The Bankers: The Next Generation The New Worlds Money Credit Banking Electronic Age (Truman Talley) - Softcover

Mayer, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452272645 ISBN 13: 9780452272644

Publisher: Plume, 1998

Synopsis

A thoroughly revised and updated version of the author's best-seller illuminates the workings of the money, credit, and banking institutions in the electronic age, showing investors where the trends are leading and how to profit from them. Reprint.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Much has happened to America's depository institutions in the more than two decades since Mayer wrote The Bankers, and his elegant update provides an informed guide to the convulsive change that has brought a remote, buttoned-down profession into the rowdy, high-tech world of financial services. Before assessing the past, present, and future of banking, the author assesses the nature of money, a demanding task that nonetheless permits him to examine the role commercial banks play in the way debts were, are, and could be paid. Moving on to ATMs, so-called smart cards, and the Internet's boundless potential, he documents why even multinational banks have good reason to fear problem-solving enterprises like Microsoft that have been poaching on their hitherto protected precincts. Mayer next evaluates the decline of bank lending, a drop that occurred despite mergers which have created regional and national powerhouses. He also offers an astute appreciation of the concurrent trend to gamble in futures trading, a high-stakes zero-sum game in which risky derivative instruments are trumps. Having reviewed the sudden death of the UK's venerable Barings Bank (to date, the highest profile casualty of casino capitalism), the author casts a cold eye on the S&L disaster in America. From this sore subject, he segues gracefully into a detailed appraisal of the many agencies that regulate the domestic banking industry in one way or another. In a concluding chapter, Mayer ventures provocative opinions on the successful efforts of the Federal Reserve System (which has a vested interest in sorting checks) to stymie private-sector rivals eager to establish a utility-like clearinghouse system that would offer universal access (at reasonable rates) to individuals and entities needing to transfer money in or out of the country. Engrossing and perceptive perspectives on developments that could signal the twilight of traditional over-the-counter banking. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Twenty-two years after his bestseller, The Bankers, Mayer returns with another kaleidoscopic look at the world of banking. While much is interesting here, the zigzag narrative can be tough to follow and seem oddly chatty. First, Mayer discusses the nature of money, the rise of checking?and perhaps its demise, because Europeans pay most of their bills through a central agency such as the post office?the emergence of credit cards and the potential for cash-value "smart cards." Then he reaches back to chart the history of banks and their civic role, the recent wave of bank mergers and banks' dicey ventures into computer-based trading, devoting a chapter to the demise of the British bank Barings. Next he examines the role of government, focusing on the S&L fiasco, in which banks were free to make bad loans while deposits were insured. Finally, Mayer looks at the future, where he sees traditional banks cutting jobs as they consolidate, relying on computers and plastic, and an increasing number of nonbanks (brokerage houses, etc.) performing banking duties. He suggests reforms to aid the poor, who are now shunned by banks, and predicts that new finance companies will take over some of banks' traditional lending roles; yet he does not offer specific proposals for regulation of banks' investment practices.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0452272645
• ISBN 13: 9780452272644
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 544