MACMILLAN Social Finance: Shadow Banking During the Global Financial Crisis

Review “Social Finance is an indispensable handbook for policymakers and academics interested in financial stability. Neil Shenai supports his new theory with evidence from the global financial crisis while providing a roadmap for thinking about risks in the global economy’s increasingly important shadow banking system.” (Panicos Demetriades, Professor of Economics at the University of Leicester; former Governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus and member of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank, UK) “Neil Shenai’s rare combination of expertise in economics, financial markets, and policymaking underpins the insightful and relevant scholarship of Social Finance. This book’s important contributions to the understanding of financial instability and the proper policy responses thereto are all the more timely given that now, roughly a decade after the global financial crisis, we must consider the prospect of the next downturn in the global credit and economic cycle in the coming years.” (John Fagan, President and Co-Founder, Markets Policy Partners, Inc. USA ) “Scholarly policy analysis is often hostage to elegant new models that explain a world that does not exist because it is professionally safe, even advantageous, to do so. Neil Shenai breaks that mold with this book, a scholarly exploration robustly grounded in the enduring relevance of John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky. Bravo!” (Paul McCulley, Senior Fellow in Financial Macroeconomics, Cornell Law School; former Chief Economist and Managing Director, Pacific Investment Management Company, USA) “As memories of the crisis fade, Neil Shenai has developed a theory of financial instability that is urgently needed. In this must-read book, Shenai offers concrete lessons about shadow banking during the crisis with ample evidence and in clear prose. Policymakers and market practitioners should read Social Finance to imagine and prepare for future instability – its drivers, triggers, and potential remedies.” (Daleep Singh, Executive Vice President and Head of the Markets Group, Federal Reserve Bank of New York; former Acting Assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary)    Product Description 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.   From the Back Cover 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