End of Finance

* Book: The End of Finance. By Massimo Amato and Luca Fantacci. Wiley / Polity, 2011

URL = http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0745651119.html

Description

"The ‘end’ or purpose of finance is to be found in the social institutions by which the making and acceptance of promises of payment are made possible - that is, the creation and cancellation of debt contracts within a specified time frame. Amato and Fantacci argue that developments in the modern financial system by which debts are securitized has endangered this fundamental credit/debt structure. The illusion has been created that debts are universally liquid in the sense that they need not be redeemed but can be continually sold on in increasingly extensive global markets. What appears to have reduced the riskiness of default for individual agents has in fact increased the fragility of the system as a whole.

The authors trace the origins of this profound transformation backwards in time, not just to the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s but to the birth of capitalist finance in the mercantile networks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This long historical perspective and deep analysis of the nature of finance enables the authors to tackle the challenges we face today in a fresh way."

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Phenomenology

I. Do we know what the financial markets are?

II. At the root of the possibility of crisis: liquidity and risk

III. What is credit?

IV. What is money?

V. Finance starting from the end

VI. Capitalism and debt: a matter of life and death

Part Two: History

I. From credit risk to liquidity risk (2008)

II. The globalization of capital (1973)

III. ‘Fiat dollar'. And the world saw that it was good (1971)

IV. The Eurodollar chimera (1958)

V. The European Payments Union (1950)

VI. Bretton Woods: the plan that might have made it (1944)

VII. Bretton Woods: the system that found implementation (1944)

VIII. The crisis paradigm (1929)

IX. Orchestra Rehearsal

X. Money before and after the gold standard (1717)

XI. The Bank of England and power currency (1694)

XII. The International Currency of the Trade Fairs (1579)

Part Three: Politics

I. Double or quits?

II. The way out of liquidity: the Gordian knot and utopia

III. Prevention or cure? The structural paradox of the anti-crisis policies

IV. The other finance

V. The (rare) "green shoots" of a possible reform

VI. If not now, when?