The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Finance
Author: Peter Stalker
An incisive introduction to global finance – where money comes from, the current mechanisms and the need for control and reform.
Foreword, Contents and Introduction
Reviews
As you'd expect from the title, it's a very digestable overview of the international finance system, starting from what 'money' actually is, through the increasingly weird and wonderful activities of banks, to the root causes and effects of the recent mess. As such, it's a great introduction, very clearly written, and spiced with some fascinating historical nuggets - it's a rare treat to have such lucid accounts of both the origins of money itself, and the origins of the credit crunch. - Tim Chapman, writer and photographer.
The book explains the basic concepts of finance – how money is created, and how decisions by banking and other financial service corporations are determining the fate of billions of people.
Right from the introduction the guide sets recent events into context, indicating how the flows of money directed by an unaccountable elite increasingly shape economic, political and social activity.
It traces the origins of money, as a source of exchange and a store of value, and the many weird and wonderful forms it now takes – visible and invisible.
How banks, investment and retail, make money and profits, and hold countries to ransom when they make losses. How companies finance their operations through stocks, shares and bonds and complex derivatives that are becoming increasingly remote from real-world activities.
It also includes chapters on global currency exchange, alternative systems of banking, including microfinance, government regulation or lack of it, international institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, and crucially a final chapter on ways of bringing global finance under control.
About the Author: Peter Stalker is a former co-editor of the New Internationalist who now works as a consultant to a number of UN agencies.
Read Peter Stalker’s New Internationalist blog post about The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Finance.
| Format: | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Dimensions: | 180mm x 110mm |
| Page extent: | 144 |
| Publication date: | October 2009 |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1-906523-18-3 |
Date added: September 23, 2010
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