The Money Trap: Escaping the Grip of Global Finance
by Robert Pringle
Why have the efforts of governments and central banks to revive economic growth and solve the problems left by the global financial crisis met with such limited success? Why have markets been periodically paralysed by fear and uncertainty?
This book argues that governments have been using the wrong policy weapons. But these can at best be only temporary palliatives. They have relied on the traditional tools of low interest rates and monetary ease, plus tighter bank regulation and new macro-prudential toolkits.
The Money Trap brings together the main strands of the current policy-oriented discussions and analyses the solutions, providing readers with an integrated guide and analysis to the events in the four years after 2007, and their antecedents in the development of the system since the early 1970s, drawing on Pringle’s extensive contacts and work as a leading economics editor over the past 40 years.
The Money Trap provides you with an understanding of:
- Why the solution – the way out of the trap – must involve the establishment of a new international monetary standard and go with the grain of financial markets.
- What the great economists of the 20th century, and contemporary scholars, have to say about the choice of a monetary standard.
- How radical reform or if necessary elimination of banking as we know it could be carried out.
- The growing demand for reform from emerging markets, drawing on the author’s long-standing top-level world-wide contacts.
- Why seismic shifts in the geo-political power balances makes fundamental reform unavoidable.
- Why the insistent pressure from the seemingly never-ending crisis will make reform acceptable even to governments of major countries that currently resist it.
- An outline of the broad shape of a reform package, integrating the re-establishment of an international monetary system and a transformation of banking.