Today's global financial system bears little resemblance to what it was at the end of the twentieth century. Shadow banking—financial activity taking place outside existing regulatory frameworks—has grown so important that it now serves as the backbone of the entire system. The shadow banking system, however, is highly unstable and the main reason why the financial system has remained in crisis mode since the 2008 financial crisis. To maintain stability, central banks like the Fed and the European Central Bank have come to use radical new monetary policy instruments which were inconceivable until very recently. Without intervention on the part of central banks, existing financial systems would completely collapse. As Joscha Wullweber shows, there has been a radical change in the state-market nexus. With governments refraining from strong and comprehensive fiscal and financial regulatory policies, central banks have become the main stabilizing force and the nodal point of financial circulation. These overburdened institutions are called on to make near-daily interventions to avert crisis. Wullweber calls this historic phase central bank capitalism. His book offers a lucid account of our current state of permanent crisis with its new dilemmas and paradoxes that pose enormous challenges to financial and economic stability.

A bold history of the rise of central banks, showing how institutions designed to steady the ship of global finance have instead become as destabilizing as they are dominant. While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisis. How do we explain this development? Drawing on original sources ignored in previous research, The Rise of Central Banks offers a groundbreaking account of the origins and consequences of central banks’ increasing clout over economic policy. Many commentators argue that ideas drove change, indicating a shift in the 1970s from Keynesianism to monetarism, concerned with controlling inflation. Others point to the stagflation crises, which put capitalists and workers at loggerheads. Capitalists won, the story goes, then pushed deregulation and disinflation by redistributing power from elected governments to markets and central banks. Both approaches are helpful, but they share a weakness. Abstracting from the evolving practices of central banking, they provide inaccurate accounts of recent policy changes and fail to explain how we arrived at the current era of easy money and excessive finance. By comparing developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland, Leon Wansleben finds that central bankers’ own policy innovations were an important ingredient of change. These innovations allowed central bankers to use privileged relationships with expanding financial markets to govern the economy. But by relying on markets, central banks fostered excessive credit growth and cultivated an unsustainable version of capitalism. Through extensive archival work and numerous interviews, Wansleben sheds new light on the agency of bureaucrats and calls upon society and elected leaders to direct these actors’ efforts to more progressive goals.

The role of central banks as a hinge on which the financial system rests has returned to the top of the political agenda in recent years. The global financial crisis has resulted in many changes for central banks, including renewed power in financial supervision and reduced restrictions in their implementation of monetary policies. This book argues that central banks play a key role in financial systems, presenting the European Central Bank as a specific example of an institution that uses its uniquely independent position and wide margins of discretion to provide an array of important functions. It illustrates how central banks promote the security and efficiency of payment systems, pursue price stability, and accommodate the optimal utilization of the resources, labour and capital available to an economy. Stabilising Capitalism demonstrates how these institutions also aid in dealing with the risk of financial collapse and permit the continuity of public expenditure when the government is unable to place securities in the bond market. The author concludes by suggesting that although many consider the idea of this role for central banks to be outdated, these institutions form the root of the capitalist market economy and act as a bastion against financial instability.

Central banks have become the go-to institution of modern economies. In the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, they injected trillions of dollars of liquidity – through a process known as quantitative easing – first to prevent financial meltdown and later to stimulate the economy. The untold story behind these measures, and behind the changing roles of central banks generally, is that they have come at a considerable cost. Central banks argue we had no choice. This book offers a powerfully original examination of why this claim is false. Using examples from Europe and the US, the authors present and analyse three specific concerns about the way central banks in developed economies operate today. Firstly, they show how unconventional monetary policies have created significant unintended negative consequences in terms of inequalities in income and wealth. They go on to argue that central banks may have become independent of governments, but have instead become worryingly dependent on financial markets. They then proceed to analyse how central bankers, despite being the undisputed experts on monetary policy, can still err and suffer from multiple forms of bias. This book is a sobering and urgent wake-up call for policy-makers and anyone interested in how our monetary and financial system really works.

This book reflects on the innovations that central banks have introduced since the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers to improve their modes of intervention, regulation and resolution of financial markets and financial institutions. Authors from both academia and policy circles explore these innovations through four approaches: ‘Bank Capital Regulation’ examines the Basel III agreement; ‘Bank Resolution’ focuses on effective regimes for regulating and resolving ailing banks; ‘Central Banking with Collateral-Based Finance’ develops thought on the challenges that market-based finance pose for the conduct of central banking; and ‘Where Next for Central Banking’ examines the trajectory of central banking and its new, central role in sustaining capitalism.

It is now a commonplace argument that capitalism is under threat. But what is the underlying problem? This brilliant book by the bestselling author of The Rotten Heart of Europe argues that both capitalism's defenders and its detractors are wrong. The principal culprit is not the moral failure of individuals, nor structural failures in politics and society -- glaring though failures of both sorts have been. Instead, there has been a catastrophic intellectual failure. The academic macroeconomics industry and the central banks who are both patron and client of that industry are themselves in the process of destroying capitalism. In this epoch-defining book, internationally acclaimed economist Bernard Connolly argues that getting off the conveyor belt to destruction is possible, but it will require a profound reorientation of social structures and a whole new understanding of economics. 'Bernard Connolly is one of the five most prescient global financial strategists in the world today. Everything he writes is light years ahead of the pack.' -- David Smick, The International Economy 'Bernard Connolly is a seer; one of the most penetrating intellects I have ever encountered. This book matters. And it will be unmissable.' -- Paul Tudor, Tudor Investment Corporation 'There are plenty of books already out on the subject. Few are written or likely to be written by an economist with the depth of understanding of both the political and economic drivers of the shifting sands of the west as Bernard Connolly.' -- MoneyWeek

Capitalism, Not Globalism shows that, while much has been made of recent changes in the international economy, the mechanisms by which politicians control the economy have not changed throughout the postwar period. Challenging both traditional and revisionist globalization theorists, William Roberts Clark argues that increased financial integration has led to neither a widening nor a narrowing of partisan differences in macroeconomic polices or outcomes. Rather, he shows that the absence of partisan differences in macroeconomic policy is a long-standing feature of democratic capitalist societies that can be traced to politicians' attempts to use the economy to help them survive in office. Changes in the structural landscape such as increased capital mobility and central bank independence do not necessarily diminish the ability of politicians to control the economy, but they do shape the strategies they use to do so. In a world of highly mobile capital, politicians manipulate monetary policy to create macroeconomic expansions prior to elections only if the exchange rate is flexible and the central bank is subservient. But they use fiscal policy to induce political business cycles when the exchange rate is fixed or the central bank is independent. William Roberts Clark is Assistant Professor, Department of Politics, New York University.