This book presents a new, inter-disciplinary framework of financial instability that builds on the Post-Keynesian model of financial crises in the tradition of Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger. It reincorporates John Maynard Keynes' insights on economic conventions to explain how market participants construct stable (but fragile) markets and why financial crises tend to take us by surprise. It borrows from scholarship on crises in international relations theory to examine how defied expectations can trigger panics in fragile financial systems. And it draws on perspectives from international political economy to show how elites' foundational economic beliefs drive their responses to crises and how the effectiveness of their interventions depends on their credibility with the marketplace. The results of interviews with some of the world's leading investors in Los Angeles, London, New York, and Toronto illustrate the utility of this new paradigm via a casestudy of shadow banking during the global financial crisis. A close examination of primary and secondary sources and quantitative evidence complement these first-hand accounts. All told, this book's model offers a viable heuristic device for thinking about financial instability, which will be relevant to academics, policy makers, portfolio managers, and students.

Auteur

Neil Shenai was a Professorial Lecturer at American University's School of International Service in Washington, DC from 2013-15. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where he served as an Adjunct Lecturer of International Economics from 2011-16. He is currently a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Résumé

How do market participants construct stable markets? Why do crises that seem inevitable after-the-fact routinely take market participants by surprise? What forces trigger financial panics, and why does uncertainty lead to market volatility? How do economic elites respond to financial distress, and why are some regulatory interventions more effective than others? Social Finance: Shadow Banking during the Global Financial Crisis answers these questions by presenting a new, economic conventions-based model of financial crises. This model emerges from a theoretical synthesis of several intellectual traditions, including Keynesian epistemology, Hyman Minsky's asset market theory, economic sociology, and international relations theory. Social Finance uses this new paradigm to explain instability in the global shadow banking system during the global financial crisis. And it presents the results of interviews with some of the world's leading investors who saw over $2 trillion in annual order flows and managed over $160 billion in assets to provide first-hand accounts of markets in crisis. Written in accessible prose, Social Finance will appeal to a broad audience of academics, policymakers, and practitioners interested in understanding the drivers of financial stability in the twenty-first century.

Contenu

Chapter 1. McCulley's Warning: Minsky, Economic Conventions, and Shadow Banking.- Chapter 2. Economic Conventions and Financial Crises: The Theory of Social Finance*.- *Chapter 3. Federal Reserve Monetary Policy, Economic Conventions, and the Housing Bubble.- Chapter 4. The Rise of Fragile Finance: Conventional Expectations, Bond Ratings, and Bank Capital.- Chapter 5. Regulators as Liquidity Providers of Last Resort.- Chapter 6. Markets After Lehman: Convention Uncertainty, Instability, and Intervention.- Chapter 7. Conclusions and Extensions of Conventions and Financial Stability.- Interview appendix.