Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets [Hardcover]

Former Federal Reserve chair Greenspan recently said that the risk management paradigm is broken; thus our understanding of financial regulation no longer makes sense. More generally, the current financial crisis obliges us to rethink the relationships among financial markets and governments. In Out of Crisis financial analyst David Westbrook illuminates the intellectual, business, and policy errors that have led us into the present morass. Through a vivid legal and political analysis he shows how the ideologies of the right and left have distorted financial thinking and policy. Learning from these errors, the book sketches the emergence of a new understanding of risk management and bureaucratic regulation. Out of Crisis begins the tasks of rethinking the structures that constitute financial markets and exploring how such structures may be strengthened. Taking responsibility for the markets we build to do so much of our society's work, we may yet become mature capitalists.Analyses the intellectual and policy errors that have led us into crisis and sketches a new paradigm for risk management and market structure.The recent crisis involved an extraordinary sequence of financial market failures. Too many economists had assumed that that could never happen, partly because they had not appreciated the wider social, legal, and institutional context which normally enables such markets to operate. In this beautifully written and gripping book, David Westbrook employs wide-ranging social science skills to make us aware of this wider context, and thereby to see markets, and their occasional failures, in a new light. I found it fascinating, original and illuminating.
Charles Goodhart is an expert in money and banking, with a long career in the Bank of England, on the UK Monetary Policy Committee, and at the London School of Economics and Political Science

Professor Westbrooks fascinating new book is not just an exegesis of the recent finanl“I