Description
Many accounts of the financial crisis focus on renegade activity in marginal financial sectors. This book argues that far from this pervading view the shadow finance that initiated the crisis is tightly networked with bank-based finance. It traces these networks to explain how the now decade-long crisis took shape. Francisco Louca is Professor of Economics at ISEG, Lisbon University, Portugal. He is a Member of the State Council, and elected advisory board to the President of Portugal, and of the Consulting Council of the Central Bank of Portugal. He was a member of the Portuguese Parliament from 1999 to 2012, and helped found the Left Bloc party. His books have been translated into eleven languages, and include Turbulence in Economics (Edward Elgar, 1997), As Time Goes By (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Years of High Econometrics (Routledge, 2007); Michael Ash is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Co-Director of the Corporate Toxics Information Project of the Political Economy Research Institute. He was previously Princeton Project 55 Fellow at the Trenton Office of Policy Studies, and Staff Labor Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Ash’s 2013 paper Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? (with Thomas Hernson and Robert Pollin) spurred worldwide reassessment of austerity and won awards from Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy Magazine, which named the authors among the 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013. Introduction; I. The World of Shadow Finance; 1 Greed and the Adventures of Homo Economicus; 2 Shadows in Times of Crash; 3 The Whole Alphabet Soup; Appendix A: The Realm of Shadow Finance: How and How Much?; II. Who Decides? Deregulation and Deregulators; 4 Big Business and Family Business; 5 The Liberalizers: Justifying Free-Market Finance; 6 Deeds and Doctrines of the Central Bankers; Appendix B: Skeptics and Critics vs. True Believers; III. Plutocracy and Oligarchy; 7 Consensus by Schooling and Power: The Indoctrination of the Elites; 8 The Revolving Door; IV. The Web of Power; 9 The Wild Side of the Street; 10 Capital Controls: The Emergency Brakes; Appendix C: Can the Institutions be Trusted; V. The World We Live In; 11 A Long Stagnation, or Capitalism without Growth?; 12 China, A New Global Player; 13 The Shadow Society and its Fictitious Capital
