Suchergebnisse

"The financial collapse of 2007-8 has questioned our assumptions about the underlying basis for stability in the financial system, and Anthony Hotson here offers an important reassessment of the development of London's money and credit markets since the great currency crisis of 1695. He shows how this period has seen a series of intermittent financial crises interspersed with successive attempts to find ways and means of stabilizing the system. He emphasises, in particular, the importance of various principles of sound banking practice, developed in the late nineteenth century, that helped to stabilize London's money and credit markets. He shows how these principles informed a range of market practices that limited aggressive forms of funding, and discouraged speculative lending. A tendency to downplay the importance of these regulatory practices encouraged a degree of complacency about their removal, with consequences right through to the present day."

In its 1981 Budget, the Thatcher government discarded Keynesian counter-cyclical policies and cut Britain's public sector deficit in the depths of the worst UK recession since the 1930s. Controversially, the government argued that fiscal contraction would produce economic growth. In this specially commissioned volume, contributors examine recently released archives alongside firsthand accounts from key players within No. 10 Downing Street, HM Treasury and the Bank of England, to provide the first comprehensive treatment of this critical event in British economic history. They assess the empirical and theoretical basis for expansionary fiscal contraction, drawing clear parallels with contemporary debates on austerity in Europe, USA and Japan in the wake of the recent global financial crisis. This timely and thoughtful book will have broad appeal among economists, political scientists, historians and policy makers