat territory. The ice has never looked thinner to seasoned observers like Peter R. Fisher, a former senior official in the US Treasury and the New York Federal Reserve. “I feel as anxious today as I’ve ever felt about the financial world,” Fisher told the Frontline podcast in November 2021.4 “The Fed has been pumping up asset prices in a way that is creating a bit of an illusion.

Investment: A History by Norton Reamer, Jesse Downing

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, book value, break the buck, Brownian motion, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, fixed income, flying shuttle, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Henri Poincaré, Henry Singleton, high net worth, impact investing, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, means of production, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical arbitrage, survivorship bias, tail risk, technology bubble, Teledyne, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, underbanked, Vanguard fund, working poor, yield curve

Today, however, the situation is rather different. Virtually all parts of the real economy are dependent to some degree upon the financial markets, and most important, the conditions of creditworthiness. Progress in Managing Cyclical Crises 223 There is a little irony to the effects of financial innovation. Financial innovation, of which securitization is a part, serves to socialize risk. It spreads risk from the balance sheets of a few to the balance sheets of many. In this regard, financial innovation on the whole has been a positive force; it has been the force behind vigorous insurance markets and higher loan volumes.

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Of course, because of financial innovation, the answer was that many more people had exposure to the risk who were otherwise far removed from the original lending apparatus: banks, foreign governments, municipalities, pensions, individuals, and other institutions. They all had to endure the financial shock at once because of this common source of risk. Financial innovation, for all the good it normally does, had now created a situation not unlike the outbreak of a deadly virus: at first, nobody was quite sure who may have contracted the virus, so agents tried to avoid contact with one another by ceasing to further interlink their balance sheets through the credit market.

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Quigen Liu, “䆎Ё೑সҷଚϮǃ催߽䌋䌘ᴀ㒘㒛Ёⱘÿড়䌘ÿϢÿড়ӭ’” [Joint-stock partnerships in business and usury capital organization in ancient China], Hebei Academic Journal (Hebei University), no. 5 (1994): 86–91. Valerie Hansen and Ana Mata-Fink, “Records from a Seventh-Century Pawnshop in China,” in The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets, eds. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 54–58; Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, 614. Hansen and Mata-Fink, “Records from a Pawnshop,” 58–59. Michael T. Skully, “The Development of the Pawnshop Industry in East Asia,” in Financial Landscapes Reconstructed: The Fine Art of Mapping Development, eds.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

With a few, but notable, exceptions, such as the future Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller and the future governor of India’s Central Bank and Chicago economist Raghu Rajan, economists overlooked the extent of problems in housing and finance. Shiller had long argued that asset prices were excessively volatile and had focused on a bubble in housing prices.5 Rajan had fretted about the downside of what was then praised as “financial innovation” and warned as early as 2005 that bankers were taking excessive risks, earning a rebuke from Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, as a “Luddite.”6 That economists were mostly blind-sided by the crisis is undeniable. Many interpreted this as evidence of a fundamental breakdown in economics.

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Markets became, in effect, the engine of social progress. They would not only mediate efficiently between savers and investors; they would also distribute risk to those most able to bear it and provide access to credit for previously excluded households, such as those with limited means or no credit history. Through financial innovation, portfolio holders could eke out the maximum return while taking on the least amount of risk. Moreover, markets came to be viewed not only as inherently efficient and stable, but also as self-disciplining. If big banks and speculators engaged in shenanigans, markets would discover and punish them.

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Such thinking by economists had legitimized and enabled a great wave of financial deregulation that set the stage for the crisis. And it didn’t hurt that these views were shared by some of the top economists in government, such as Larry Summers and Alan Greenspan. In sum, economists (and those who listened to them) became overconfident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation improves the risk-return trade-off, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful. They forgot about the other models. There was too much Fama, too little Shiller. The economics of the profession may have been fine, but evidently there was trouble with its psychology and sociology.

When Free Markets Fail: Saving the Market When It Can't Save Itself (Wiley Corporate F&A) by Scott McCleskey

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, break the buck, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, place-making, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, web of trust

See Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) over-the-counter market, 39, 71, 168 P Parmalat, 84 Petrou, Karen, 43 Plan B, 10, 20, 22, 30, 81, 144 point-in-time ratings, 96 political capture, 104 privacy laws, 134–35, 137, 141 private equity funds, 105, 180 E1BINDEX 06/16/2010 194 11:28:9 n Page 194 Index R Regan administration, xv regulation and innovation about, 41–44 conclusions, 45 credit default swaps (CDSs), 42–44 financial innovation and risk management, 42 financial innovation pushes boundary of complexity further, 43 financial regulators and regulatory lag on innovations, 43 internal risk controls, 44 legislation to reform markets after near-collapse of financial system, 41 market complexity, 44 mortgage-backed securities, 42 policy implications, 44 regulation could stifle all innovation, 42 residential mortgage-backed securities, 44 transparency as regulatory tool, 44 regulation of free markets about, xv–xvi Bernie Madoff scandal, xxi Commodities Future Trading Commission and transparency to credit derivatives market, xvi conclusion, xx–xxi credit rating agencies and subprime-loan pools, xvii–xix, 88, 93 credit rating agencies diluted meaning of AAA, xxi Efficient Market Theory, xix market collapse is 2008, xx markets, inefficiencies and imbalances of distorted, xvii market self-regulation, xix–xx perfect markets regulate themselves, xx philosophy to math, the shift from, xvii–xix regulation, ideological legitimacy of, xv regulation is not separate from market, xv regulation vs. justice, xx regulation vs. retribution, xx self interest and free trade, xvii selfish interest drives irresponsible, inordinate risk-taking and fraud, xxi Smith, Adam, xvi–xvii subprime mortgages, xxi transparency and market self-regulation, xix regulations are there other ways to achieve the same aim?

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Rather than diluting risk, securitization concentrated the risk into mortgage backed securities that then infected the entire financial system as they were sold to financial institutions and investors everywhere. Some have argued that securitization is a product we would have been better off without. This brings us in the next chapter to the question of whether regulation should act as the gatekeeper to financial innovation. C05 06/16/2010 11:17:40 Page 41 5 CHAPTER FIVE Should Regulation Stifle Innovation? A C O M M O N C O M PL A IN T A B O U T proposed regulations is that they would have the consequence, unintended or otherwise, of ‘‘stifling’’ innovation in the financial services industry—the creation and growth of new financial products.

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It was no surprise, then, that the charge would arise with respect to major pieces of legislation aimed at reforming the markets in the wake of the near-collapse of the financial system. In the U.S. market, the idea of stifling innovation is akin to censorship in the arts—by limiting creativity you limit genius and progress. The notion that financial innovation is at the heart of economic growth is so deep-seated among free marketers that it has become nearly unchallengeable. And it is true, up to a point. But while the logic of expanding the frontier of financial engineering is compelling on the surface, the financial crisis has challenged the underlying assumption that all innovation is good.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

There are some service activities, such as banking, which have greater scope for productivity increase than other services. However, as revealed by the 2008 financial crisis, much of the productivity growth in those activities was due not to a real rise in their productivity (e.g., reduction in trading costs due to better computers) but to financial innovations that obscured (rather than genuinely reduced) the riskiness of financial assets, thereby allowing the financial sector to grow at an unsustainably rapid rate (see Thing 22). To sum up, the fall in the share of manufacturing in total output in the rich countries is not largely due to the fall in (relative) demand for manufactured goods, as many people think.

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However, Simon’s theory shows that many regulations work not because the government necessarily knows better than the regulated (although it may sometimes do – see Thing 12) but because they limit the complexity of the activities, which enables the regulated to make better decisions. The 2008 world financial crisis illustrates this point very nicely. In the run-up to the crisis, our ability to make good decisions was simply overwhelmed because things were allowed to evolve in too complex a manner through financial innovation. So many complex financial instruments were created that even financial experts themselves did not fully understand them, unless they specialized in them – and sometimes not even then (see Thing 22). The top decision-makers of the financial firms certainly did not grasp much of what their businesses were doing.

…

However, we should not rush into restraining financial markets simply because of this once-in-a-century financial crisis that no one could have predicted, however big it may be, as the efficiency of its financial market is the key to a nation’s prosperity. What they don’t tell you The problem with financial markets today is that they are too efficient. With recent financial ‘innovations’ that have produced so many new financial instruments, the financial sector has become more efficient in generating profits for itself in the short run. However, as seen in the 2008 global crisis, these new financial assets have made the overall economy, as well as the financial system itself, much more unstable.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

Across the globe, regulators, politicians and financiers had come round to the view that, after a shaky decade and a half, the market model had finally triumphed. According to Kenneth Rogoff, chief economist at the IMF from 2001 to 2003, ‘the policy community has developed a smug belief that enhanced macroeconomic stability at the national level combined with continuing financial innovation at the international level have obviated any need to tinker with the (international financial) system’.206 The prophets of market ideology made grand claims for their beliefs. The medicine of the markets had at last overturned the failings of post-war welfare capitalism. The rise of finance to a more central place in the economy had lowered financial risk.

…

As David Moss described it, ‘The rise of these massive [American banking] institutions represented a profound change in our financial system and a powerful new source of systemic risk.’251 Far from improving the efficiency with which resources were allocated, as banking executives liked to claim, ballooning levels of liquidity, fed by more and more complex forms of financial innovation, merely fuelled a series of unsustainable financial and asset bubbles. While it was the role of government to put a cap on risk, a fourth mechanism then came into play. In more equal societies, the financial sector is more circumscribed and much less able to capture regulators and politicians.

…

But gradually other interest groups with legitimate claims for a share of the influence, from trades unions and town halls to manufacturers and small businesses, became at best marginalised, at worst, ignored. The only voices that came to count, it seemed, were those coming from corporate boardrooms and City offices. The Treasury itself became little more than an outpost of the City. A torrent of City lobbying secured Treasury support for the idea that financial innovation was good for the economy, that the City was a key generator of social value and should be the central engine of economic growth. As Manchester University academics have described it, ‘The new Treasury doctrine is the impossibility of upsetting the City.’260 The forces that drove economic instability were not external shocks that could not have been foreseen, but ones implicit to the great shifts in policy direction instituted from the late 1970s.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

They seem to be responsible for a slowdown in business investment as a first-order effect. The second-order implications are, we believe, even more troubling. The difficulty of financing modern business investment appears to be limiting equality of opportunity, reducing innovation, encouraging potentially unsound forms of financial innovation, and increasing risk in the banking system. The net result is a lower-growth economy that is more prone to financial crises. We think of advanced economies as sophisticated and clever places, but at an individual level the opposite is often true. A hunter-gatherer in the State of Nature needs to be smart, savvy, and constantly alert, but modern life is full of rules and systems that allow people to carry out important tasks thoughtlessly, carelessly, and even stupidly—and everything will still work.

…

The Friedman Doctrine, named after a 1970 essay by Milton Friedman that argues “the business of business is business” rather than serving the needs of stakeholders, began growing in popularity in the 1980s and now represents the mainstream position on corporate governance, especially in the United States and Britain. The epitome of value-based management is activist hedge funds, which buy into the stocks of companies with unimpressive share price performance and try to force management to improve it. Value-based management is another example of a financial innovation that cuts down on cognitive load. It replaces a messy, embedded, judgment-based system with a simpler set of rules and a more clearly divided set of responsibilities. It is an innovation that harnesses a powerful force: if managers own stock or options, then shareholders can rely on the managers’ self-interest to motivate them to improve company performance: the interests of the principal and agent are better aligned.

…

Others involve lightly regulated equity (such as equity crowdfunding) or unsecured bonds (such as minibonds). And still others involve using cryptocurrencies to finance new businesses or new organisational structures like special purpose acquisition companies. Some of these products look like unimpeachably valuable financial innovations, connecting willing providers of capital to willing firms. Others look more questionable. Some critics have claimed that some consumer bonds and crowdfunding issues offer bad risk–return trade-offs to investors too naive to know better. In addition, some crowdfunding leverages investors’ goodwill towards a particular type of business to provide capital at a submarket rate.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

If a London bank would pay more than the US government permitted, bring it on; if not, buyer beware. This was an early example of what has come to be called ‘financial innovation’, a term for the bewildering techniques developed in the City and on Wall Street to move money in more profitable ways. We tend to reflexively approve of innovation, since it brings us new medicines, machines and ideas. It is worth pausing, however, to ask what exactly financial innovation actually is. Unlike the kinds of innovation that have brought us the iPhone or antibiotics, a new financial technique doesn’t carve a new niche out of the natural world or find a cleverer way to exploit existing materials.

…

Boiled down to its essentials, finance always does the same thing: it takes money from people who have it but don’t need it, and gives it to people who need it and don’t have it, and earns a fee for its trouble. Governments try to regulate this process, to direct the funding towards the causes they care about, and financial institutions try to avoid those rules so they can direct the funding towards the causes that will pay the largest fees. That is financial innovation, which is simply an artificial way of exploiting artificial rules governing the artificial thing we call money, and normally involves finding mismatches between regulations in different countries. It’s clever, but it adds nothing to the sum of human achievement. And that’s how it worked with Eurodollars.

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INDEX A accountants regulators 185, 186 Suspicious Activity Reports 189 Acheson, Dean 58 Action Fraud 214, 218 Aliyev family 191–3 Aliyev, Nurali 199, 200, 202 Aliyev, Rakhat 198, 199, 200 Allard Prize 145 Aloi, Tony 229–30, 231 Altman, Oscar 52 Angola 155 Anguilla 198, 235, 243 Apple 223 Archbishop of Canterbury’s Faculty Office 186–8 Asquith, Lord Julian 234 Asquith, Raymond 159, 169, 173 Assad, Hafez al- 159 Assange, Julian 171 Assets Recovery Agency 204 Association of Accounting Technicians 135 Australia 19 visas 244 Austria 166, 170, 171 autonomy 31, 38, 57 Azerbaijan 191–3, 197 B BAE Systems 85–9 Ballester, Freddie 98–100, 104, 105, 114, 121 Bank of England 36–40 cultural uniformity 45–6 Eurodollars 45–7, 49, 50–1, 54–5, 58–9, 232 governors 32, 33, 36 and Midland Bank 42 Suez Crisis 44 banknotes 8 banks and money laundering 194 Suspicious Activity Reports 189–90 Baring, Evelyn, first Earl of Cromer 16, 32 Baring, George Rowland Stanley, third Earl of Cromer 32–3, 36, 39, 55, 232 Baring, Rowland, second Earl of Cromer 32 Barings Bank 57 Barker, Alison 183 Barkshire, John 34, 40, 229–31 BBC, Orwell statue 8 Bean, David 88 Bell, Geoffrey 45–6, 51 Bell, Lord 171 Bercow, John 163 Berry, Elspeth 138, 146–7 Betfair 115 Better Regulation Task Force 111 betting see gambling Betting and Gambling Council 119 Billion Bright Trading Limited 213 billionaires, and COVID-19 pandemic 58 Birnbaum, Eugene 54 Blair, Tony 109 blockchain 242, 243 Boeing 170 BOLSA (Bank of London and South America) 50, 57 Bolton, George 43, 50 Bossano, Joe 95, 96–7, 123, 124 Bretton Woods 30, 31 Brexit 12–13, 140, 142, 144, 248, 249 Bridgen, Andrew 140–1 British empire 18–20, 58 and City of London 30 British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association 142 British Syrian Society 159–60 British Ukrainian Society (BUS) 159–60, 172–3, 174 British Virgin Islands (BVI) 68–71, 74, 79–81, 91, 227 Firtash 161 Khassenov 209 shell companies 72–9, 81–5, 86–9, 90, 123, 124, 235, 238, 239, 240 Brompton Road Tube station 151–3, 164–5, 170, 172, 174, 176–7 Brown, Gordon 132 Brown, John 108, 109–10 Budapest Project 167–8, 169 Burma 20 Butler, Paul 71, 72–3, 75–6 butlers 4–6 Jeeves 6–7, 10–11 C Callaghan, James 36 Cambridge University 160–1, 162, 163, 169, 171–2, 237 Canada 19 visas 244 capital flows 31–2, 50, 51, 55, 59 Eurodollars 40–2, 44–57, 58–9, 232, 238 funk money 64–6, 78–9, 82, 208 capitalism 35 Cassidy, Rebecca 111–12, 113, 116–17, 119 Cayman Islands 233–5, 241, 243, 247 Ceylon 20 Chambers, Ajit 149–50, 151, 152, 153, 165, 176–7 Chandler, Victor 104–7, 108 Child & Child 192–3 China British investment in 19 cultural revolution 66 and Hong Kong 78, 82 money laundering 1–4 socialism 123 and Tanganyika 63 Church of England 186–8 Churchill, Winston 7, 21 City of London 29–30, 32, 57–8 Big Bang 56 cultural uniformity 32–4, 35–6 deregulation 56–7 Eurodollars 44–57, 58–9 financial innovation 48 and funk money 64, 65 Midland Bank 40–2 money laundering 182, 184 offshore finance 249 regulation 39–40 Scottish limited partnerships 137–9, 141, 142–3 and Suez Crisis 42–4 Clarke, Kenneth 240 Clinton, Bill 109, 121, 236 Cobbold, Cameron 33 Colston, Edward 7 Columbus, Christopher 69 communism 35 Tanganyika 62, 63 Coomes, Mr and Mrs 101 Coral 103, 107 Countrywide 193 COVID-19 pandemic 13, 15 and billionaires 58 Crimea 164 Cromer, Evelyn Baring, first Earl of 16, 32 Cromer, George Rowland Stanley Baring, third Earl of 32–3, 36, 39, 55, 232 Cromer, Rowland Baring, second Earl of 32 Crown Prosecution Service 204, 218 Cuban Missile Crisis 52 Curaçao 71–2, 198 Cyprus 19 Firtash 166 D Daily Telegraph 108 Danske Bank 144–5 Davies, Philip 115 defence against money laundering (DAML) SARs 195 Department for Culture, Media and Sport 110 Deripaska, Oleg 226 DF Foundation 161 dirty money see money laundering dollars 41–2, 44, 48 see also Eurodollars double taxation treaties 72, 75 E The Economist 151–2 Eden, Anthony 23, 24, 26 Edmonds, Tamlyn 219–20, 221, 222 Edmonds Marshall McMahon (EMM) 219–20, 225 Egypt, Suez Crisis 15–19, 20–7 Eisenhower, President 24 ELMER 195, 205 Envers 87, 88 estate agents 193 Suspicious Activity Reports 189 Eurobonds 45 Eurodollars 40–2, 44–57, 58–9, 232, 238 exchange rates 31–2, 38 F Fawcett, Millicent 8 FBI Budapest Project 168 Firtash 168–71, 200, 202 Federal Reserve 46, 48 Eurodollars 51, 53–4 Financial Action Task Force (FATF) 182–4 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 183, 185, 186 financial innovation 48 see also Eurodollars Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) 190, 195 Financial Security Index (Tax Justice Network) 235 Financial Times 38 Firtash, Dmitry 157–66, 171–6, 177, 181, 219, 227 Brompton Road Tube station 164–5, 170, 172, 174, 177 Cambridge University 160–1, 162, 163, 169, 171–2, 237 FBI case 168–71, 200, 202 Firtash, Lada 163, 172 fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBTs) 112 Fonseca, Ramon 78 Foreign Affairs Committee 166, 179–81, 248 Fortuna United LP 128–30 France Eurodollars 49 overseas territories 243 prosecutions 216 Suez Crisis 23–4 Franco, Francisco 93, 95 Franklin, Professor Simon 161 Fraser, Ian 128–9 Freud, Jane McAdam 165 Fry, Richard 29–30, 57 funk money 64–6 Hong Kong 78–9, 82 Kazakhstan 208 G gambling 10, 102–5 deregulation 107–14, 236–7 gambling addiction 111, 116– 20, 121, 124 Gibraltar 98–102, 104, 105–7, 113, 114–17, 122–4, 242–3 Gambling Commission 118, 119, 185 Gambling with Lives 118 Gamesys 120 Garcia, Joe 122–3 Gartcosh 125–6 gas 153–5, 168 Gazprom 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 161 Gazprombank 161 Germany, Eurodollars 49 ghost stations 149–53, 164–5 Gibraltar 91–8, 114–15, 122, 227, 235, 238, 241–3, 245 blockchain 242, 243 gambling 10, 98–102, 104, 105–7, 109, 110, 113, 114– 17, 119–20, 121–4, 242–3, 245 smuggling 92, 97 Global Witness 157–8, 169, 196, 198, 200, 205 golden visas 244–5 Goodman, Helen 172–3 Granovski, Vladimir 159 Greece financial crisis 31 visas 244 Green, Jeremy 57 Greenspan, Alan 46 Grogan, John 159, 160 Group DF 161 Grundy, Milton 233–4, 235–6 Guernsey 235 Guyana 19 H Hambro, Charles 49 Hambros Bank 57, 65 Hayek, Friedrich 35 Hayward, Mark 188 hedge funds Cayman Islands 234 and limited partnerships 138 Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs 185 Herald 125, 147 Hitler, Adolf 21 Hodge, Margaret 239–40, 241, 247–8 Hodivala, Jama 223 Home Office, UWOs 197 Hong Kong and British Virgin Islands 78–9, 82 Khassenov 208–9, 211–12, 213, 220 Horrocks, Ian 210, 214–15, 218, 219, 220, 221 HSBC 189, 193 Hungary 166, 167–8, 169 Hunte, Lewis 76, 77 Huntington, Earl of 107 I India 19, 20 Institute of Chartered Accountants 194–5 Intelligence and Security Committee 175–6, 201 international business companies (IBCs) 77–8, 83–4 International Centres Forum 90 Ireland betting duty 106 petrol taxes 47, 54, 56, 236 Isle of Man 235, 243 Isola, Albert 241–2 Israel, Suez Crisis 23–4 Italy, visas 244 J Jaspert, Augustus James Ulysses 80–1 Jeeves, Reginald 6–7, 9, 11, 59, 101, 110–11, 232, 246 Jersey 235 Johnson, Boris Brexit campaign 225 London Underground 149–50, 151 and Russian influence in UK 175 Jowell, Tessa 110 Justice Committee 225 K Kazakhstan 198–201, 207, 208 Kennedy, John F. 63 Kenya 19, 61 Keynes, John Maynard 35 Khassenov, Argyn 207–15 private prosecution 215, 219– 23, 226 Kleinwort Benson 64 Kroll 126, 127, 128 Kulich, Aleksandr 209, 213 Kulich, Andrey 208–9, 210, 211, 213–14, 220, 221–3, 226 L Ladbrokes 103, 104, 107, 115 Laird, Judge Francis 220, 221 Lancet 124 Lasser Bros 229 Law Commission 190–1 Law Society of Scotland 136–7 lawyers 11–12 private prosecutions 223–4 regulators 185 Suspicious Activity Reports 188–9 Leask, David 125–6, 128, 131, 134, 135, 136, 144, 147 Lebedev, Yevgeny 248 legislative reform orders (LROs) 139–40 Levin, Carl 247 Li Ka-Shing 78–9 limited partnerships (LPs) 138, 143–4, 146–7 Northern Ireland 146 private fund limited partnerships 142, 145–6 Scottish limited partnerships 128–45, 227, 245, 246 London Kleptocracy Tours 162–3, 196 London Underground 149–51 Brompton Road Tube station 151–3, 164–5, 170, 172, 174, 176–7 M McMafia 179, 196, 214 Macmillan, Harold 20, 23 Malaya 19, 20 Malone, Jeff 17–18, 25–6, 34–5 Malta 242 Marx, Karl 35 May, Theresa 182 Mercantile House 229 merchant banks 36, 44 Metcalf, David 244 Micky Blue Eyes 230–1 Midland Bank 40–2, 44, 45, 51–2, 57 Migration Advisory Committee 244 Mills, Nigel 203 Ministry of Defence Brompton Road Tube station 152, 164–5, 172 Gibraltar 94–5, 114–15 Mishcon de Reya 199, 201 Mitchell, Andrew 239–40, 241, 247–8 Mkapa, Benjamin 89 Mogilevich, Semyon 157, 158, 167–8, 169 Moldova 126–7, 128, 129, 131, 132, 142, 143, 147 money laundering 1–4, 9, 179– 82, 196–8, 203–6, 246 Aliyev family 191–3 Cayman Islands 247 Financial Action Task Force 182–4 limited partnerships 128–45, 146, 245 Mogilevich 167–8 Nazarbayeva case 198–203 Panama Papers 191–2 UK regulation 184–96 Moneyland (Bullough) 30, 45, 130 Montado, Ernest 94, 95 Montegriffo, Peter 114 Moscow Narodny Bank (MNB) 41 Mossack Fonseca 78, 83, 191 Mullin, Roger 132, 134–6, 138– 42, 143–4 Mynors, Humphrey 39 N Nasser, Gamal Abdel 22, 23 National Crime Agency (NCA) 197, 201–4, 241 and Khassenov 214 Nazarbayeva case 199–201, 202, 203 National Lottery 103–4 Nazarbayev family 208 Nazarbayev, Nursultan 198, 201 Nazarbayeva, Dariga 198, 199, 200, 202 Ndibe, Okey 10 Netherlands 190 New Deal 31, 56 New York 229–31 New York Times 53, 89–90 New Zealand 19 Nigeria 155 healthcare 9–10 Nixon, Richard 55 Noriega, Manuel 78 Northern Ireland limited partnerships 146 petrol taxes 47, 54, 56, 236 notaries 187–8 Noyes, James 120 Nurse, Gwyneth 141–2, 143 Nyerere, Julius 62–3, 85, 89–90 O O’Brien, Leslie 54 Ogle, Vanessa 64 online gambling 114–17, 119– 20, 124 Only When I Larf 212 Orange Revolution 155–7, 159 Orban, Victor 169 Ormerod, David 191 Orwell, George 8 overseas territories 235, 239–41, 243, 245 see also British Virgin Islands; Cayman Islands; Gibraltar Owens, Lynne 201 P Panama 78, 82, 240 Panama Papers 83, 191–2 partnerships 132 see also limited partnerships Party Gaming 114, 121–2 Patel, Priti 181 Peel, Robert 7–8 Petfre 120 Philip, Prince 61, 161, 162, 169 police 216–17 and financial crime 218, 219– 20, 246 funding 224 Gartcosh 125–6 Hungary 168 and Khassenov 214, 219–20 and London Kleptocracy Tours 163 and private sector 202 and Scottish limited partnerships 126, 144, 146, 246 Portugal, visas 244 private equity, and limited partnerships 137–9, 142 private fund limited partnerships (PFLPs) 142, 145–6 private prosecutions 215–19, 223–8 Khassenov 215, 219–23, 226 problem gamblers 111, 116–20, 121, 124 Pryor, Henry 195 Public Accounts Committee 248 Purplebricks 193 Putin, Vladimir 155 and Ukraine 156, 164, 166 R Racing Post 106 Rankin, Ian 125, 134 Reagan, Ronald 56 Red Diamond Trading Limited 86, 88 Regulatory Reform Committee 139, 141–2 Rhodes, Cecil 7, 18–19 Riegels, Colin 71 Riegels, Michael in British Virgin Islands 68, 71, 73–4, 75, 76, 77, 78, 82, 83–5 in Tanzania 61–2, 63, 65–7, 85 and Tanzania radar contract 89 Riegels, Norma 67, 68, 73, 75, 84–5 Risby, Lord 159–60, 163–4, 173 Rock Turf Accountants 98, 100–1 RosUkrEnergo (RUE) 155, 156–7, 158, 169 Rothermere, Viscount 32 Royal Navy, Gibraltar 92, 93, 94–5 Russia money in UK 175–6, 179, 182, 222 organised crime 167 and Ukraine 154, 155, 164 S Saudi Arabia, and BAE Systems 87, 90 Scotland, police force 246 Scotsman 125 Scottish limited partnerships (SLPs) 128–45, 227, 245, 246 Scottish National Party 131–2 Scottish private fund limited partnerships 146 Scottish Property Federation 136, 142 Serious Fraud Office (SFO) 206 and BAE Systems 88–9, 90 Seychelles 128–9 Sharif, Khalid Mohammed 192–3 Shaw, David 84 shell companies 72–84, 86–9, 90, 123, 124, 130–1, 196, 237, 239–40 Scottish limited partnerships 128–32 Shetler-Jones, Robert 159, 171, 175 Shonfield, Andrew 37–9, 59 Shor, Ilan 127, 128 Short, Clare 86 Skripal, Sergei 179 Smith, Richard 128–9, 133–4 Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) 192–3 Soviet Union 153 see also Kazakhstan; Russia; Ukraine Spain, and Gibraltar 93, 95, 97–8, 124 Spink, Mike 162, 165 sportsbook.com 114 Spring, Richard (Lord Risby) 159–60, 163–4, 173 Standard Chartered 209, 210, 211–12, 220 Stark, Pete 75 sterling 30, 42–3 The Sting 212 Stoutt, Lavity 75, 76 Suez Crisis 15–19, 20–7, 34–5, 42–4, 58, 249 Suez Veterans’ Association (SVA) 15, 16–18, 22, 24, 25–6 suicides, and gambling addiction 118 surveillance capitalism 117 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) 2–4, 187–91, 192, 193, 194 ELMER 195, 205 Switzerland Eurodollars 49 Firtash 166 T Tanchel, Vivienne 225–6 Tanganyika 61–3 Tanzania 63, 65–7, 85 corruption 89–90 radar contract 85–9 tax havens 72, 84 see also British Virgin Islands; Cayman Islands; Curaçao Tax Justice Network (TJN) 235 taxation treaties 71–2, 75 Thank You, Jeeves (Wodehouse) 110–11 Thatcher, Margaret 56 Thompson, Mark 181, 206 The Times 131, 140 Tortola 69 Trainspotting 128 Transparency International 185, 194, 196 Transport for London (TfL) 149 Traynor, Brian 99–100 Treasury and Bank of England 37–8 limited partnerships 136, 139, 141–2, 143 Treaty of Utrecht 93 Tube see London Underground Turpin, Neil 187, 188 U UK Finance 190 Ukraine 131, 170, 174–5 British Ukrainian Society 159–60 corruption 155, 164 gas 153–5, 156–7, 158, 168 Orange Revolution 155–7, 159 unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) 196–202, 203–4 United Nations General Assembly, Suez Crisis 43 United States and BAE Systems 87 and British Virgin Islands 78, 82 and Cayman Islands 247 Eurodollars 51, 52, 55 financial deregulation 56–7 and Firtash 166, 168–71, 176, 177 gambling 102, 120–2, 236 and Gibraltar 96 and money laundering 189, 191, 193 New Deal 31, 56 offshore business 71–2, 73, 74–5 and organised crime 166–71 and Panama 78 Regulation Q 41, 56 Suez Crisis 24–5, 43–4 and Tanganyika 63 and Ukraine 164 visas 244 United States Virgin Islands (USVI) 70 V Venezuela 155 Vicious Games (Cassidy) 111– 12, 113, 116–17, 119 Virgin Islands 69, 70 see also British Virgin Islands visas 244–5 Vithlani, Shailesh 85–8 Volcker, Paul 46 W Walker, David 50–1 Wall Street Journal 168–9 Wallace, Ben 194, 196 Washington, George 63 welfare state 31, 56 Westwood, Neville 71, 73 Wheatley, Sowande 240 whistle-blowers 246–7 Whittingdale, John 173–4 Wilkinson, Howard 145 William Hill 103, 107, 108, 115 Without the Option (Wodehouse) 6–7 Wodehouse, P.

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Still, it’s not as though market crashes or speculative bubbles are a new phenomenon — after all, the largest market collapse in modern times occurred in 1929, long before derivatives became important. What’s more, for the past forty years, essentially the period over which financial innovation has been most important, the financial services sector has buoyed Western economies. In the United States, for instance, the financial services industry has grown six times faster than the economy as a whole. This rapid growth has occurred at the same time that other industries, such as manufacturing, have either declined or grown much more slowly. Financial innovation, like other technological innovation, has thus played a major role in buoying the U.S. and other Western economies over the past three decades.

…

The final part of the book will show how models have continued to evolve outside of mainstream finance, as physicists have imported newer and more sophisticated ideas to finance and economics, identifying the problems with our current models and figuring out how to improve them. Black was instrumental in producing a new status quo on Wall Street, but his ideas were just the beginning of the era of financial innovation. 6 The Prediction Company WHEN THE SANTA FE TRAIL was first pioneered in 1822, it stretched from the westernmost edge of the United States — Independence, Missouri — through Comanche territory and into the then-Mexican state of Nuevo Mexico. From there it passed over the high plains of what is now eastern Colorado and then took the Glorieta Pass through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost subrange of the Rockies.

…

But the process that I have described in this book is the best way we have ever come up with for addressing our biggest challenges. We shouldn’t abandon it here. There’s a third criticism of financial modeling that one sometimes hears. This one is a little deeper. It has been made most influentially by Warren Buffett, who has famously warned of “geeks bearing formulas.” This view has it that financial innovation is a dangerous thing because it makes financial markets inherently riskier. The excesses of the 2000s that led to the recent crash were enabled by physicists and mathematicians who didn’t understand the real-world consequences of what they were doing, and by profit-hungry banks that let these quants run wild.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

Chapter 7 Private digital currency Digital currencies issued by Big Tech firms would undoubtedly have some advantages relative to fiat currencies. — Gita Gopinath, IMF chief economist, Financial Times (7 January 2020) It is now a quarter of a century since a pamphlet I picked up at the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (CSFI) changed my view on the provision of currencies. It was provocatively titled ‘The IBM dollar’ and was written by the noted lateral thinker Edward de Bono. His thesis on the future of money, later reprinted in David Boyle’s superb collection The Money Changers (de Bono 2002), was that technological developments in computers, communications and cryptography (my paraphrasing) would reduce the cost of creating money to the point where it would make sense for private organizations to make their own.

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However accurate this scenario may or may not be, the virtual money debate is no longer about e-money versus digital cash, hash tables versus smart chips or proof of work versus proof of stake. It is all about global power. As a historian, it is natural for Ferguson to remind us that the countries which have forged the path in financial innovation have led in every other way, too (Ferguson 2019). He cites Renaissance Italy, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Republic and the British Empire, all the way through to post-1930s America. He goes on to note that once a country loses that financial leadership, it loses its place as a global hegemon.

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Glossary ACU: alternative currency unit AI: artificial intelligence AML: Anti-Money Laundering AMLDV: Anti-Money Laundering Directive API: application programming interface BIS: Bank for International Settlements BRI: Belt and Road Initiative (China) BSA: Bank Secrecy Act (United States) CBDC: central bank digital currency CDD: customer due diligence CDP: collateralized debt position CFA: Franc of the Financial Community of Africa CFSI: Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payment System CPS: Crime Pays System CTF: counter-terrorist financing DCA: digital currency area DCEP: Digital Currency/Electronic Payment DeFi: decentralized finance ECB: European Central Bank ECU: European Currency Unit ELMI: Electronic Money Institution ESL: enterprise shared ledger FinCEN: Financial Crimes Enforcement Network FINMA: Financial Market Supervisory Authority ICO: initial coin offering IMF: International Monetary Fund IMFS: International Monetary and Financial System JPMC: JPMorgan Chase SHC: synthetic hegemonic currency HMRC: Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs KYC: Know Your Customer KYZ: Known-bY-Zuck NFC: near-field communication NCSC: National Cyber Security Centre NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology OFAC: Office of Foreign Assets Control PBoC: People’s Bank of China PEPSI: Pan-European Payment System Initiative PIN: personal identification number Pseudonym: a persistent alias to an identity PQC: post-quantum cryptography SDR: special drawing right SEC: Securities and Exchange Commission SGA (Saga): a partially collateralized stablecoin SHC: synthetic hegemonic currency Sibos: The annual SWIFT banking conference SIM: subscriber identification module, the chip inside a digital mobile phone that links the device to a user SMS: short message service (the GSM text message service) SWIFT: Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications USSD: Unstructured Supplementary Service Data Bibliography Adrian, T., and T.

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America) by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business logic, card file, central bank independence, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, p-value, pattern recognition, post-Fordism, profit maximization, profit motive, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technological determinism, technology bubble, the built environment, transaction costs, union organizing, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

For Great Society policymakers and promoters, the problems of inequality were framed as a problem of credit access rather than job access. More credit, and not higher wages, would be enough to solve the problems of America’s cities. Toward that end, federal policy fashioned the financial innovation that made possible America’s debt explosion—the asset-backed security—that expanded well beyond its original purpose. Solving the urban crisis would require solving the housing crisis. But to fix the housing crisis, radical financial innovation would have to occur to maintain the capital flows into mortgages. As the urban riots became the urban crisis, however, mortgage markets had a crisis of their own. American mortgage markets had abruptly frozen—the so-called Credit Crunch of 1966—as investors rapidly withdrew their deposits from banks and put their money in the securities markets.

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As automobile production exploded in the 1920s, so too did the need for automobile financing for both consumers and dealers alike.61 The capital requirements of more expensive, mass-produced goods led retailers and entrepreneurs to explore new options in consumer finance and, in the process of meeting their own immediate needs, created a novel financial institution that was neither an informal lender nor a commercial bank—the finance company. Modern, pervasive installment credit found its institutional bedrock in the financial innovation of the early automobile industry. The financial infrastructure of installment credit grew out of the very requirements of heavy capital manufacturing for mass production, but once created, finance companies found other markets outside of the automobile industry. They turned to less capital-intensive retail sectors, which enabled the expansion of installment credit throughout the American economy.

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Moving beyond the resale networks of the mid-twentieth century, new ways to sell debt anonymously on national and even international capital markets inaugurated a new relationship between consumer credit and investor capital. In an insecure world, unsecured debt came of age. Mortgage-backed Securities and the Great Society The financial innovation that ultimately allowed capital markets to directly fund any form of debt began with the federal government, not business. In the late 1960s, the federal government sought a way to 224 CHAPTER SEVEN channel capital into America’s rioting cities. Capital would make possible the Great Society ambitions of saving America’s cities and the newly rising pension funds needed to invest.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future by Paul Krugman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, frictionless, frictionless market, fudge factor, full employment, green new deal, Growth in a Time of Debt, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, New Urbanism, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Seymour Hersh, stock buybacks, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, universal basic income, very high income, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population

Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool, which acts as a bank for the state’s school districts, was supposed to be risk-free; it wasn’t (and now schools don’t have the money to pay teachers). How did things get so opaque? The answer is “financial innovation”—two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors’ hearts. O.K., to be fair, some kinds of financial innovation are good. I don’t want to go back to the days when checking accounts didn’t pay interest and you couldn’t withdraw cash on weekends. But the innovations of recent years—the alphabet soup of C.D.O.s and S.I.V.s, R.M.B.S., and A.B.C.P.

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By 2005 or so I and many (but not enough) others had grown concerned about what looked like an immense housing bubble. It seemed obvious that bad things would happen when that bubble burst. As it turned out, it was far worse than almost anyone realized. Years of financial deregulation and financial “innovation” (which often amounted to finding ways to evade regulation) had created a banking system that was, in a modern, high-tech way, just as vulnerable to panics as the banking system on the eve of the Great Depression. And the panic came. The columns in this section describe the growing fear I and others felt that something was going terribly wrong, and the wall of misconception we had to climb when the things we feared might happen, did.

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We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime crisis. And free-market orthodoxy dies hard. Just a few weeks ago Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, admitted to Fortune magazine that financial innovation got ahead of regulation—but added, “I don’t think we’d want it the other way around.” Is that your final answer, Mr. Secretary? Now, Mr. Paulson’s new proposal to help borrowers renegotiate their mortgage payments and avoid foreclosure sounds in principle like a good idea (although we have yet to hear any details).

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

This is not inherently impossible, but it is certainly not what most supporters of government lending programs propose, expect, or support. The second way to address the problem is by devising new types of lending. Financial innovation has been something of a dirty word since the financial crisis—former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker went so far as to say the only beneficial financial innovation of the decades prior to the financial crisis was the automated teller machine—but, in fact, lenders have over the years come up with novel ways to use at least some types of intangible assets as security. One recent working paper (Mann 2014) suggests that 16 percent of patents registered at the US Patent and Trademark Office have been pledged as collateral at some point.

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A couple of studies have looked at the impact of US banking deregulation on investment in innovation: one showed that the deregulation of interstate banking saw an increase in lending to innovating companies (based on the number and quality of their patents), implying that greater competition pushes banks to be more willing to lend to businesses making (at least one type of) intangible investment (Amore, Schneider, and Zaldokas 2012). There are also a growing number of specific financial innovations focused on lending against intangibles. When David Bowie died in 2016, there were plenty of tributes to his musical innovations, but rather fewer to the contribution he made to intangible finance by raising a $55 million bond against his future royalties. The governments of Singapore and Malaysia (working together with UK organizations such as the Intellectual Property Office), for example, have begun programs to subsidize or guarantee bank loans against intellectual property, in the hope that these subsidies will increase the availability of intangible-backed loans.

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We might speculate that the reason VCs can seem like a clique is not because the venture capitalists are unusually bad or cliquish people, but because the underlying model of the VC business thrives on dense social networks, which will always tend to gravitate to cliquishness in the absence of countervailing effort, and perhaps even then. What Venture Capital Can’t Do So there is a strong case for saying that venture capital is well suited to investing in intangible-rich businesses and should be rightly held up as a positive type of financial innovation. But VC is not a panacea for business investment, and on its own VC will struggle to solve the problem of how to finance the capital development of an intangible economy. There are three problems that face VC firms and VC-backed companies, some of which arise from the nature of intangible investments themselves.

Barometer of Fear: An Insider's Account of Rogue Trading and the Greatest Banking Scandal in History by Alexis Stenfors

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, game design, Gordon Gekko, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, London Interbank Offered Rate, loss aversion, mental accounting, millennium bug, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Rubik’s Cube, Snapchat, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, work culture , Y2K

In September 2009, Adair Turner, the chairman of the FSA at the time, delivered a speech in London that went on to be cited frequently in the British media.16 He was critical towards the City and the role banks had played in the run-up to the financial crisis. ‘Not all financial innovation is valuable, not all trading plays a useful role, and a bigger financial system is not necessarily a better one,’ he said. ‘There are good reasons for believing that the financial industry, more than any other sector of the economy, has an ability to generate unnecessary demand for its own services – that more trading and more financial innovation can under some circumstances create harmful volatility against which customers have to hedge, creating more demand for trading liquidity and innovative products.’

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From a personal perspective, the global financial crisis also acted as a trigger point in revealing the wider implications of LIBOR. The STIRT desks at the banks had not been particularly glamorous before 2007. We traded a range of instruments that were important, but not interesting and complex enough to represent the forefront of financial innovation. The turnover in OISs, FRAs, IRSs (interest rate swaps), CRSs (cross-currency basis swaps) and FX swaps, among others, was enormous. However, options, long-end interest rate swaps and structured products enjoyed considerably more prestige. The crisis turned everything upside down. Suddenly, the spotlight fell on us.

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Opponents raised concerns surrounding the possible inflationary effects caused by excessive lending by banks, the weakening role of the central bank in controlling the monetary system,9 the difficulties for smaller banks of competing with the new ‘universal’ banks, and the Eurocurrency market’s destabilising impact on exchange rates. Some argued that the market had created a set of semi-independent international interest rates over which no single country or institution had control.10 Questions were also asked about the vulnerability of domestic banks as a result of the opaqueness of the new financial innovations and whether and how they should be regulated. In fact, the arguments used back then were surprisingly similar to some of those used during and after the financial crisis of 2007–08. Banks were seen as having lent recklessly. Banks had created financial instruments that hardly anybody understood.

House of Debt: How They (And You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It From Happening Again by Atif Mian, Amir Sufi

Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, break the buck, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, debt deflation, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, financial innovation, full employment, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, paradox of thrift, quantitative easing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, school choice, seminal paper, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the payments system, the scientific method, tulip mania, young professional, zero-sum game

In contrast, if the investors are equity investors, meaning that they share the profits of the business, they will have a strong incentive to detect theft. Debt convinces investors that they don’t have to worry about fraud because their senior claim on the asset protects them. In a world of neglected risks, financial innovation should be viewed with some degree of skepticism. If investors systematically ignore certain outcomes, financial innovation may just be secret code for bankers trying to fool investors into buying securities that look safe but are actually extremely vulnerable. * * * In a cruel twist of irony, Kindleberger passed away in 2003 at the age of ninety-two, just as the mortgage-credit boom was starting.

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In our research, we directly linked these two patterns by showing that the rate of securitization was much stronger in low credit-quality zip codes compared to high credit-quality zip codes. Securitization transformed global capital inflows into a wild expansion of mortgage credit to marginal borrowers. But it was only possible if the lenders were sure their funds were protected. Manufacturing Safe Debt A cynical view of financial innovation sees it merely as bankers fooling investors into buying very risky securities that are passed off as safe. There is substantial research demonstrating that this is exactly what private-label securitization was during the housing boom. Josh Coval, Jakub Jurek, and Erik Stafford show that when investors buying mortgage-backed securities made small mistakes in assessing their vulnerability, securitization enabled banks to amplify the effect of these mistakes.

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This can be confirmed by noting that 100 × $125,000 = $12.5 million. 10. See, for example, Edward Glaeser, Joshua Gottlieb, and Joseph Gyourko, “Can Cheap Credit Explain the Housing Boom?” (working paper no. 16230, NBER, July 2010). 11. Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny, “Neglected Risks, Financial Innovation, and Financial Fragility,” Journal of Financial Economics 104 (2012): 452–68. 12. Solow, foreword to Manias, Panics and Crashes. 13. Jon Hilsenrath, “A 91-Year-Old Who Foresaw Selloff is ‘Dubious’ of Stock-Market Rally,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2002. Chapter Nine 1.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All by Costas Lapavitsas

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, false flag, financial deregulation, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, Flash crash, full employment, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, global village, High speed trading, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market bubble, means of production, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pensions crisis, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Simon Kuznets, special drawing rights, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, union organizing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

The bulk of Minsky’s output is concerned with developing his path-breaking treatment of financial instability that postulated destabilizing balance sheet behaviour by large capitalist enterprises over the cycle as optimism became increasingly unbridled and led to excessive debt accumulation.49 Minsky’s empirical knowledge of the US financial system also made him aware of the risks of financial innovation, including securitization. However, there is little discussion in his work of the long-term balance between finance and the rest of the economy. To be precise, there are brief references to ‘money manager capitalism’ in some very late work.50 Nonetheless, the characteristic features and broader implications of ‘money manager capitalism’ were not examined in depth by Minsky.

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Note that Robin Blackburn was one of the first Anglo-Saxon Marxists systematically to deploy the term financialization and to examine it in relation to the rise of pension funds. For Blackburn, functioning capitalists have come to terms with institutional investors accepting shareholder value. Power has been devolved to the ‘shady’ areas of the financial system, partly through financial innovation. See Robin Blackburn, Banking on Death, or Investing in Life: The History and Future of Pensions, London: Verso, 2002; and Robin Blackburn, ‘Finance and the Fourth Dimension’, New Left Review 39, 2006, pp. 39–70. 63 Paul Langley, The Everyday Life of Global Finance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; Paul Langley, ‘Financialization and the Consumer Credit Boom’, Competition and Change 12:2, pp. 133–47, 2008. 64 Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002; Michael Pryke and Paul du Gay, ‘Take an Issue: Cultural Economy and Finance’, Economy and Society 36:3, 2007. 65 Manuel B.

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When the bubble of 1999–2000 burst, the US Federal Reserve drastically loosened monetary policy. Official interest rates were kept at close to 1 percent during 2002–2003, promoting extraordinary activity in the US housing market. Moreover, private US banks took advantage of low interest rates to engage in financial innovation – above all, in securitization – thus feeding financial expansion. The real estate bubble in the US effectively came to an end in 2006 but booming conditions in the financial markets lasted until the summer of 2007. The bubble kept getting bigger after 2004, despite US interest rates beginning to rise, as the US received capital inflows from developing countries expanding dollar reserves.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets, ed. William N. Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, 225–38. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Narron, James, and David Skeie. 2013. “Crisis Chronicles: Tulip Mania, 1633–37.” Ritholz, September 22, https://ritholtz.com/2013/09/crisis-chronicles-tulip-mania-1633-37/. Nath, Virendra. 2015. Out of Aces? Fifty Steps to Financial Acuity. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris. Neal, Larry. 2005. “Venture Shares and the Dutch East India Company.” In The Origins of Value: The Financial Innovations That Created Modern Capital Markets, ed.

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They may reflect increasingly profitable opportunities. Were the rapid stock price increase and subsequent collapse of the Mississippi Company and the South Sea Company true bubbles? Again, Garber disputes this characterization, as does the historian Francois Velde.31 According to Garber, Law had a plan to revitalize the French economy through financial innovation and reform. As Law gained more power, his chances of economic success grew. The decline in the Mississippi Company share price coincided with the ascension of his enemies, who were bent on dismantling the company. Velde contrasts the common English name of the episode, the Mississippi Bubble, with the original French name, le système de Law.

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So, what I often say is get a financial adviser and get one that good people recommend. They generally are helpful.”100 The future of investments may look different from the past as new financial instruments and products are developed. “I think also that the Perfect Portfolio would involve some financial innovations. For example, I have been advocating for years now that governments issue GDP [gross domestic product]-linked bonds,”101 an idea that he has had since the early 1990s. Shiller elaborated, “The simplest GDP-linked bond—my work with Mark Kamstra at York University—is what we call a trill. It’s just a share in GDP.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin. SOME PEOPLE LOOK at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong.

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We could have a much simpler tax system without all the distortions—a society where those who clip coupons for a living pay the same taxes as someone with the same income who works in a factory; where someone who earns his income from saving companies pays the same tax as a doctor who makes the income by saving lives; where someone who earns his income from financial innovations pays the same taxes as a someone who does research to create real innovations that transform our economy and society. We could have a tax system that encourages good things like hard work and thrift and discourages bad things, like rent seeking, gambling, financial speculation, and pollution.

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Does he know that prior to these “reforms,” the U.S. had not had a financial crisis—now a regular occurrence around the world—for a half-century, and that deregulation led to a bloated financial sector that attracted many talented young people who otherwise might have devoted their careers to more productive activities? Their financial innovations made them extremely rich but brought America and the global economy to the brink of ruin. Australia’s public services are the envy of the world. Its health care system delivers better outcomes than that of the U.S., at a fraction of the cost. It has an income-contingent education-loan program that permits borrowers to spread their repayments over more years if necessary, and in which, if their income turns out to be particularly low (perhaps because they chose important but low-paying jobs, say, in education or religion), the government forgives some of the debt.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The act, although anticompetitive and even inefficient, was a follow-through of Brandeis and Roosevelt’s desire to keep banks from getting too powerful. The act reinforced the long-held policy of the government stepping in to halt the natural movement of banks toward conglomeration. These hard-line rules stifled financial innovation and banking efficiency, but that was a tradeoff policymakers were willing to make to protect community banks and the public from too much bank power. Because the economy was booming, neither the government nor the banking industry agitated for a change of policy. That is, until the banking world was transformed in the 1970s.

…

After years of operating a safe and boring model dictated by the regulations imposed during the New Deal, the model began to fall apart. Unit banking and the restrictions and prohibitions of the fifty years following the Great Depression had allowed banks to profit modestly by keeping their balance sheets focused on deposits and loans. But suddenly, technological advances, financial innovation, capital markets, and commercial paper markets started to offer safe and enticing alternatives to banks. Banks started hemorrhaging customers, a process called disintermediation, which means cutting out the middleman. Deposits went directly to high-yield markets and sidestepped highly regulated banks.99 Concerns about banks’ waning profitability led to growing pressure on the government to deregulate banks and allow them to compete more freely with other institutions.

…

Paul Tucker, “Regimes for Handling Bank Failures—Redrawing the Banking Social Contract,” remarks, British Bankers’ Association Annual International Banking Conference “Restoring Confidence—Moving Forward,” London, June 30, 2009, accessed January 18, 2015, www.bis.org/review/r090708d.pdf. 21. Gary Gorton, “Slapped in the Face by the Invisible Hand: Banking and the Panic of 2007,” conference, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s 2009 Financial Markets Conference: Financial Innovation and Crisis, May 9, 2009, accessed March 13, 2015, www.frbatlanta.org/news/conferences/09-financial_markets_agenda.cfm. 22. See “Adding Up the Government’s Total Bailout Tab,” New York Times, July 24, 2011, accessed March 13, 2015, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/02/04/business/20090205-bailout-totals-graphic.html?

Derivatives Markets by David Goldenberg

Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, fudge factor, implied volatility, incomplete markets, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, law of one price, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, random walk, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, time value of money, transaction costs, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

So no matter what state of the world prevails, you will end up having to buy the underlying commodity for $E. But that is exactly what a long forward contract is; the obligation to buy the underlying commodity for $E, no matter what happens at time T. 11.8 FINANCIAL INNOVATION USING EUROPEAN PUT-CALL PARITY 11.8.1 Generalized Forward Contracts Using these ideas linking forward contracts to European puts and calls, we can do a little financial innovation. When you take a long position in a ‘normal’ forward contract, the forward price must equal Ft,T=erτSt in order to avoid arbitrage. There is no up-front payment required because, at this forward price, the current value of the forward contract to all longs and shorts is zero.

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increment of ABM process 555; shifted arithmetic Brownian motion (ABM) model of prices 541–2; reduced process 570; stochastic differential equations (SDEs) 553, 559, 562–3, 564, 566, 567–8, 570, 571, 583; stochastic integral equations (SIEs) 559, 560, 561, 564, 565–6, 567; stochastic processes 540–1, 543, 562, 587, 588; transition density function for shifted arithmetic Brownian motion 545–6; Wiener measure (and process) 540–1 option sellers 328 option trading strategies 345–67, 415–34; basic (naked) strategies 347–63; ‘calling away’ of stock 422; concept checks: covered call strategies, choice of 426; solution to 434; covered call write, upside potential of 422; solution to 433; cushioning calls 422; In-the-Money covered call writes 421; solution to 433; market for call options, dealing with profit potential and 354; solution to 367; payout present value on longing zero-coupon riskless bond 362; solution to 367; positions taken, definition of risk relative to 427; profit diagram for long call option, working on 418; rationalization of profits, short call positions 357; stock price fluctuations, dealing with 353; solution to 366–7; upside volatility in short positions, dealing with 359; covered call hedging strategy 419–27; economic interpretation of 426–7; covered call writes, types of 420–6; covered calls and protective put strategies 419; diversification, maximum effect of 419–20; Dollar Returns, percentage rates of 366; economic characteristics 358; European Put-Call Parity 416, 417, 418, 419, 426, 429; exercises for learning development of 364–6, 431–3; finite-maturity financial instruments, options as 354; generation of synthetic option strategies from European Put-Call Parity 416–18; In-the-Money covered call writes 421–4; key concepts 364, 431; long a European call option on the underlying 351–5; economic characteristics 353; long a European put option on the underlying 348, 357–9; economic characteristics 358; long a zero-coupon riskless bond and hold to maturity 348, 360–2; economic characteristic 361; long call positions, difference between long underlying positions and 354; long the underlying 347–9; economic characteristics 349; Merck stock price fluctuations 346–7; natural and synthetic strategies 416; natural stock, economic equivalence with synthetic stock 418; Out-of-the-Money covered call writes 424–6; potential price paths 346–7; profit diagrams 346–7; protective put hedging strategy 427–30; economic interpretation of 429–30; insurance, puts as 427–9; puts as insurance 427–9; short a European call option on the underlying 348, 355–7; economic characteristics 357; short a European put option on the underlying 348, 359–60; economic characteristics 360; short a zero-coupon riskless bond and hold to maturity 348, 362–3; economic characteristic 363; short the underlying 348, 349–51; economic characteristics 351; synthetic equivalents on basic (naked) strategies 416–18; synthetic strategies, natural strategies and 416 option valuation: binomial option pricing model (BOPM) 445–8; risk-neutral valuation 624–33; direct valuation by risk-averse investor 626–31; manipulations 624–6; for risk-neutral investors 631–3 options and options scenarios 323–6 Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) 328 options markets 323–44; American options 328; anticipation of selling 339; anticipatory buying 339–40; basic American call (put) option pricing model 332–4; buying back stock 339; CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) 324–5, 334; asked price entries 335, 336; bid entries 335, 336; equity option specifications 343; exchange-traded option contracts 325; last sale entries 335, 336; Merck call options and price quotes 334–7; mini equity option specifications 344; net entries 335, 336; open interest entries 335, 336; volume entries 335, 336; concept checks: individual equity options, product specifications for 326; solution to 342; mini equity options, product specifications for 326; solution to 342; MRK OV-E price quote 337; option positions 331; option sales 332; solution to 342; option’s rights 331; payoff diagram construction 338; put option positions 332; context in study of 326–7; decision-making, option concept in 324; delayed exercise premium 331, 337; European options 328; exercise price 328, 336; exercises for learning development of 341–2; exercising options 328; expiration date 336; expiration month code 336; financial engineering techniques 337–8; immediate exercise value 330; implicit short positions 340; importance of options 323–4; In-the-Money calls 337; insurance features, options and 327; intrinsic value 326, 330, 333, 337; key concepts 341; learning options, framework for 326–7; leverage, options and 327; liquidity option 333; long and short positions, identification of 339–40; long positions 339–40; long vs. short positions 339–40; maturity dates 328; moneyness 329; naked (unhedged) positions 327; non-simultaneous price quote problem 334–6; option buyers 328; option market premiums 328; option sellers 328; options and options scenarios 323–6; Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) 328; options embedded in ordinary securities 324; options in corporate finance 324; payoff and profit diagrams 326, 338; plain vanilla put and call options, definitions and terminology for 327–32; put and call options 323–5, 327, 328, 329, 338; puts and calls, infrastructure for understanding about 337–8; reading option price quotes 334–7; real asset options 324; short positions 339–40; short sales, covering of 339; speculation on option prices 327; standard equity option 336; standard stock option 334; strategic, option-like scenarios 324; strike price 328; strike price code 336; time premium 326, 330–1, 333, 337; underlying assets or scenarios 327, 334; identification of long and short positions in 339–40; see also binomial option pricing model (BOPM); equivalent martingale measures (EMMs); model-based option pricing (MBOP) in real time; rational option pricing (ROP) order execution 125–6; futures contract definition and 126 order submission 125–6 orders, types of 127–34 Out-of-the-Money covered call writes 424–6 over the counter (OTC): markets 12–13, 14, 17 over-the-counter (OTC): bilateral agreements 278 overall profits (and losses) 144, 150, 151, 153, 156, 157 overnight averages 11 par swap rate 294, 301 parameterization 454, 477–8, 502 partial equilibrium (PE) 453; models of, risk-neutral valuation and 614 participants in futures market 122–5 path structures: in binomial process 440–2, 442–4; multi-period BOPM model (N=3) 497; thinking of BOPM in terms of paths 493–9 paying fixed 293; in interest rate derivatives (IRDs) 278–9; and receiving floating in commodity forward contracts 276 payoff and profit: diagrams of 326, 338; difference between 66 payoff position with forward contracts 37 payoff to long forward position in IBM 40 payoff to short forward position in IBM 43 payoffs per share: to naked long forward contract 68–9; to naked long spot position 67, 68–9 perfect negative correlation 166 perfect positive correlation 609–11 performance bonds (margins) 144–5, 148 physical probability: measure of, martingale hypothesis for 530; risk-neutralization of 604 pit trading, order flow process and 136–9 plain vanilla interest-rate swaps 274; dealer intermediated swaps 284–93; non-dealer intermediated swaps 281–4 plain vanilla put and call options, definitions and terminology for 327–32 portfolio price dynamics, replication of 457 portfolio theory, hedging as 165–8 portfolio variance, calculation of 179–81 position accountability 214, 215, 228, 229 preference-free risk-neutral valuation 598, 600 present and future spot prices 20–3 present value (PV): valuation of forward contracts (assets with dividend yield) 94; valuation of forward contracts (assets without dividend yield) 69, 75 price contingent claims with unhedgeable risks 599–601 price paths: ending at specific terminal price, numbers of 442–4; numbers of 440–2 price quotes: in forward markets 9–11; in futures markets 17–19; in spot markets 6–7 pricing a swap 294 pricing by arbitrage and FTAP2 597–8 pricing currency forwards 105 pricing European options under shifted arithmetic Brownian motion (ABM) with no drift 542–51; Bachelier option pricing formula, derivation of 547–51; fundamental theorems of asset pricing (FTAP) 542–3; transition density functions 543–7 pricing foreign exchange forward contracts using no-arbitrage 106–7 pricing mechanism, risk-neutral valuation and 596 pricing options: at expiration (BOPM) 445–6; at time t=0 (BOPM) 446–8; tools for (MBOP) 448–53; relationships between tools 450–3 pricing states 509 pricing zero-coupon, unit discount bonds in continuous time 69–73 primitive Arrow-Debreu (AD) securities, option pricing and 508–14; concept check, pricing ADu(ω) and ADd(ω) 514; exercise 1, pricing B(0,1) 510; exercise 2, pricing ADu(ω) and ADd(ω) 511–14 probability density function 544 profit diagrams 346–7 protection, market orders with 127–9 protective put hedging strategy 427–30; economic interpretation of 429–30; insurance, puts as 427–9 put and call options 323–5, 327, 328, 329, 338; infrastructure for understanding about 337–8 puts as insurance 427–9 quality spreads 299 random variables 536 random walk model of prices 530–1 randomness, state of nature and 23 rate of return of risky asset over small time interval, components of 555–6 rational option pricing (ROP) 369–414; adjusted intrinsic value (AIV) for a European call, definition of 375–6; adjusted time premium (ATP) 397; basic European option pricing model, interpretation of 397–8; certainty equivalent (CE) cash flow 397; concept checks: adjusted intrinsic value (AIV) for calls, calculation of 413; solution to 413; adjusted intrinsic value (AIV) for puts, calculation of 381; solution to 413; directional trades and relative trades, difference between 372; dominance principle and value of European call option 376; solution to 413; exercise price of options, working with 391; forward contracts, overpaying on 403; generalized forward contracts, current value on 404; rational option pricing (ROP) or model-based option pricing (MBOP) 407; short stock position, risk management of 399; solution to 413–14; working from strategies to current costs and back 393; solution to 413; continuation region 385; convexity of option price 406; current costs and related strategies, technique of going back and forth between 393; directional trades 371–2; dominance principle 372, 373; implications of 374–88; equilibrium forward price 402; European Put-Call Parity, financial innovation with 401–5; European Put-Call Parity, implications of 394–400; American option pricing model, analogue for European options 396–8; European call option 394–6; European option pricing model, interpretation of 397–8; European put option 398–9; synthesis of forward contracts from puts and calls 399–400; exercises for learning development of 409–12; financial innovation using European Put-Call Parity 401–5; American Put-Call Parity (no dividends) 403–5; generalized forward contracts 401–3; full replication of European call option (embedded insurance contract) 391–2; generalized forward price 402; key concepts 408–9; LBAC (lower bound for American call option on underlying, no dividends) 374–5; LBACD (lower bound for American call option on underlying, continuous dividends) 383–5; call on underlier with continuous, proportional dividends over life of option 384–5; call on underlier with no dividends over life of option 384; LBAP (lower bound for American put option on underlying, no dividends) 378–80; intrinsic value lower bound for American put, example of 379–80; LBAPD (lower bound for American put option on underlying, continuous dividends) 387–8; LBEC (lower bound for European call option on underlying, no dividends) 375–8; implications of 377–8; LBECD (lower bound for European call option on underlying, continuous dividends) 382–3; LBEP (lower bound for European put option on underlying, no dividends) 380–1; adjusted intrinsic value (AIV) for European put, definition of 380–1; LBEPD (lower bound for European put option on underlying, continuous dividends) 386–7; model-based option pricing (MBOP) 371, 398; model-independent vs. model-based option pricing 370–1; model risk 372; No-Arbitrage in Equilibrium (NAIE) 372, 405–6; partial replication of European call option (embedded forward contract) 388–91; postscript on 405–7; relative pricing trades vs. directional trades 371–2; risk-free arbitrage 373; static replication, principle of 393–4; static replication and European Put-Call Parity (no dividends) 388–94; current costs and related strategies, technique of going back and forth between 393; fully replicating European call option (embedded insurance contract) 391–2; partially replicating European call option (embedded forward contract) 388–91; working backwards from payoffs to costs to derive European Put-Call Parity 393–4; sub-replication 404; super-replication 404; working backwards from payoffs to costs to derive European Put-Call Parity 393–4 raw price change, present value of 243 reading option price quotes 334–7 real asset options 324 realization of daily value 149 realized daily cash flows, creation of 243 receiving floating 293 receiving variable in interest rate derivatives (IRDs) 279–80 recontracting future positions 149, 151 Registered Commodity Representatives (RCRs) 122–3 relative pricing 65–6 relative pricing trades vs. directional trades 371–2 relative risks of hedge portfolio’s return, analysis of 618–24; risk-averse investor in hedge portfolio, role of risk premia for 620–4; risk neutrality in hedge portfolio, initial look at 618–20 replicability: option pricing in continuous time 588; risk-neutral valuation 597–8, 600, 601, 603, 605, 606, 614, 615, 631, 633 replicating portfolio, construction of 478–84; concept check, interpretation of hedge ratio 482; down state, replication in 481; hedge ratio, interpretation of 482–3; replication over period 2 (under scenario 1) 479–82; replication under scenario 2 (over period 2) 484; scenarios 478–9; solving equations for ?

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Directional Trades 11.3 The Dominance Principle 11.4 Implications of the Dominance Principle, ROP for Puts and Calls 11.4.1 Lower Bound for an American Call Option on an Underlying with no Dividends (LBAC) 11.4.2 Lower Bound for a European Call Option on an Underlying with no Dividends (LBEC) 11.4.3 Lower Bound for an American Put Option on an Underlying with no Dividends (LBAP) 11.4.4 Lower Bound for a European Put Option on an Underlying with no Dividends (LBEP) 11.4.5 Lower Bound for a European Call Option on an Underlying with Continuous Dividends (LBECD) 11.4.6 Lower Bound for an American Call Option on an Underlying with Continuous Dividends (LBACD) 11.4.7 Lower Bound for a European Put Option on an Underlying with Continuous Dividends (LBEPD) 11.4.8 Lower Bound for an American Put Option on an Underlying with Continuous Dividends (LBAPD) 11.5 Static Replication and European Put-Call Parity (No Dividends) 11.5.1 Partially Replicating a European Call Option (the Embedded Forward Contract) 11.5.2 Fully Replicating a European Call Option (the Embedded Insurance Contract) 11.5.3 From Strategies to Current Costs and Back 11.5.4 Working Backwards from Payoffs to Costs to Derive European Put-Call Parity 11.6 Basic Implications of European Put-Call Parity 11.6.1 What is a European Call Option? 11.6.2 The Analogue of the Basic American Option Pricing Model for European Options 11.6.3 What is a European Put Option? 11.7 Further Implications of European Put-Call Parity 11.7.1 Synthesizing Forward Contract from Puts and Calls 11.8 Financial Innovation using European Put-Call Parity 11.8.1 Generalized Forward Contracts 11.8.2 American Put-Call Parity (No Dividends) 11.9 Postscript on ROP CHAPTER 12 OPTION TRADING STRATEGIES, PART 2 12.1 Generating Synthetic Option Strategies from European Put-Call Parity 12.2 The Covered Call Hedging Strategy 12.2.1 Three Types Of Covered Call Writes 12.2.2 Economic Interpretation of the Covered Call Strategy 12.3 The Protective Put Hedging Strategy 12.3.1 Puts as Insurance 12.3.2 Economic Interpretation of the Protective Put Strategy CHAPTER 13 MODEL-BASED OPTION PRICING IN DISCRETE TIME, PART 1: THE BINOMIAL OPTION PRICING MODEL (BOPM, N=1) 13.1 The Objective of Model-Based Option Pricing (MBOP) 13.2 The Binomial Option Pricing Model, Basics 13.2.1 Modeling Time in a Discrete Time Framework 13.2.2 Modeling the Underlying Stock Price Uncertainty 13.3 The Binomial Option Pricing Model, Advanced 13.3.1 Path Structure of the Binomial Process, Total Number of Price Paths 13.3.2 Path Structure of the Binomial Process, Total Number of Price Paths Ending at a Specific Terminal Price 13.3.3 Summary of Stock Price Evolution for the N-Period Binomial Process 13.4 Option Valuation for the BOPM (N=1) 13.4.1 Step 1, Pricing the Option at Expiration 13.4.2 Step 2, Pricing the Option Currently (time t=0) 13.5 Modern Tools for Pricing Options 13.5.1 Tool 1, The Principle of No-Arbitrage 13.5.2 Tool 2, Complete Markets or Replicability, and a Rule of Thumb 13.5.3 Tool 3, Dynamic and Static Replication 13.5.4 Relationships between the Three Tools 13.6 Synthesizing a European Call Option 13.6.1 Step 1, Parameterization 13.6.2 Step 2, Defining the Hedge Ratio and the Dollar Bond Position 13.6.3 Step 3, Constructing the Replicating Portfolio 13.6.4 Step 4, Implications of Replication 13.7 Alternative Option Pricing Techniques 13.8 Appendix: Derivation of the BOPM (N=1) as a Risk-Neutral Valuation Relationship CHAPTER 14 OPTION PRICING IN DISCRETE TIME, PART 2: DYNAMIC HEDGING AND THE MULTI-PERIOD BINOMIAL OPTION PRICING MODEL, N>1 14.1 Modeling Time and Uncertainty in the BOPM, N>1 14.1.1 Stock Price Behavior, N=2 14.1.2 Option Price Behavior, N=2 14.2 Hedging a European Call Option, N=2 14.2.1 Step 1, Parameterization 14.2.2 Step 2, Defining the Hedge Ratio and the Dollar Bond Position 14.2.3 Step 3, Constructing the Replicating Portfolio 14.2.4 The Complete Hedging Program for the BOPM, N=2 14.3 Implementation of the BOPM for N=2 14.4 The BOPM, N>1 as a RNVR Formula 14.5 Multi-period BOPM, N>1: A Path Integral Approach 14.5.1 Thinking of the BOPM in Terms of Paths 14.5.2 Proof of the BOPM Model for general N CHAPTER 15 EQUIVALENT MARTINGALE MEASURES: A MODERN APPROACH TO OPTION PRICING 15.1 Primitive Arrow–Debreu Securities and Option Pricing 15.1.1 Exercise 1, Pricing B(0,1) 15.1.2 Exercise 2, Pricing ADu(ω) and ADd(ω) 15.2 Contingent Claim Pricing 15.2.1 Pricing a European Call Option 15.2.2 Pricing any Contingent Claim 15.3 Equivalent Martingale Measures (EMMs) 15.3.1 Introduction and Examples 15.3.2 Definition of a Discrete-Time Martingale 15.4 Martingales and Stock Prices 15.4.1 The Equivalent Martingale Representation of Stock Prices 15.5 The Equivalent Martingale Representation of Option Prices 15.5.1 Discounted Option Prices 15.5.2 Summary of the EMM Approach 15.6 The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), A Guide To Modeling Prices 15.7 Appendix: Essential Martingale Properties CHAPTER 16 OPTION PRICING IN CONTINUOUS TIME 16.1 Arithmetic Brownian Motion (ABM) 16.2 Shifted Arithmetic Brownian Motion 16.3 Pricing European Options under Shifted Arithmetic Brownian Motion with No Drift (Bachelier) 16.3.1 Theory (FTAP1 and FTAP2) 16.3.2 Transition Density Functions 16.3.3 Deriving the Bachelier Option Pricing Formula 16.4 Defining and Pricing a Standard Numeraire 16.5 Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) 16.5.1 GBM (Discrete Version) 16.5.2 Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM), Continuous Version 16.6 Itô’s Lemma 16.7 Black–Scholes Option Pricing 16.7.1 Reducing GBM to an ABM with Drift 16.7.2 Preliminaries on Generating Unknown Risk-Neutral Transition Density Functions from Known Ones 16.7.3 Black–Scholes Options Pricing from Bachelier 16.7.4 Volatility Estimation in the Black–Scholes Model 16.8 Non-Constant Volatility Models 16.8.1 Empirical Features of Volatility 16.8.2 Economic Reasons for why Volatility is not Constant, the Leverage Effect 16.8.3 Modeling Changing Volatility, the Deterministic Volatility Model 16.8.4 Modeling Changing Volatility, Stochastic Volatility Models 16.9 Why Black–Scholes is Still Important CHAPTER 17 RISK-NEUTRAL VALUATION, EMMS, THE BOPM, AND BLACK–SCHOLES 17.1 Introduction 17.1.1 Preliminaries on FTAP1 and FTAP2 and Navigating the Terminology 17.1.2 Pricing by Arbitrage and the FTAP2 17.1.3 Risk-Neutral Valuation without Consensus and with Consensus 17.1.4 Risk-Neutral Valuation without Consensus, Pricing Contingent Claims with Unhedgeable Risks 17.1.5 Black–Scholes’ Contribution 17.2 Formal Risk-Neutral Valuation without Replication 17.2.1 Constructing EMMs 17.2.2 Interpreting Formal Risk-Neutral Probabilities 17.3 MPRs and EMMs, Another Version of FTAP2 17.4 Complete Risk-Expected Return Analysis of the Riskless Hedge in the (BOPM, N=1) 17.4.1 Volatility of the Hedge Portfolio 17.4.2 Direct Calculation of σS 17.4.3 Direct Calculation of σC 17.4.4 Expected Return of the Hedge Portfolio 17.5 Analysis of the Relative Risks of the Hedge Portfolio’s Return 17.5.1 An Initial Look at Risk Neutrality in the Hedge Portfolio 17.5.2 Role of the Risk Premia for a Risk-Averse Investor in the Hedge Portfolio 17.6 Option Valuation 17.6.1 Some Manipulations 17.6.2 Option Valuation Done Directly by a Risk-Averse Investor 17.6.3 Option Valuation for the Risk-Neutral Investor Index FIGURES 1.1 Canada/US Foreign Exchange Rate 1.2 Intermediation by the Clearing House 1.3 Offsetting Trades 1.4 Gold Fixing Price in London Bullion Market (USD$) 2.1 Graphical Method to Get Hedged Position Profits 2.2 Payoff Per Share to a Long Forward Contract 2.3 Payoff Per Share to a Short Forward Contract 2.4 Profits per bu. for the Unhedged Position 3.1 Profits Per Share to a Naked Long Spot Position 3.2 Payoffs Per Share to a Naked Long Spot Position 3.3 Payoffs (=Profits) Per Share to a Naked Long Forward Position 3.4 Payoffs Per Share to a Naked Long Spot Position and to a Naked Long Forward Position 5.1 Order Flow Process (Pit Trading) 5.2 The Futures Clearing House 5.3 Offsetting Trades 5.4 Overall Profits for Example 2 6.1 Long vs.

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

Since then some economists such as Nouriel Roubini have claimed that they predicted the crisis. But if this is the case, no one took them seriously. Raghuram Rajan, formerly Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the current Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, is credited with having argued, in 2005, that the new set of financial innovations were increasing the volatility in financial markets and heightening risk.3 He was dismissed as a “luddite.” Once the crisis struck, people recalled that the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the IMF had made gentle warning noises. The noises had to be gentle because of the fear that acknowledging the problem could make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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A variety of agents grew up promising large wealth-holders higher than the widely available yields. Businesses such as hedge funds, private equity firms and “special vehicles,” which could treat money in imaginative ways to assure better than average returns, proliferated. They could borrow from banks on the strength of their collateral, and indeed behaved like shadow banks. Financial innovations also began to explode. The original idea of Black and Scholes on pricing options was extended to more sophisticated instruments using the calculation of risk based on statistical mathematics (stochastic calculus), allowing for the creation of new assets even when the buyers (and often even the sellers) could not quite grasp the principles underlying such assets.

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Interest rates in the US had averages at around 6 percent between 1971 and 2001. By 2005 they had come down to nearly 1 percent, falling steadily from above 5 percent in 2000. Raghuram Rajan, who was Chief Economist of the IMF and a professor at Chicago, did warn in 2005 that there were fault lines in the global financial architecture which financial innovations might expose. But he was dismissed as a “Luddite.” This was an amazing situation, with low inflation, low interest rates and plenty of credit. But then another aspect of globalization impinged on the world economy. GDP growth accelerated in China and this put pressure on raw material prices, especially oil prices.

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

How the U.S. central bank (the Fed) and the surpluses of fast-growing emerging economies made money cheaper than ever in the past decade, and why that money ended up in people's homes. Chapter 2: Housing policy. The story of how U.S. politicians-both Democrats and Republicans-worked systematically to increase the share of families who owned their homes, even when that undermined traditional requirements of creditworthiness. Chapter 3: Financial innovations. How to transform big risks into smaller risks by repackaging them, labeling them, and selling them. How regulations and bonuses caused everybody to flock into the market for mortgage-backed securities, and why even cows could have made a fortune from such securities. Chapter 4: The crisis.

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Their point is that nothing is more dangerous than good times because they encourage investors to borrow more and take bigger risks. If things look good, they are going to get worse. "Investors said, `I don't want to be in equities anymore, and I'm not getting any return in my bond positions,"' explains a financier who is the author of many financial innovations: "Two things happened. They took more and more leverage, and they reached for riskier asset classes. Give me yield, give me leverage, give me return."" It's the Deficit, Stupid U.S. households were not alone in opening wide their pocketbooks and bankbooks: The U.S. government did the same.

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., 36, 38 Fannie Mae (Federal National Mortgage Association), 25-28, 147 aggressive risk-taking, 40-43 collapse of, 36-43, 77-79 Cuomo and, 32 early repayment penalties, 34 exposure to housing market, 42-43 flexible standards and procedures, 31-32, 40, 43 fraud and abuse scandal, 37-39, 40 "junk loans," 42 monitoring of loans, 34 nationalized, 79 political contributions and other favors from, 30, 38-39 securitized mortgages, 47 special privileges for Countrywide, 30 stockholder dividends, 77 subprime project rollout, 32-34 Farley, James, 107 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 34-36, 127-28 Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, Office of, 36, 38 Federal Reserve Bank Greenspan on, I interest rates and, 2, 3-5, 12-13, 14, 21 lending to investment banks, 79-80 as a model, 3-4 short- and long-term interest rate behaviors, 17-18 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, flexible underwriting standards and, 31-32, 43 Federal Reserve Board, monetary policy control, 103-4 federal spending, 19-20 Ferguson, Niall, 130 FHA. See Federal Housing Administration (FHA) financial innovations for risk pooling, 7 adjustable-rate mortgages, 7, 71 liberalization of financial markets and, 131 nonrecourse mortgages, 9 See also mortgage-backed securities; risk-taking, excessive financial markets, 129-31 confidence and cooperation, 131-38 false sense of security and, 138-45 regulation and supervision responsibilities, 145 fines for discrimination in lending, 31 First Boston, 47 First Union, oversubscribed securitized mortgages, 27 Fitch, 60, 61 fixed-rate mortgages, 7 Fixing Global Finance, 16 "flipping" real estate, 8-9 foreclosures, 24-25 Fortis, 119, 146 fraud and abuse, 144-45 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, 37-39, 40 Subprime XYZ package, 65-68 Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), 25-28, 147 aggressive risk-taking, 40-43 collapse of, 36-43, 77-79 Cuomo and, 32 exposure to housing market, 42-43 flexible standards and procedures, 31-32, 40, 43 fraud and abuse scandal, 37-39, 40 "junk loans," 42 monitoring of loans, 34 nationalized, 79 political contributions and other favors from, 30, 38-39 securitized mortgages, 27, 47 stockholder dividends, 77 subprime project rollout, 33-34 free-market system, Bush (G.

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

Still, Pangloss is no more persuasive as an economic analyst than as an observer of social life. It is absolutely true that increasingly complex and mathematically intricate financial innovation has, for example, made it cheaper to buy a house or drive off in a new car. But as de Tocqueville feared almost two centuries ago, the modern, utterly interconnected and increasingly powerful financial system is not always the best of all possible worlds. Here again, the South Sea year has some lessons to teach about the risks of financial innovation. The Bubble may be past, that is, but its implications are not, as the world would be reminded, brutally, in the reverberations of a truly wretched Monday morning in September 2008.

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A host of men, gamblers like Neale, theorists of money like John Locke, Defoe’s “projectors,” and more, had used the moment to launch one experiment after another to extract the nation from its troubles. Two decades later, Harley faced a similar risk of a collapse of Britain’s ability to borrow. Trying to navigate that crisis within a financial milieu dominated by his political opponents, he was met by a round of offers similar to those proposed twenty years before, a renewed push for financial innovation that would, if its proponents could be believed, both save the nation and make those riding to the rescue very rich indeed. * * * — ONE SUCH SCHEME stood out. It had several moving parts, but it turned on a single, simple idea: a forced marriage of two of the financial revolution’s signature inventions, official debt and the joint-stock company.

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That particular bit of financial engineering became known as the Bowie Bond, in which for the first time musically inclined (or celebrity-dazzled) punters could buy and sell shares of a pop star’s future earnings. Selling shares in a bundle of royalties to come from his songs brought a tidy $25 million to the man behind Ziggy Stardust. That was exactly the result financial innovation is supposed to deliver: Bowie got cash in hand to use as he saw fit, while buyers of his bonds got a stream of income extending into the future, and, perhaps, an extra, unquantifiable happy jolt every time Major Tom spoke on their radio, floating in his most peculiar way. Isaac Newton and Robert Walpole might have been amazed by the reality of David Bowie, but they would have had no problem with the thinking behind selling a stream of future earnings.

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

We should not worry so much about rugged individualism as about undifferentiated groupthink, for that is the primary source of systemic problems. A competitive system is also likely to produce the financial innovation necessary to broaden access and spread risk. Financial innovation nowadays seems to be synonymous with credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, derivative securities that few outside Wall Street now think should have been invented. But innovation also gave us the money-market account, the credit card, interest-rate swaps, indexed funds, and exchange-traded funds, all of which have proved very useful. So, as with many things, financial innovations span the range from the good to the positively dangerous.

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Some progressive economists dispute whether the recent crisis was at all related to government intervention in low-income housing credit.49 This certainly was not the only factor at play, and to argue that it was is misleading. But it is equally misleading to say it played no part. The private financial sector did not suddenly take up low-income housing loans in the early 2000s out of the goodness of its heart, or because financial innovation permitted it to do so—after all, securitization has been around for a long time. To ignore the role played by politicians, the government, and the quasi-government agencies is to ignore the elephant in the room. I have argued that an important political response to inequality was populist credit expansion, which allowed people the consumption possibilities that their stagnant incomes otherwise could not support.

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Another factor restricting mobility, certainly in the current downturn, is home ownership. Anecdotal evidence suggests that hard-to-sell homes, and homes that are worth less than the debt that is owed, are weighing down workers and preventing them from looking elsewhere for employment. A number of financial innovations that would allow households to purchase insurance against home-price declines have been proposed, and in light of the recent crisis, demand for these instruments may increase.33 This is also a reason why the government’s focus on encouraging home ownership needs to be revisited. Although the modern economy needs some workers to specialize, workers like Badri, encountered in chapter 4, may tend to grow overly specialized in one industry.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Silber, “The Process of Financial Innovation,” American Economic Review 73, no. 2 (1983): 89 (listing thirty-eight innovative financial products developed from 1970 to 1982, ranging from “Debit Cards” and ATMs to “Interest Rate Futures”). For more on financial innovation in the period, see Merton Miller, “Financial Innovation: The Last Twenty Years and the Next,” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 21, no. 4 (December 1986): 459 (describing the financial “revolution” of the previous twenty years as having occurred largely due to reactions to regulation and taxes), and Peter Tufano, “Financial Innovation,” in The Handbook of Economics of Finance, ed. George Constantinides, Milton Harris, and René Stulz (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2003), 307 (exploring the history of financial innovation and the explanations given for the extensive amount of innovation seen in both the past and the present).

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the services they made possible: See generally Dan Awrey, “Toward a Supply-Side Theory of Financial Innovation,” Journal of Comparative Economics 41, no. 2 (2013): 401, and Donald MacKenzie, “Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets,” paper presented in Tacoma, WA, June 25, 2005, who argues that financial models, and in particular Black-Scholes option pricing, shape financial markets. between just 1970 and 1982: For a list, see William L. Silber, “The Process of Financial Innovation,” American Economic Review 73, no. 2 (1983): 89 (listing thirty-eight innovative financial products developed from 1970 to 1982, ranging from “Debit Cards” and ATMs to “Interest Rate Futures”).

…

Middle-class borrowing, in other words, bent upward just as middle-class incomes flattened out, and borrowing grew on a scale big enough to fill the income gap that middle-class households lost to stagnant wages.* The scale of the borrowing, moreover, approached the shift in wages from the middle to the top. As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has observed, “The negative impact of stagnant real incomes and rising income inequality . . . was largely offset by financial innovation . . . and lax monetary policy that increased the ability of households to finance consumption by borrowing. . . . The support for the bubble thus depended on expansionary monetary policy together with financial sector innovation leading to ever-increasing asset prices that allowed households virtually unlimited access to credit.”

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

While not the subject of this book, I do find it interesting to note the role that the City of London played in shifting the new technology of the tally from debt to medium of exchange. London has always survived and thrived through the introduction of money technologies: ranging from banknotes and bills of exchange, through derivatives and EFT. The City has always been associated with financial innovation and, crucially, the creation of markets. Look at insurance, where it is pre-eminent. London didn’t invent insurance: the preamble to the Insurance Act of 1601 talks about it as a long-established business (Raphael 1994). Indeed, it starts with the words: ‘Whereas it hath bene tyme out of mynde an usage amongste Merchantes…’.

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— Sir Dudley North in Discourses upon Trade (1691) New technology brings along new opportunities. In the Western, capitalist tradition, new technology works with long cycles of change in a well-understood way. The recession that follows the collapse of a bubble once again creates conditions for the emergence of a new economics and of new policies. In the context of financial innovations, these policy tools will have to conform closely to the characteristics of the current technological revolution and its paradigm (Perez 2005), which is why I think it important to separate the present paradigm from the present time, if you see what I mean. Thus, technological evolution often leads to crises as the technology races ahead of institutions and legal systems, but the crises may be an indispensable part of the co-evolution of financial services, because they in turn lead to regulation that puts markets onto a firm footing and allows them to grow even more.

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After the low-profit late 1970s and the loss-making early 1980s, credit cards were profitable and the business exploded. In the United Kingdom, regulators opted for a light touch and allowed Barclaycard to grow. In both countries credit cards became a mass-market phenomenon, leading to increased competition, which in turn drove financial innovations and additional products and services ranging from frequent flyer miles and cash rebates to credit towards future purchases and a wide variety of ‘cobranding’ in all sorts of industries. A note about card fraud Dee Hock’s earlier comment on card fraud is very interesting because the co-evolution of cards and fraud helps us to learn a great deal about putting new money technology in place.

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

Rather, the ready availability of leverage made it easy to invest heavily in assets whose prices had risen a great deal, and in innovative, untested, synthetic, levered investment products, many of which would go on to fail. Perhaps most importantly among the contributing factors, the period was marked by risky behavior on the part of financial institutions. When the world is characterized by benign macro events, hyper-financial activity and financial innovation, there is a tendency for providers of capital to compete for market share in a process I call “the race to the bottom” (I’ll make reference later on to a memo of that name). The mood in the years 2005–07 was summed up by Citigroup CEO Charles Prince in June 2007, virtually on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis, in a statement that became emblematic of the era: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated.

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Levered mortgage backed securities (and financial derivatives, most of which contain high levels of built-in leverage) generally switched from being return-enhancing tools to weapons of financial mass destruction, as levered funds and securities breached loan covenants, and issuers ultimately proved unable to service their debt. Of course, the new financial products demonstrated—as usual—that financial innovations promising high returns with low risk rarely keep that promise. As for the relaxed regulations, the financial conglomerates permitted by revocation of the Glass-Steagall Act had extensive problems; the repeal of the uptick rule allowed the stocks of financial institutions to be driven down relentlessly; and several banks proved unable to survive under the high levels of leverage that had been allowed.

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Thus far I’ve covered a lot of the past and a bit of the present. Now, as I conclude, I want to turn to the future. Over the course of my career, I’ve witnessed numerous occasions on which pundits said the occurrence of one type of cycle or another had come to an end. Whether because of economic vitality, financial innovation, astute corporate management, or the supposed omniscience of central bankers and heads of Treasury, they observed that the fluctuations of either the economic cycle or the cycle in profits would be seen no more. I spent some time on this subject in “Will It Be Different This Time?” (November 1996).

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional