Interchange fees have been the focal point for debate in the card industry, among competition authorities and policy makers, as well as in the economic literature on two-sided markets and on the regulation of market failures. This book offers insight into the economics of interchange fees. First, it explains the nature of two-sided markets/platforms/networks and elaborates on four-party schemes and on the rationale behind interchange fees according to Baxter's model and its later refinements. It also includes the debate about the optimum level of interchange fees and its determination ("tourist test"), and presents the original framework for assessing the impact of interchange fee regulatory reductions for the market participants: consumers, merchants, acquirers, issuers, and card organisations. The framework addresses three areas of concern in reference to the transmission channels of interchange fee reductions (pass-through) and the card scheme domain (triangle: payment organisation, issuer, acquirer). The book discusses the effects of regulatory interchange fee reductions in Australia, USA, Spain, and, most specifically, Poland. It will be of interest to policy makers, card and payments industry practitioners, academics, and students.

Banking in India has a long history and it has evolved over the years passing through various phases. The beginning of modern day banking in India can be traced to 18th century when English traders came to India. The English Agency Houses in Calcutta and Bombay began to conduct banking business besides their commercial activities. Banking in India during the pre-Independence period was largely characterised by the existence of private banks organised as joint stock companies. Most banks were small and had private shareholding of the closely-held variety. They were largely localised and many of them failed. At the time of Independence in 1947, the Indian banking system was weak. The entire banking sector was in the private sector and the credit requirements of agriculture and other needy sectors were ignored. With a view to better aligning the banking system to the needs of planning and economic policy, the policy of social control over the banking sector began in 1967. The year 1969 was a landmark in the history of commercial banking in India. In July of that year, the Government nationalised 14 major commercial banks of the country. In April 1980, Government nationalised 6 more commercial banks. The period beginning from the early 1990s witnessed the transformation of the banking sector as a result of financial sector reforms that were introduced as a part of structural reforms initiated in 1991. This book integrates and brings together the history of modern banking in India, with focus on recent developments in the context of liberalisation and privatisation wave sweeping across world economies.

Bank foundations serve an important purpose in the Italian nonprofit sector. This book presents the legal grounds, areas of intervention, and basic tools involved in the asset management and grant-making activities that such organizations undertake. A special emphasis focuses on the analyses of the organizational structure of bank foundations and the relevant aspects of governance, particularly with regard to the composition, roles, and responsibilities of bank foundation boards. The general reduction in the resources to which they have access requires a new strategy that clearly defines long-term goals and the necessary procedures to achieve them. The topic of strategic planning is therefore also central to this text, which examines its peculiarities, content and governing bodies. The analysis of some case studies provides a better understanding of the manner in which foundations interpret strategic planning and reveals strengths and weaknesses that demand careful attention.

As Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy, says in his Foreword, all economic policy makers today need to re-examine our history to help them confront the challenges of today. This edited volume focuses specifically on the theme of financial innovation and how financial resiliency was achieved in Naples. To highlight both the achievements of the public banks of Naples and their lessons for financial resiliency, the book focuses on financial crises and how they were overcome in Naples in contrast to other European financial systems. The first section focuses on the development of the public banks unique to Naples. The second section compares those with other banking systems and how they responded to the same shock in 1622, caused by the full mobilization of European belligerents to finance their efforts in the Thirty Years War. The next section compares lessons learned in the rest of Europe over the next century and a half. The final section comes back to original start of the narrative arc to suggest ways that today's policymakers and thinkers could use the historical experience of the public banks of Naples to deal better with the ongoing problems stemming from the financial crisis of 2007-08.

"Vera Smith's book remains an authoritative and accurate summary of the theoretical arguments for and against free banking, a subject that has recently received renewed attention."--Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution"The Rationale of Central Banking" was first published in England in 1936. Vera Smith spent her professional career in a variety of research positions. She wrote articles and books on money, banking, economic development, and the labor market and translated into English books by Wilhelm Ropke, Oskar Morgenstern, and Fritz Machlup.This book provides a scholarly review and judicious assessments of the experience and theory that bear on the issues of free banking and central banking. Its wide-ranging discussion identifies both the fallacies in the arguments for central banks and the influential fallacies in the arguments against free banking. Vera Smith's work should play a prominent role in any reappraisal of our monetary institutions.Leland B. Yeager is Ludwig von Mises Distinguished Professor of Economics at Auburn University.

'It's not the people who are bad, it's the culture.' 'Friends turned on me, on my wife.' 'This job involves in some part selling your soul for a good salary.' 'You're sitting there, and you may have just made the decision that destroyed the world.' Winner of the NS Public Prize for Book of the Year 2015 Joris Luyendijk, an investigative journalist, knew almost nothing about banking until he was assigned to investigate the financial sector. Over two years he spoke to more than 200 people - from the competitive investment bankers and elite hedge fund managers to downtrodden back office staff and those made redundant in regular 'culls'. They opened up about what they actually do, about the toxic hiring and firing culture and about the overwhelming technological and mathematical opacity of their work. They admitted that in the crash of 2008, they hoarded food, put their money in gold and prepared to evacuate their children to the countryside. And they agreed that nothing had changed since then.

This handbook is a comprehensive and up to date work of reference that offers a survey of the state of financial geography. With Brexit, a global recession triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as new financial technology threatening and promising to revolutionize finance, the map of the financial world is in a state of transformation, with major implications for development. With these developments in the background, this handbook builds on this unprecedented momentum and responds to these epochal challenges, offering a comprehensive guide to financial geography. Financial geography is concerned with the study of money and finance in space and time, and their impacts on economy, society and nature. The book consists of 29 chapters organized in six sections: theoretical perspectives on financial geography, financial assets and markets, investors, intermediation, regulation and governance, and finance, development and the environment. Each chapter provides a balanced overview of current knowledge, identifying issues and discussing relevant debates. Written in an analytical and engaging style by authors based on six continents from a wide range of disciplines, the work also offers reflections on where the research agenda is likely to advance in the future. The book's key audience will primarily be students and researchers in geography, urban studies, global studies and planning, more or less familiar with financial geography, who seek access to a state-of-the art survey of this area. It will also be useful for students and researchers in other disciplines, such as finance and economics, history, sociology, anthropology, politics, business studies, environmental studies and other social sciences, who seek convenient access to financial geography as a new and relatively unfamiliar area. Finally, it will be a valuable resource for practitioners in the public and private sector, including business consultants and policy-makers, who look for alternative approaches to understanding money and finance.

"Tower of Basel" is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers--including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials--Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank.
Created by the governors of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank in 1930, and protected by an international treaty, the BIS and its assets are legally beyond the reach of any government or jurisdiction. The bank is untouchable. Swiss authorities have no jurisdiction over the bank or its premises. The BIS has just 140 customers but made tax-free profits of $1.17 billion in 2011-2012.
Since its creation, the bank has been at the heart of global events but has often gone unnoticed. Under Thomas McKittrick, the bank's American president from 1940-1946, the BIS was open for business throughout the Second World War. The BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, conducted foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and was used by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a secret contact point to keep the channels of international finance open.
After 1945 the BIS--still behind the scenes--for decades provided the necessary technical and administrative support for the trans-European currency project, from the first attempts to harmonize exchange rates in the late 1940s to the launch of the Euro in 2002. It now stands at the center of efforts to build a new global financial and regulatory architecture, once again proving that it has the power to shape the financial rules of our world. Yet despite its pivotal role in the financial and political history of the last century and during the economic current crisis, the BIS has remained largely unknown--until now.

Globalisation and the governance of the international financial system have arrived at the crossroads, where either a coherent level playing field for the cross-border activities of banks and multinational enterprises is settled upon, or the risk of another crisis will build up again. This book will explore the underlying problems alongside inconsistent economic and financial trends as a guide for researchers, advanced students and professionals to think about the interconnectedness of the factors involved. Readers will gain insights drawn from recent developments in economic theory and empirical research-a toolkit to help them in their future careers in economics and finance-illustrated with an analysis of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath.

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.

This book offers insights into the contemporary issues in banking with a special focus on the recent European regulatory reforms, governance and the performance of firms. Written by prestigious professors and expert academics in the field, the book also covers a diverse set of topics that have gained great importance in this sector such as firm financing, culture, risk and other challenges faced by banks. The book is of interest to scholars, students and professionals in banking.

The book explores the endogenous creators of inside money, the commercial banks, and their key role in igniting the 2007-8 monetary crisis and the aftermath of the Great Recession. This is an area of study overlooked by the traditional approach in the form of neo-classical analysis, a body of theory based on a barter system of exchange. Money has evolved from a construct of barter to become a medium of exchange based on fiat money and loan creation by the banking system, underpinned by legal tender, and therefore, a creature of law. It is not a phenomenon exogenously controlled by the monetary authorities and simply assumed to be a "veil" over the real economy, which just determines the absolute price level. This monograph, in the eyes of the student, represents critical thinking and the realization of a more precise formulation of the endogenous money supply with various features systematically added in an attempt to derive a fully dynamic model of the monetary system, which will be straightforward to visualize and contrast with the benchmark approach.

This book provides a comprehensive overview and insight of virtually all multilateral institutions involved in lending for international socio-economic development. The analysis covers twenty-five MDBs globally by classifying them in three groups based on geographical lending outreach. Unlike similar books and articles, which treat MDBs as banks, this book offers a novel perspective by addressing the specifics of multilateral lending institutions, revealing multiple aspects of their operations, going beyond the "bank" concept towards "knowledge bank," "change agent," and even "benchmark setter." The book reflects on the key role of most MDBs in inspiring and advancing sustainable economic development through transfer of knowledge and funding towards addressing multiple global challenges for the benefit of practitioners, consultants, government officials, borrowers, and researchers interested in MDBs.