Finance is Beautiful!

Robert Shiller has written an op-ed piece in City A.M., where he talks about the importance and beauty of finance (hat tip - Graham Brownlow). Shiller has a unique vision for the future of finance as you will see from the quotes below taken from his op-ed.

There is still work to do in making finance into a more effective tool for advancing our fundamental goals. Finance needs to be democratised, to serve all the people more effectively than it has been. It needs to be humanised, so that it respects human values, and human foibles, in a grander design for society. Financial innovations, from practitioners, self regulatory organisations and government regulators, are still needed.

Young people who feel a moral obligation to exert leadership for positive good in society should well consider finance as a field to enter now. It puts them on the cutting edge where human activities are moulded and directed, it gets them involved in the minutiae of activities that are privately valued, but often little talked about in most public discourse, and in opportunities to improve these activities. And there is real beauty in doing that.

The Economics of Global Warming

The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press .

The Failure of Herstatt Bank

As an undergraduate, I was taught about the failure of Herstatt Bank in 1974 and Herstatt risk. This bank was only the 35th largest bank in Germany at the time so why would anyone be interested in studying its failure? Herstatt failed because of its involvement in risky foreign exchange business. When it closed its doors on 26 June 1974, counterparty banks (mainly in New York) had not received dollars due to them because of time-zone differences - this is known as settlement risk. The cross-jurisdictional implications of its failure resulted in the Bank for International Settlements setting up the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and Herstatt's failure was a key reason for the establishment of real-time gross settlements systems, which ensures that payments between two banks are executed in real time. The Bank of England's Ben Norman has an interesting post on Herstatt over at the Bank's new blog ( Bank Underground ). As well as giving an excellent overview of

Finance: Past, Present and Future

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