This book explains how banking institutions in Portugal were able to maintain their strength and solubility while undergoing a demanding Program of Financial Assistance from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission from May 2011 and May 2014.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the shareholder wealth effects of the financial sector consolidation in the Asia-Pacific region and its impact on the acquirer's cost of debt. By not only examining the capital market reactions to the institutions directly involved in M&A transactions, but also their closest rivals, it is possible to draw clearer conclusions in regard to the overall success of the financial sector consolidation in this region. In addition, by investigating the acquiring institution's CDS market reaction to merger announcements, valuable insights are offered in regard to the difference between equity and debt market perceptions of bank M&As. The analyses suggest that equity and debt markets consider different factors when evaluating the success of mergers.

This book assesses the strategic significance of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) by examining the logic of international power and order, historic trends in East Asian international relations, the AIIB's design in comparison to 'rival' financial institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, recent tendencies in Chinese foreign policy, and the Chinese system of political economy. It focuses on how China 'constructs' international arrangements at a critical juncture in history compared to other great powers, especially the United States and Japan. Viewed in isolation, the AIIB does not represent a radical departure from the existing international order; it is a hybrid institution built on China's integration into the West-dominated international structure and conditioned by the global financial market. But the AIIB does draw in part from a different institutional lineage, a different historical root, and a different national system of political economy. In this context, China's greater success will constitute a partial change to the existing international order, whatever the Chinese intention.

With the end of the Cold War, the International Monetary Fund emerged as the most powerful international institution in history. But how much influence can the IMF exert over fiercely contested issues in domestic politics that affect the lives of millions? In "Lending Credibility," Randall Stone develops the first systematic approach to answering this question. Deploying an arsenal of methods from a range of social sciences rarely combined, he mounts a forceful challenge to conventional wisdom. Focusing on the former Soviet bloc, Stone finds that the IMF is neither as powerful as some critics fear, nor as weak as others believe, but that the answer hinges on the complex factor of how much credibility it can muster from country to country.

Stone begins by building a formal, game-theoretic model of lending credibility, which he then subjects to sophisticated quantitative testing on original data from twenty-six countries over the 1990s. Next come detailed, interview-based case studies on negotiations between the IMF and Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Bulgaria. Stone asserts that the IMF has exerted startling influence over economic policy in smaller countries, such as Poland and Bulgaria. However, where U.S. foreign policy interests come more heavily into play, as in Russia, the IMF cannot credibly commit to enforcing the loans-for-policy contract. This erodes its ability to facilitate enduring market reforms. Stone's context is the postcommunist transition in Europe and Asia, but his findings carry implications for IMF activities the world over.

This book offers new insights on banking business models, risks and regulation proposals in the aftermath of the European financial crisis. It investigates the main issues affecting the business of banking nowadays, such as low interest rates and non-performing loans. The combined effect of low to negative interest rates and weak economic growth has encouraged banks to shift their business towards new areas less associated with interest rates, which financial markets and institutional investors are currently evaluating. Contributions also shed new light on topics not yet fully investigated by current literature, such as banks' short selling bans after Brexit, the European Deposit Guarantee Scheme and banks' risk appetite framework. This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars and practitioners.

This Palgrave Pivot assesses the impact of the regulatory framework for derivatives built post-crisis and examines its ambition to centralize and minimize credit risk, enhance transparency, and regain control. Zelenko delves into the powerful destabilizing forces exerted by derivatives markets in the global financial meltdown of 2008. Recapping the evolution in markets and counterparty risk management, as well as key aspects of regulation and their impact, this book aims to give readers the big picture and foster a deep understanding of the role of derivatives markets in the financial crisis. This practical angle will give useful keys to end-users and their risk managers, as they are faced with a new, complex, and changing environment. Additionally, this book conducts a comprehensive analysis of the new metrics the market has created to model, price, and manage credit risk, such as the Credit Value Adjustment (CVA), the Debt Value Adjustment (DVA), or the Funding Value Adjustment (FVA), and takes full stock of a domain that is still in rapid evolution. This volume covers the concepts, methods, and approaches taken by banks to manage counterparty credit risk in their derivatives activities in the new post-crisis market and regulatory environment, and it aims to highlight what is practical and effective today.

The formula for the Future of Work is called SMAC - social, mobile, analytics and cloud on one integrated stack where each function enables another to maximize its effect. This is the new enterprise IT model delivering an organization that is more connective, collaborative, real time and productive. This book provides a comprehensive view of how SMAC Technologies are impacting the entire banking "eco-system" as well as the key stakeholders, namely customers, employees and partners.

Contemporary Financial Intermediation, 4th Edition by Greenbaum, Thakor, and Boot continues to offer a distinctive approach to the study of financial markets and institutions by presenting an integrated portrait that puts information and economic reasoning at the core. Instead of primarily naming and describing markets, regulations, and institutions as is common, Contemporary Financial Intermediation explores the subtlety, plasticity and fragility of financial institutions and credit markets. In this new edition every chapter has been updated and pedagogical supplements have been enhanced. For the financial sector, the best preprofessional training explains the reasons why markets, institutions, and regulators evolve they do, why we suffer recurring financial crises occur and how we typically react to them. Our textbook demands more in terms of quantitative skills and analysis, but its ability to teach about the forces shaping the financial world is unmatched.

This book provides an up-to-date overview of the development of the German financial system, with a particular focus on financialization and the financial crisis, topics that have increasingly gained attention since the crisis and the discussion on the secular stagnation started. The authors of the book-economists who have conducted extensive research in this area-offer a perspective on the financial system in the context of its importance for the overall economic system. The book not only provides detailed insights into Germany's financial system; it also takes a broader perspective on finance and connects it with current macroeconomic developments in Germany.

This volume assembles and presents a new database on bank regulation in over 150 countries (included also on CD). It offers the first comprehensive cross-country assessment of the impact of bank regulation on the operation of banks, and assesses the validity of the Basel Committee's influential approach to bank regulation. The treatment also provides an empirical evaluation of the historic debate about the proper role of government in the economy by studying bank regulation and analyzes the role of politics in determining regulatory approaches to banking. The data also indicate that restrictions on the entry of new banks, government ownership of banks, and restrictions on bank activities hurt banking system performance. The authors find that domestic political factors shape both regulations and their effectiveness.

William D. Cohan's Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World is a chronicle of the most successful, iconic bank on Wall Street, from the firm's founding in 1869 to the present day. Goldman Sachs are the investment bank all other banks - and most businesses - want to emulate; the firm with the best talent, the best clients, the best strategy. But is their success just down to the gilded magic of the 'Goldman way'? William D. Cohan has gained unprecedented access to Goldman's inner circle - both on and off the record. In an astonishing story of clashing egos, backstabbing, sex scandals, private investigators, court cases and government cabals, he reveals what really lies beneath their gold-plated image. 'The best analysis yet of Goldman's increasingly tangled web of conflicts' Economist 'Startling ... lifts the lid on Goldman's pivotal role in the meltdown' Mail on Sunday 'Cohan portrays a firm that has grown so large and hungry that it's no longer long-term greedy but short-term vicious. And that's the wonder - and horror - of Goldman Sachs' Businessweek 'Cohan's book tells of bitter power struggles and business cock-ups' Guardian 'A definitive account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era' The New York Times Book Review William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. His first book, The Last Tycoons, about Lazard, won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and was a New York Times bestseller. His second book, House of Cards, also a bestseller, is an account of the last days of Bear Stearns & Co.

Prior to the financial crisis of 2007-2008, economists thought that no such crisis could or would ever happen again in the United States, that financial events of such magnitude were a thing of the distant past. In fact, observers of that distant past-the period from the half century prior to the Civil War up to the passage of deposit insurance during the Great Depression, which was marked by repeated financial crises-note that while legislation immediately after crises reacted to their effects, economists and policymakers continually failed to grasp the true lessons to be learned. Gary Gorton, considered by many to be the authority on the financial crisis of our time, holds that economists fundamentally misunderstand financial crises-what they are, why they occur, and why there were none in the U.S. between 1934 and 2007. In Misunderstanding Financial Crises, he illustrates that financial crises are inherent to the production of bank debt, which is used to conduct transactions, and that unless the government designs intelligent regulation, crises will continue. Economists, he writes, looked from a certain point of view and missed everything that was important: the evolution of capital markets and the banking system, the existence of new financial instruments, and the size of certain money markets like the sale and repurchase market. Delving into how such a massive intellectual failure could have happened, Gorton offers a back-to-basics elucidation of financial crises, and shows how they are not rare, idiosyncratic, unfortunate events caused by a coincidence of unconnected factors. By looking back to the "Quiet Period " from 1934 to 2007 when there were no systemic crises, and to the "Panic of 2007-2008, " he brings together such issues as bank debt and liquidity, credit booms and manias, and moral hazard and too-big-too-fail, to illustrate the costs of bank failure and the true causes of financial crises. He argues that the successful regulation that prevented crises did not adequately keep pace with innovation in the financial sector, due in large part to economists' misunderstandings. He then looks forward to offer both a better way for economists to conceive of markets, as well as a description of the regulation necessary to address the historical threat of financial crises.

In this volume Witold Henisz provides readers with a new set of tools for assessing the extent of political and regulatory risk faced by investment projects in a given country. The author measures political risk directly by examining the structure of a nation's political institutions and the preferences of the actors that inhabit them. He also provides a critical analysis of the effectiveness of one common political risk mitigation strategy, partnering with a local firm. Neither democracy (Russia), political stability (Zaire, until recently) nor low country risk scores (Indonesia in 1995) are sufficient for investor security. The failure of each of these measures points to the need for more objective methods of measuring risk. After implementing tests to show the validity of a new measures, Witold Henisz analyzes the efficacy of partnering with local firms. The results of this analysis suggest that partnership will often introduce more hazards than it solves. This framework for measuring risk and analyzing the efficacy of risk-mitigating strategies could easily be extended to make it applicable on a project-by-project basis. Policymakers, investment managers, business professionals and scholars will find this book extremely useful.

This book provides two important contributions to existing theories in the financial innovation literature. First, it extends the existing literature of innovation orientation to a completely new field and construct that is based on a religious imperative as a framework within which financial innovation is constrained. It explains how an innovation orientation in IFIs can be directed within religious rules, which indicates that innovation orientation in IFIs is a learning philosophy. Second, the book introduces and examines the plasticity of Shariah as a shared boundary object and its dynamic role in managing tension and conflicting values in the financial innovation process. Furthermore, building on the empirical results, the study illustrates the insights that each theoretical lens affords into practices of collaboration and develops a novel analytical framework for understanding religious orientation towards financial innovation. This practical contribution, of the developed framework, could form the basis for a standardised framework for the Islamic finance industry. The book concludes by noting the policy and managerial implications of its findings and provides directions for further research.

If English is rapidly becoming the international language of choice and necessity, the dollar is racing ahead as the world's currency. This somewhat astonishing development is due in large part to the actions, and deliberate non-actions, of the Federal Reserve. This organisation is responsible for tweaking, pushing and pulling the financial and economic infrastructure of America when it deems it necessary. Its moves and non-moves are scrutinised, analysed, and criticised. This new book offers an in-depth presentation of the proposes and functions of the Federal reserve, several analytical articles and an in-depth bibliography.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of funding arrangements for explicit deposit insurance schemes. Responding to international guidelines and best practice, it discusses policy decisions and operational challenges which deposit insurers face in the financial management of ex-ante deposit insurance funds. Numerous examples are provided, and solutions offered on sources and uses of funds, focusing on target and optimal funding. Coverage includes: the role that modern deposit insurance schemes play in ensuring financial stability how to design the main deposit insurance features in order to maximize compliance with international standards the different types of funding and financial planning for deposit insurance methods for setting the target fund size level optimal deposit insurance funding challenges faced by the European Union members following new deposit insurance and bank resolution directives. The book concludes by providing a comprehensive overview of funding issues and recommendations for deposit insurance schemes in the European Union.

Finance is the life blood of a modern economy. A financial system helps to mobilize the financial surpluses of an economy and transfers them to areas of financial deficit. It is the linchpin of any development strategy. Soon after independence in 1947, the government of India followed a policy of social control of important financial institutions. This was reflected, through the years, in the nationalization of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the takeover of the then Imperial Bank of India (rechristened as State Bank of India), creation of the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), further nationalization of major commercial banks and general insurance companies, and the setting up of the General Insurance Corporation (GIC). As a result of state domination, India's financial system was characterized by barriers to entry, control over pricing of financial assets, high transaction costs, and restrictions on movement of funds from one market segment to another. It was in this backdrop that wide-ranging financial sector reforms were introduced as an integral part of the economic reforms program started in early 1990s. These reforms have paved the way for integration among various segments of the financial system. It is widely accepted that reduction/removal of financial repression has enhanced the efficiency and potential growth of the Indian economy. This book explains and examines at length the changes which have swept India's financial sector over the last 60 years since independence, with focus on post-1991 period.

The management of cash within a corporation has a direct impact on both the profitability and the shareholder value of that company. Active and efficient management of cash resources will significantly improve both the profitability and the shareholder value of every corporation, whereas passive and inefficient management will have a directly negative impact.

In European Cash Management Marie Dolfe and Anna Koritz, two leading experts in cash management, draw on their considerable international experience of working with banks and major multinational corporations to explain the various techniques for effective cash management and outline best practice within the area. The book shows managers the effect of poor management of cash on their company and offers clear practical guidance on how to formulate an effective strategy that will enable companies to release capital employed that may be put to more effective use.