New Books in Finance

Adrian Bazbauers and Susan Engel’s 2021 book The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development? (Routledge, 2023) explores the evolution of the 30 functioning multilateral development banks (MDBs). MDBs have their roots in the growing system of international finance and multilateral cooperation, with the first recognizable MDB being proposed by Latin America in financial cooperation with the US in the late 1930s. That Inter-American Bank did not eventuate but was a precursor to the World Bank being negotiated at Bretton Woods in 1944. Since then, a complex network of regional, sub-regional, and specialized development banks has progressively emerged across the globe, including two significant recent entrants established by China and the BRICS.MDBs arrange loans, credits, and guarantees for investment in member states, generally with the stated aim of fostering economic growth. They operate in both the Global North and South, though there are more MDBs focusing on emerging and developing states. While the World Bank and some of the larger regional banks have been scrutinized, little attention has been paid to the smaller banks or the overall system. This book provides the first study of all 30 MDBs and it evaluates their interrelationships. It analyses the emergence of the MDBs in relation to geopolitics, development paradigms and debt. It includes sections on each of the banks as well as on how MDBs have approached the key sectors of infrastructure, human development, and climate.This book will be of particular interest to researchers of development finance, global governance, and international political economy.Dr. Susan Engel is an Associate Professor in Politics and International Studies and co-Director of the Future of Rights Centre. Her research interests focus on the impact of neoliberalism on development and international political economy.Dr Adrian Robert Bazbauers is a Senior Lecturer in International Public Sector Management, and Undergraduate Coordinator, in the School of Business at UNSW, Canberra. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

With the Biden Administration's student loan relief coming down the pike, Annika sits down with Dr. Beth Akers, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in higher education finance. Beth discusses the issue of student debt, and what the Biden relief plan will and will not achieve. You can find more information about Dr. Akers and her recent writing and appearances here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

We all know that things are a little more expensive when we head to the grocery store. But what does inflation actually mean? How did we get to where we are, and what happens next? What does history have to say about our current economic situation?Annika sits down with Tyler Goodspeed of the Hoover Institution. Dr. Goodspeed served in the White House as Acting Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2020-2021, and was formerly on the Faculty of Economics at the University of Oxford, where he specialized in financial history.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financial assets. The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live-all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios.As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World (Verso, 2023), Brett Christophers peels back the veil on "asset manager society." Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.Brett Christophers is a professor in the Department of Human Geography and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. His previous books include The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (2019) and Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?  (2020). Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Calming the Storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises Since 1825 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) by Dr. Charles Read exposes, for the first time in modern scholarship, the role that the rise of the Carry Trade played in British financial crises between 1825 and 1866, how in reaction the Bank of England improved its management of monetary policy after 1866 and how those lessons have been forgotten since the 1970s.Britain is one of the few major capitalist economies in the world to have avoided policy-induced systemic financial crises for more than 100 years of its history—between 1866 and 1973. Beforehand, it suffered a series of serious banking panics, in 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857-58 and 1866. Since the 1970s banking instability has returned again, with the global financial crisis of 2007-09 hitting Britain hard.Economists and policymakers have asked what can be learnt from Britain’s experience of the disappearance and reappearance of crises to help efforts to prevent future ones. This book answers that question with a major reassessment of Britain’s financial history over the past two centuries. It does so by applying the long-neglected ideas of the British Banking School to explain how crises can occur because of the Carry Trade. This book is essential reading for economists and historians of modern Britain, practitioners and policymakers, as well as anyone who is affected by financial crises and their consequences.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (Metropolitan Books, 2023) follows the most notorious radical libertarians--from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel--around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.Quinn Slobodian is a professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

In Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization (Yale UP, 2023), distinguished economic historian Harold James offers a fresh perspective on the past two centuries of globalization and the pivotal moments that shaped it. James analyzes seven major economic crises that occurred over this period, including the late 1840s, the simultaneous stock market shocks of 1873, the First World War years, the Great Depression era, the 1970s, the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, and most recently the Covid-19 crisis. Through his insightful analysis, he illustrates how some of these crises contributed to increased cross-border integration of labor, goods, and capital markets, while others resulted in significant deglobalization.James classifies the crises into two categories: those caused by shortages and those driven by demand. He explains how shortages have led to greater globalization as markets expanded and producers innovated to increase supply, as evidenced by events such as the First World War and the oil shocks of the 1970s. In contrast, demand-driven crises, such as those that caused the Great Depression and the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008, have typically led to international trade contraction and decreased globalization, often accompanied by widespread skepticism of governments.To support his findings, James examines the writings of key observers who shaped our understanding of each crisis, including Karl Marx in 1848, Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger in the 1870s, German Treasury Secretary Karl Helfferich in the First World War, John Maynard Keynes in the Great Depression, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1970s, Ben Bernanke in 2008, and Larry Summers and Raj Chetty in 2020.Overall, James' work provides an insightful and thought-provoking analysis of the relationship between economic crises and globalization over the past two centuries, and sheds light on the potential trajectory of future economic developments.Javier Mejia is an economist at Stanford University who specializes in the intersection of social networks and economic history. His research interests also include entrepreneurship and political economy, with a particular focus on Latin America and the Middle East. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. Mejia has previously been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University-Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is also a frequent contributor to various news outlets, currently serving as an op-ed columnist for Forbes Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems--coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention.Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed.Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency (U Chicago Press, 2023) illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods--such as silver--to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Public companies now face constant pressure to meet investor expectations. A company must continually deliver strong short-term performance every quarter to maintain its stock price. This valuation treadmill creates incentives for corporations to deceive investors. Published more than twenty years after the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires all public companies to invest in measures to ensure the accuracy of their disclosures, The Valuation Treadmill: How Securities Fraud Threatens the Integrity of Public Companies (Cambridge University Press, 2022) shows how securities fraud became a major regulatory concern. Drawing on case studies of paradigmatic securities enforcement actions involving Xerox, Penn Central, Apple, Enron, Citigroup, and General Electric, the book argues that corporate securities fraud emerged as investors increasingly valued companies based on their future performance. Corporations now have an incentive to issue unrealistically optimistic disclosure to convince markets that their success will continue. Securities regulation must do more to protect the integrity of public companies from the pressure of the valuation treadmill.James J. Park is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance

Spanning twelve presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, and eight Federal Reserve chairs, from William McChesney Martin to Jerome Powell, this is an insider's story of macroeconomic policy. Focusing on the most significant developments and long-term changes, Alan Blinder traces the highs and lows of monetary and fiscal policy, which have cooperated and clashed through many recessions and several long booms over the past six decades. From the fiscal policy of Kennedy's New Frontier to Biden's responses to the pandemic, the book takes readers through the stagflation of the 1970s, the conquest of inflation under Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker, the rise of Reaganomics, and the bubbles of the 2000s before bringing the story up through recent events, including the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and monetary policy during COVID-19. A lively and concise narrative, A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021 (Princeton University Press, 2022) is filled with vital lessons for anyone who wants to better understand where the economy has been and where it might be headed.Alan S. Blinder is the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, a former vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and a former member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance