“Mervyn King may well have written the most important book to come out of the financial crisis. Agree or disagree, King’s visionary ideas deserve the attention of everyone from economics students to heads of state.” —Lawrence H. Summers Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his ten years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking, the keys to modern finance. The Industrial Revolution built the foundation of our modern capitalist age. Yet the flowering of technological innovations during that dynamic period relied on the widespread adoption of two much older ideas: the creation of paper money and the invention of banks that issued credit. We take these systems for granted today, yet at their core both ideas were revolutionary and almost magical. Common paper became as precious as gold, and risky long-term loans were transformed into safe short-term bank deposits. As King argues, this is financial alchemy—the creation of extraordinary financial powers that defy reality and common sense. Faith in these powers has led to huge benefits; the liquidity they create has fueled economic growth for two centuries now. However, they have also produced an unending string of economic disasters, from hyperinflations to banking collapses to the recent global recession and current stagnation. How do we reconcile the potent strengths of these ideas with their inherent weaknesses? King draws on his unique experience to present fresh interpretations of these economic forces and to point the way forward for the global economy. His bold solutions cut through current overstuffed and needlessly complex legislation to provide a clear path to durable prosperity and the end of overreliance on the alchemy of our financial ancestors.
Life story of a colourful circus man, Mervyn King, as told to the author. The focus is on King's life from 1915, when his family gave him away to a travelling circus where he spent his time as a lion tamer, animal trainer and boss tentman.
Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book, now with a preface on COVID-19. Invented numbers offer a false sense of security; we need instead robust narratives that give us the confidence to manage uncertainty. “An elegant and careful guide to thinking about personal and social economics, especially in a time of uncertainty. The timing is impeccable." — Christine Kenneally, New York Times Book Review Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless. The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.
Mervyn Warren offers you a journey into the preaching of Martin Luther King Jr., a homiletical biography exploring King's sermons, use of language, delivery and more.
The audit profession is at a tipping point. Without significant innovation in its business model, staff recruitment strategies and audit execution processes, the audit profession may not remain relevant in the 21st century. The number of claims against auditors has significantly increased over the past twenty years due to the spate of corporate and audit failures early in the 21st century (Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, etc.). Regulation to monitor professional and ethical standards has increased, leading audit firms to feel under even more financial pressure. In addition, the investor community is calling for greater insight and foresight from auditors. These challenges, coupled with the unlimited liability regime of auditors still applicable in many jurisdictions, are making audit firms and regulators nervous as to the systemic risk of another one of the Big 4 failing. And yet, the audit profession is in place to protect businesses, their wider stakeholder groups, including clients and investors, and society at large. Therefore, this book asks the important question about the profession’s future and engages a broad readership in the discussion of audit failure and reform. Intended to help readers to get up to speed with the issues and possible solutions quickly, this book assists directors, investors, business people and regulators, especially those with a non-financial background, to gain a greater understanding of the challenges and threats being faced by the audit profession, which in turn could disrupt the capital market and affect businesses across the globe. The book outlines the critical success factors needed for a sustainable audit profession.
The legendary Greek figure Orpheus was said to have possessed magical powers capable of moving all living and inanimate things through the sound of his lyre and voice. Over time, the Orphic theme has come to indicate the power of music to unsettle, subvert, and ultimately bring down oppressive realities in order to liberate the soul and expand human life without limits. The liberating effect of music has been a particularly important theme in twentieth-century African American literature. The nine original essays in Black Orpheus examines the Orphic theme in the fiction of such African American writers as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Mackey, Sherley Anne Williams, Ann Petry, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, and Toni Morrison. The authors discussed in this volume depict music as a mystical, shamanistic, and spiritual power that can miraculously transform the realities of the soul and of the world. Here, the musician uses his or her music as a weapon to shield and protect his or her spirituality. Written by scholars of English, music, women's studies, American studies, cultural theory, and black and Africana studies, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection ultimately explore the thematic, linguistic structural presence of music in twentieth-century African American fiction.
Integrate is an easy read guide for people in business about the new way of thinking in running a company today. Businesses, large and small, have the same issues to contend with: greater expectations of their stakeholders, rising consumer power in the digital information age, environmental constraints, economic uncertainty in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and social uncertainty on rising income inequality. Doing business today is quite different from the past. Different corporate tools are needed. One of the four corporate tools for today's business is integrated thinking. This extends strategy and daily management beyond the pure financial to encompass the social and environmental factors that deeply affect a company's future viability in the 21st century. Integrated thinking leads to another tool - the integrated report. This tells the company's story of how it creates value and how it can create value in the future. The global financial crisis showed that a more understandable and holistic form of company reporting is crucially needed. This book offers practical guidance on integrated thinking and the integrated report.
ÔRichard Iley and Mervyn Lewis have written an extremely useful book on the global economy since the Western financial crisis. Well-written, well-informed and easily accessible to non-economists, it offers much good sense about many questions, from the future of the renminbi to that of the United States. They wisely urge that, as ChinaÕs rise continues, the United States should engage with China rather than resist it. This is a book full of good judgement that deserves a wide readership.Õ Ð Martin Jacques, author, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order ÔThe interplay between the macro-economic imbalances, notably in the relationship between the USA and China, and the more micro-economic shortcomings of the WestÕs financial systems, particularly the lax regulation, forms the centre-piece of this excellently written book. In the disputes about the relative culpability of China and the USA for current macro-economic problems, they tend to support the Chinese arguments, and give well-considered arguments for so doing. This book provides an excellent, clear, and at times provocative, assessment of the course of the macro-monetary problems of the world since the Ògreat recessionÓ struck.Õ Ð Charles A.E. Goodhart, London School of Economics, UK This thought-provoking book addresses challenging questions raised in light of the aftermath of the global financial crisis that saw an accelerated rise in the economic growth of China and other emerging market economies, while the US, Japan and Europe have laboured under the great recession. The authors examine global post-crisis reordering in a long-run context, identify five fundamental flaws in global bank business models and document the explosion of gross capital flows. They tackle difficult-to-answer lines of enquiry such as: can zero interest rates and quantitative easing lift the advanced world back to growth, or will they be dragged down by the overhang of debt? Might costs on savers, retirees and distortions to the pattern of global financing render zero rates counter-productive? What issues face the BRICs? Could ÔChina as number oneÕ see the renminbi soon challenge the dollar and the euro as a major international currency? Providing a detailed analysis of the post-crisis world and the issues posed by the rise of China and emerging market economies relative to developed countries, this book will prove a stimulating account for academics, students and researchers in the fields of economics, money, finance and banking, and world trade. Bank and market economists as well as policymakers based in central banks, governments and think-tanks will also find this book to be an invaluable reference tool.
Corporate governance principles, codes and regulations have developed over the past few years to cater for the challenging realities of a changing world. These advances come in the wake of revelations of weaknesses in organisational leadership and structures, and amid vocal calls for transparency. Corporate governance as a tool for sustainable development of businesses is now more relevant than ever. A recent trend has been to approach corporate governance principles from an 'outcomes based' perspective. This requires businesses to consider the benefits of good governance properly applied and fully achieved. Outcomes-Based Governance: A Modern Approach to Corporate Governance was written to demystify outcomes-based governance and emerging corporate governance trends. The book also aims to aid their adaptability in emerging economies. The authors, from South Africa and Nigeria, have decades of experience and knowledge to share.
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