Global Finance at Risk: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong

In Global Finance at Risk, two economists whom John Kenneth Galbraith has hailed as "accomplished scholars of the first rank" propose a bold solution to the financial crises that threaten us all: a World Financial Authority with powers to establish worldwide best-practice financial regulation and risk management. Expansion of finance in industrialized economies, including that of the nineteenth-century United States, was accompanied by the same kind of turbulence now afflicting Asia, Russia, and Latin America. Then, the solution was to establish national banking and securities regulators, create deposit insurance, and empower lenders of last resort. But in our increasingly globalized times, an account opened at a local bank can be based on bad debt from anywhere in the world, including places outside the jurisdiction of those national agencies. And when banks fail, it is not only their account holders who suffer, but all of us. This is why, argue John Eatwell and Lance Taylor in this timely and urgent book, effective regulation of international finance is crucial to the economic health of all nations. Global Finance at Risk casts a welcome light on the deepening intricacies of world financial systems.

John Eatwell is President of Queens' College, Cambridge, and a member of Britain's House of Lords.

Lance Taylor, the Arnhold Professor of International Cooperation and Development at the New School University, New York, is also the director of the New School's Center for Economic Policy Analysis.