Shadow Networks: Financial Disorder and the System that Caused Crisis

The 2007-08 financial crisis surprised many economists and the public. But how did the crisis come about, why was it so deep, and why has the clean-up been so slow and painful? Many accounts of the crisis focus on renegade activity in marginal financial sectors. Shadow Networks challenges this pervading view and sets out to demonstrate that, far from a dissident branch, the shadow finance that initiated the crisis is tightly networked with, and highly profitable for, bank-based finance. The collapse was not an accident, but baked into the system of finance from the start. Shadow Networks traces the complex web of power that caused crisis and gives vivid descriptions of the actors in the quarter century leading up to 2007 to explain how the now decade-long crisis took shape. Shadow Networks: Financial Disorder and the System that Caused Crisis is a probing examination of the roles of the powerful elite. It traces the networks and institutions that support a finance-focused, market centered model of economy and society from their ascendancy to their surprising resilience in the face of manifest failures.

Table of Contents:
IntroductionI. The World of Shadow Finance 1: Greed and the Adventures of Homo Economicus 2: Shadows in Times of Crash 3: The Whole Alphabet Soup Appendix A: The Realm of Shadow Finance: How and How Much?II. Who Decides? Deregulation and Deregulators 4: Big Business and Family Business 5: The Liberalizers: Justifying Free-Market Finance 6: Deeds and Doctrines of the Central Bankers Appendix B: Skeptics and Critics vs. True BelieversIII. Plutocracy and Oligarchy 7: Consensus by Schooling and Power: The Indoctrination of the Elites 8: The Revolving DoorIV. The Web of Power 9: The Wild Side of the Street 10: Capital Controls: The Emergency Brakes Appendix C: Can the Institutions Be TrustedV. The World We Live In 11: A Long Stagnation, or Capitalism without Growth? 12: China, A New Global Player 13: The Shadow Society and Its Fictitious Capital

About the Author :
Francisco Louçã is Professor of Economics at ISEG, Lisbon University, Portugal. He is a Member of the State Council, and elected advisory board to the President of Portugal, and of the Consulting Council of the Central Bank of Portugal. He was a member of the Portuguese Parliament from 1999 to 2012, and helped found the Left Bloc party. His books have been translated into eleven languages, and include Turbulence in Economics (Edward Elgar, 1997), As Time Goes By (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Years of High Econometrics (Routledge, 2007). Michael Ash is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Co-Director of the Corporate Toxics Information Project of the Political Economy Research Institute. He was previously Princeton Project 55 Fellow at the Trenton Office of Policy Studies, and Staff Labor Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Ash's 2013 paper Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? (with Thomas Hernson and Robert Pollin) spurred worldwide reassessment of austerity and won awards from Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy Magazine, which named the authors among the 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013.

Review :
Shadow Networks is a tour de force. This wonderful book by Francisco Louçã and Michael Ash gives us a fascinating global view of the of the underlying forces, people, and financial institutions that generate massive wealth at the top and instability and insecurity for many of the rest of us. With numerous entertaining vignettes of the people in power, from bankers to politicians to economists, Louçã and Ash weave the destructive texture of our global financial system, but manage to bring it down to the human level. Rigorous yet lively and easy to read, Shadow Networks will be a great text for students that want to understand the financial mess we are in, and anyone who wants to chart a new, more stable and egalitarian course forward. That the world has financialized is not news. We live, as a famous newspaper has it, "in Financial Times. But we tend to see only one aspect of financialization - the bit that we can sometimes count - the bit that goes bust with depressing regularity - the shadow banking system. What we miss is hidden in the shadows. The intellectual and political networks that sustain and nurture financialization as a social and political project. In this work Louçã and Ash seek to bring into the light those forces that would prefer to stay in the shadows.