Call for Papers- WEA Online Conference “Food and Justice”

The World Economics Association Online Conferences format, designed by Edward Fullbrook and Grazia Ietto-Gillies, makes full use of the digital technologies in the pursuit of the commitments included in the WEA Manifesto: plurality, reality and relevance, diversity, ethical conduct, and global democracy.

The Call for papers for the current conference Food and Justice is now open.

Food production has always been present in the economic debate because of the concern about population growth and demographic changes. In spite of the Malthusian concern, new methods of food production have emerged which allowed the increase in food supply. Technological changes, however, have not occurred uniformly throughout the world. Indeed, some countries have managed to expand their production and trade surpluses while situations of hunger remained a reality in many parts of the world.

In addition to technological factors in food production, other political and economic issues are involved in the access to food. In the 21^st century, the scenario of changes in food production means that even with a larger supply of food, many people, mainly the poor ones, still live in a situation of starvation. In addition to the challenges in food access, other relevant issue is food waste. Actually, a large percentage of the world food production is lost throughout the different stages of production, transportation, processing and consumption. Indeed, among the current concerns, there is the need to search for actions that can reduce the food losses that could face the situation of hunger of millions of people.

The agriculture and food industries are part of the list of “global” sectors. Indeed, a global network of institutions supplies the worldwide food markets. In this scenario, one of the major outcomes of the expansion of the global supply chain is the changing role of the local farm sector under the pressure of international competition. Contract farming and integrated supply chains are deeply transforming the structure of the agriculture and food industries. Besides, the advance of the biotech revolution and the introduction of genetically improved varieties have also fostered structural changes in the global industry. These systemic changes are linked to financial and trade flows largely driven by the search for wider markets and less expensive sources of raw material.

This process of globalization of capital in food production arises other problems related to the growth of investments in big projects led by investment funds and transnational companies that purchase land in various parts of the world in order to increase global production. In truth, these investments often expose small farmers to a situation of hunger and food insecurity by expelling them from the land where they live.

Considering this backgorund, the purpose of the Conference Food and Justice is to enhance a debate that could stimulate the articulation of various aspects of the relationship between food and justice.  Although the scope and intensity of these challenges vary according to the economic situation of countries, the debate has been global. Current food challenges involve issues ranging from food access to national and international regulation.

The WEA Online Conferences seek to engage professional economists – academics or not – besides graduate and undergraduate students in Economics considering the variety of theoretical perspectives and the study of the world’s diverse economies.

We invite you to submit a paper to weafoodconference@gmail.com by 15th  September, 2016. 

Visit the Conference website http://foodandjustice2016.weaconferences.net/

How unemployment has been considered by mainstream macroeconomic models?

From the 1950s onwards, the macroeconomic models of the neoclassical synthesis, based a system of simultaneous equations, focused on the interaction between the market for goods and services and the money market in the context of a general equilibrium analysis. According to John Hicks (1904-1989),  in the general case, the capitalist economy is at full employment level of output.  The underlying employment theory is based on the demand and supply of labour in a competitive market. In fact, this neoclassical approach supposes that price adjustment market mechanisms could guarantee full employment.  In same specific cases, however, the general equilibrium implied by the IS-LM model could not necessarily correspond to a full employment level of output. This situation, called unemployment equilibrium, would be the result of market imperfections, such as rigid money wages, interest-inelastic investment demand, income-inelastic money demand, among others.

In the 1960s, mainstream macroeconomic models expanded the analysis of the negative correlation  between  inflation and unemployment. This correlation was  based on the conclusions drawn from an empirical study  -the Philips curve- about the negative relationship between the evolution of the rate of employment and the rate of variation of nominal wages in England at the turn of the 20th century.  The attempt to incorporate the Phillips curve (trade-off between inflation and unemployment) in the analysis of the labour market dynamics turned out to  put emphasis on the role of nominal wages in determining prices, and ultimately, on the demands of workers that put pressure on inflation.

As a matter of fact, since the late 1960s,  the economic scenario of inflation and unemployment in the OECD countries enhanced the spread of the ideas of Milton Friedman, who proposed new monetary policy suggestions founded on the acceptance of the short run trade-off between inflation and  unemployment. After a period of expansionary monetary policy, as businessmen and workers calculate future prices and wages after considering the information they have at present, the rise in the short-run levels of inflation would be reinforced by higher inflationary expectations  and higher nominal wages and prices. For Friedman, expectations are adaptive and, in the long run, the trade-off between unemployment and inflation does not exist. In practice, the promotion of price stability could require a higher level of unemployment in the short-run. In the long-run,  unemployment would be stuck at its natural level.

The Monetarist school of economics eventually made its way into the neoliberal policies of Reagan and Thatcher and formed the core of the proposals of the economists that defend the Washington Consensus agenda. Since these economists have been much more concerned with the effects of inflation on the economy, the economic policy recommendations that priviledge the inflation targeting takes for granted the existence of a natural level of unemployment, the so called non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU).

 

Orientalism

I was deeply impressed by the magnificient sweep of Edward Said’s book, which show how an entire field of knowledge was intimately linked with the demands of imperialism, and had no relation to the ground realities of Eastern societies. The success of the book created within me the ambition to carry out the same analysis for the field of economics, to show that it reflects the demands of the powerful, and has no relation to the ground realities of existence. Of course this demands an entirely different analysis, one which I have working on for decades. I now have many major pieces of the picture in place, but still need some more work to put it all together. Below, I provide a brief review and summary of Edward Said’s masterpiece.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 18th, 2016:

Orientalism by Edward Said launched a revolution when it first came out in 1978. He succeeded in discrediting an entire field of study; so much so that scholars no longer call themselves “orientalists”. His book has been enormously influential, with ramifications in many established disciplines, including literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, area studies, and comparative religion. The thesis of the book is complex and subtle, and we will only attempt to sketch a crude outline in this brief essay.  

History of economic thought: Wealth, labour and profits

Adam Smith (1723-1790) in his Wealth of Nations deals with the major drivers of the wealth of a country in an analysis that highlights the interrelations among capital, labour and the expansion of markets in the XVIII century. His contribution can be considered a reaction to Mercantilist practices in which protectionism played a decisive role to expand markets. Smith discusses the consequences of the division of labour, exemplifying this question from a pin factory which productivity increases as human beings work on specific tasks. According to Adam Smith, the division of labour has its origin in the propensity of human nature to exchange. Thus, individuals lead to society to well-being while pursuing the maximization of their own interests. Although labour specialization is a key factor for productivity growth, the division of labour could be limited by the extension of the market. In his opinion,  labour specialization paves the way for increased production and, therefore, the expansion of the market. In this sense, Smith defended the free operation of markets as a driver of economic growth.

David Ricardo (1772-1823), in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, discusses the factors that affect the prices of grain and the connections between land rent and profits. Considering the drivers of the wealth of nations, Ricardo turned out to develop an international trade theory based on comparative advantages that defends the specialization in goods produced at lower costs in a context of free markets. However, Ricardo was ideologically motivated to do so, primarily to prevent developing nations like Portugal from becoming developed and overtaking Great Britain. Ricardo believed that total production would generate an income to be divided into wages, profits and land rent. He returns to the theoretical discussion initiated by Adam Smith on the relative value of goods, their relationship with the amount of labour and advances on the distribution of income.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) makes a re-reading of the British classical economists, most notably David Ricardo and Adam Smith. Marx’s Capital presents an analysis of capitalist society, characterized as a social organization based on an exchange system and the division of labour. In the capitalist system, according to Marx, the free worker sells his labour force and  capital is a social relation.  The reality of the capital accumulation process, though, is that it is a double movement of production and valorisation. The accumulation process ordinarily produces both use-value and exchange-value.  Capitalists are less interested in the commodity-in-itself or the use-value of commodities, but, their interest, as the personification of capital,  relies on the expansion of value. Wealth creation is dependent labour power exploited to appropriate surplus value. To Marx, this is the source of profits.

 

Calssical Reading

Smith, Ricardo, Marx: Observations on the History of Economic Thought  by Claudio Napoleoni (1976)

IMF backs away from neoliberalism?

The IMF has been among the principal architects, executors and enforcers of the neoliberal agenda all over the globe for several decades. This is why an IMF publication with an article entitled “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” is as surprising as an ISIS article entitled “Violence: Oversold?” would be. Has neoliberalism become so unpopular that even the IMF does not want to be associated with it? In this essay, we study the lessons that the IMF claims to have learnt from experience with its single-minded drive to enforce the neoliberal agenda throughout the globe.
The article by Ostry, Loungani, and Furceri, starts out by praising the neoliberal agenda for getting many things right. The authors write that they will confine their critique to two aspects. The first is capital account liberalisation, which means freely allowing capital flows across national borders. The second is “austerity”, which requires tight control of budget deficits, raising taxes, lowering expenses and making borrowing costly for the government.

While the rest of the world learnt this lesson after the East Asian Crisis in 1997, the IMF took two additional decades to catch on to the fact that free flows of capital across national boundaries are destabilising. Ostry et. al. write that growth benefits from capital flows are negligible, while the costs in terms of volatility and financial crises are high. They calculate that since 1980, there have been 150 episodes of surges in capital inflows with more than 30 resulting in crises. Many of these crises have resulted in large and sustained losses in economic output. They conclude that capital flows often create financial crises, and adversely affect economic growth, contrary to neoliberal theory. In addition, capital flows create increasing income inequality. In the era when capital account liberalisation was taken as the gospel truth, “capital controls” were taboo, considered akin to the suggestion of bloodletting for medical problems. Therefore, it is surprising that Ostry et. al. conclude their discussion by suggesting that direct capital controls may sometimes be the only effective method to prevent booms and busts due to short term capital flows. In the era of financial liberalisation, mechanisms for capital controls were dismantled all over the world, including Pakistan. To follow IMF advice, based on bitter experience, we will need to restructure capital controls, in a manner suitable to the substantial advances in electronic financial flows, which are characteristic of the modern age.
The question of ‘austerity’ is more subtle and complex. Thinking intuitively, it seems reasonable that governments should balance budgets, and not spend in excess of what they earn. This is called fiscal responsibility, and is strongly urged by advocates of austerity. In the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929, JM Keynes revolutionised economics, and created the field of macroeconomics by showing that recessions are caused by shortfalls in aggregate demand. The anti-austerity measures of printing money, and government spending, financed by deficits if necessary, could make up for the shortfall in demand, and lift the economy out of recession. In the post-Depression era, President Roosevelt was defensive about the deficit spending required to carry out New Deal programmes. Keynes visited him in 1934 to try to convince him to increase deficit spending, but was only partially successful. The recession was substantially prolonged because of Roosevelt’s timid and hesitant anti-austerity measures, running deficits of only around three per cent. It was more aggressive deficit spending necessitated by the war that finally lifted the US out of depression.
Why was this basic Keynesian lesson forgotten by the IMF, an institution which was created by Keynes? Although top level decision-making at the IMF lacks transparency, one can guess at the motive by following the money. Austerity helps richer countries, since scarcity of money allows them to lend at higher interest rates and extract greater concessions from poorer countries. The massive flows of interest payments from the poorest countries to the richest provides evidence for this view.
Among US Army generals who were the most brutal and savage in the persecution of Native Americans, many would become their strongest defenders after retirement. Perhaps the mea culpa of the IMF is motivated by guilt and remorse. However, it is more likely that they are backing away from an unpopular position.

Short Posts on Diverse Topics: My author page on LinkedIn. Other works: Index . Related” The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution

Re-Introducing Ethics in Education

A driving spirit of the modern age is the desire to banish all speculation about things beyond the physical and observable realms of our existence. This spirit was well expressed by one of the leading Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, who called for burning all books which did not deal with the observable and quantifiable phenomena: “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

This is a breathtakingly bold assertion. The literate reader may examine his or her bookshelf to see what little, if anything, would survive after applying Hume’s prescriptions. Nonetheless, the spirit of the secular age was very much in tune with Hume, and relegated vast areas of human knowledge captured in literature, history, and the arts, to second-class citizenship. The modern world has been shaped by this downgrading of the spiritual, intuitive, and mystical, and the elevation of the rational as supreme judge and arbiter over all other faculties.

The leaders of the Enlightenment advocated rationality as the sole criterion for establishing an authoritative system of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge. This has led to a dualism which has become firmly embedded in the foundations of Western thought, and has created a social science incapable of perceiving, let alone solving the problems currently being faced by humanity as a whole. Western hegemony has led to the global and widespread acceptance of this dualism, clearly expressed by Hume, in embracing the quantitative and passionately and violently rejecting the qualitative. Exploring the full range of difficulties caused by this dualism would take several books. In this essay we consider just one of the salient problems. Harvard Professor Julie Reuben expressed it as follows: “Truth was (a united whole) embracing spiritual, moral, and cognitive knowledge. By the 1930’s, this unity was shattered; factual cognitive knowledge (was separated from) moral/spiritual knowledge.”

The Enlightenment project had aimed to provide rational foundations for all human knowledge. However, influential intellectuals like Max Weber, in the early twentieth century, argued that scientific knowledge had to be value-free, because values could not be established empirically. Widespread acceptance of this rejection of morality and spirituality has had dramatic consequences in all realms of human life. The most important questions that we face as human beings were declared to be meaningless, and unworthy of our attention and study. We all recognize that our own life is an infinitely precious gift; the most important question we face is: how should we use this gift? What is the purpose or meaning of life? What characterizes the ‘good life’ and what steps can we take to achieve a lifestyle which embodies the good?

Influential positivist philosophers argued that these questions had no meaning, because there was no empirical or observational evidence which could be used to answer them. All answers were equally valid. We should simply do with our lives whatever we desire to do. There were no ethical or moral standards to guide our behavior. As one of the leading positivist philosophers, A J Ayer, stated: “Moral judgments are as meaningless as a cry of pain”. Centuries of traditional wisdom about life was discarded as meaningless noise, and the new generations were encouraged to work out answers to these deep and difficult questions on their own, starting from scratch. To understand the catastrophic consequences of this, imagine what would happen if we threw out accumulated wisdom in medicine (or any other field of knowledge), and started again from scratch.

The key to the social sciences is an understanding of the nature of human beings. Can we understand human lives without understanding responsibility, conscience, courage, love, heroism and cowardice, trust, jealousy and the enormous range of human emotions? All of these elements of human lives are deeply and inherently qualitative and cannot be measured on any scales. Thus, by definition, these do not qualify for inclusion in the realm of scientific knowledge. The wisdom of the ancients, contained in books discussing these concepts in literary and philosophical terms, without measurement and data, would deserve to be burned according to Hume. But all this book-burning would leave us without any guidance on issues central to human affairs.

The dualism that deified science, and scoffed at that qualitative and unmeasurable, resulted in a tremendous loss of knowledge about the nature of human beings and society. We are living with the consequences of a college education which teaches students how to build bombs, but nothing about the ethics of killing innocents. As a chilling example, consider the changing attitudes towards torture and murder. Japanese soldiers were executed for torturing American POW using waterboarding, and American soldiers in Vietnam were tried for such treatment of Vietnamese prisoners. But recent Presidents have thrown their full support behind the use of extreme torture techniques, officially approving their use. Hollywood movies glorify and justify torture, even though empirical evidence shows that it does not work to obtain useful intelligence. Official reports show that senior officials in the UK and the US concocted evidence to fool the public into supporting the invasion of Iraq, resulting in deaths of millions of innocent civilians, and unnecessary expense of trillions of dollars. But no one has been convicted of any wrongdoing. MBAs are taught that the bottom line is all that matters, and social responsibility should not interfere with the pursuit of profits. Thus, there is no outrage at the deaths of the poor and hungry farmers, caused by millions of dollars spent on research to produce genetically modified terminating seeds, so that rich organisations can make more profits by selling seeds every year. Even justice has been separated from morality; in the adversarial system, lawyers are taught that their responsibility is to win the case for their clients, regardless of whether or not justice would be served by this win. Reform requires deep and fundamental changes in the system of education, which needs to be firmly grounded in all those ideas that have been kicked out of the curriculum as ‘unscientific’.

Short Posts on Diverse Topics: My author page on LinkedIn. Other works: Index . Related: Re-Enchanting the World.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 15th, 2016.

Why the study of transnational companies should be part of the economics curriculum

 

 Special contribution from Grazia Ietto-Gillies

The business media is awash with news about transnational companies (TNCs) be they in the services or manufacturing or agriculture sector. The news may refer to performance or strategies or plans for real investment (or the lack of them) or takeovers. There is currently also considerable interest in their tax minimization strategies.

Yet economics textbooks and courses are still shying away from this most relevant part of our contemporary economies. This is true of both orthodox/neoclassical approaches and – I regret to say – of alternative ones as a quick analysis of textbooks recommended in the WEA Pedagogy page shows.

It could be argued that the nationality of the investor, employer, or producer does not matter: a firm is a firm and the task of economics is to study it independently of where it invests or its nationality. I have argued (Ietto-Gillies, 2004 and 2012: introduction and Ch. 14) that the existence of nation-states with their different regulatory regimes makes a specific study of the TNC necessary. The regulatory regimes refer to taxation or labour and social security or currencies or environmental laws. The differences in regulatory regimes across different countries generate opportunities for alternative, profitable strategies for firms able to operate across national frontiers. Such operations allow the TNC to take advantage of different fiscal, currency or labour and social security or environmental regulations. Most relevant, transnationality increases the bargaining power of TNCs over labour as we see on an almost daily basis throughout the world. On the fiscal side the advantages that TNCs derive from their tax minimization strategies are partly linked to strategic location of their headquarters in tax-friendly countries and partly to the widely used manipulation of transfer prices (Eden, 2001; OECD, 2010).

Additional advantages of transnationality for companies may also derive from: (a) the spreading of risk across different locations; and (b) the acquisition of knowledge from a variety of cultural and business contexts that the location of production in different countries allows. There are, of course, also costs and risks associated with operating in different locations.

There is more to this issue. Most of us who have embraced alternative and realist approaches to the study and teaching of economics are still, on the whole, stuck with the distinction between micro and macro economics largely taken by us from the orthodox literature. How appropriate is this distinction in a world in which a few firms dominate markets and industries even at the global level? The domination is not just in terms of market shares. On the production side we must take account of the domination that principal firms exercise over smaller contractors many of which operate in other countries. The domination by a few large firms in a particular industry affect labour, consumers and smaller firms linked to the large ones by contractual arrangements. It also affects governments and their policies. Celi et at. (2017: Ch 2) show how the offshoring and outsourcing investment strategies of French, German and Italian automobile manufacturers can largely explain changes in the country’s trade balance. The micro is almost the meso and greatly affects the macro. Governments and labour force as well as economics teachers take note.

If we WEA economists want to disseminate among our students an alternative and realist approach to the study of economics, then we need to include the study of TNCs in our courses. The task is feasible because there is, indeed, a large literature on theories and effects of TNCs and their activities. The topic is widely researched mostly in Business Schools. Here are some sources of literature.

UNCTAD publishes, among others, the following:

• World Investment Report: a yearly thematic analysis with considerable empirical content; full databases available free online.
• Transnational Corporations: a quarterly academic, peer reviewed journal which focuses on analysis and policy.

Among the many journals that deal with ‘International Business’ are the following:

Journal of International Business Studies (JIBS)

International Business Review (IBR)

Critical Perspectives on International Busines (CPoIB).

Most of the journals tend to be multi- and inter-disciplinary dealing with economics, management, accounting and organizational issues. CPoIB deals also with social and political issues and its content can be of particular interest to WEA members. It has published, among others, papers by a radical accountant, Prof. Prem Sikka of Essex University (including Sikka and Wilmott, 2013).

My (2012) listed below has a comprehensive treatment of the various theories of the TNCs (Part II) and of their effects (Part III) with suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter. The chapters on theories first summarize a specific theory and then critically analyses it in a separate section.

See also ‘The theory of the Transnational Corporation at 50+’ in the WEA journal

Economic Thought:

http://et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/papers/the-theory-of-the-transnational-corporation-at-50/

The same issue of the journal has a debate on the questions raised in the article with John Cantwell as a result of the Open Peer Review process.

 References

Eden, L. (2001), Taxes, Transfer Pricing, and the Multinational Enterprise, in A.M. Rugman and T.L. Brewer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Business, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 21, pp. 591-619.

Celi, G., Ginzburg, A., Guarascio, D. and Simonazzi, A (2017), Northern and Southern Europe in the long European Crisis: a core-periphery perspective, forthcoming, London: Routledge (fortcoming).

Ietto-Gillies, G. (2004), ‘Should the study of transnational corporations be part of the economics syllabus?’, in Fullbrook, E. (ed.) A Guide to What is Wrong with Economics, Ch. 26: 289-98,  London: Wimbledon Publishing.

Ietto-Gillies, G. (2012), Transnational Corporations and International Production. Concepts, Theories, Effects, Second Edition, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), (2010), Transfer Pricing Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and Tax Administrators, Paris: OECD

Prem Sikka and Hugh Willmott, “The Tax Avoidance Industry: Accountancy Firms on the Make”, Critical Perspectives on International Business, Vol. 9, No, 4, 2013, pp.415-443.

 

G.iettogillies@yahoo.co.uk. I am grateful to Maria Alejandra Madi for useful comments on an earlier draft and to Andrea Ginzburg for information on offshoring in the European automobile industry.

Shrunken global biggest banks

Global financial integration has augmented the exposure to macroeconomic and financial vulnerabilities. In this scenario, prudential financial regulation presents challenges to success. First, banking assets and liabilities are vulnerable to changes in macroeconomic conditions. Second, segmented supervisory authorities do not cope with the universal scope of banks. Third, new regulatory patterns are generally proposed after banking innovations. At last, the consolidation of larger banks, stimulated by financial liberalization, changes in financial savings, capital adequacy requirements and information technology, have favoured the action of central banks as agencies that arbitrate competitive struggles.

Looking back, in the late 1980s,  there was a  global concern  around the development of a new regime of prudential banking regulation, founded on the ratio of capital to risk-adjusted assets. The first Basel Capital Accord introduced the 8 % capital requirement on the risk-weighted value of a bank’s assets, mainly credit-risk.  As of 2004, a new Capital Accord, Basel II, was settled and underlined three pillars: a bank’s core capital requirement; supervision and market discipline. This Accord aimed to spread out mechanisms of protection  in order to avoid financial systemic risk and to favour informational transparency (disclosure). Therefore, the institutional set up would enhance more efficient financial leverage systems and greater transparency to financial regulators and investors.

Throughout the implementation of Basel II, banks proved to enhance asset-liability management (ALM), or even, balance sheet management, to reduce legally capital requirements. At the operational level, ALM involves new management practices and techniques to manage risks that arise due to imbalances in assets and liabilities.  For example, banks could manage the credit risk with further securitization transactions. ALM could also be used to analyse market risks related to trading in capital markets. Besides, low capital requirements were supported by off balance sheet assets since great volumes of their trading books were shifted into SIVs (structured investment vehicles).  The 2008 global crisis showed that innovations, such as banks’ asset-liability management, have reinforced systemic risks.

In the aftermath of the crisis, global  biggest banks increased write-downs on loans while credit losses put pressure on profitability. The reduction of leverage and new strategies related to the internal reassessment of risks (credit, currency, interest, liquidity) have been implemented to maintain existing capital levels. Besides, uncertainty about the future evolution of the global economy has reduced the bank’s interest in foreign markets, mainly in  U.S. and Europe.

Supervisory authorities have searched for setting new rules that could make the financial system more resilient in response to the crisis,. Among other issues, i) banks will need to hold larger capital requirements against further potential losses, ii) financial products’ approval would involve extensive disclosure requirements and iii) banks would be induced to negotiate standardized products. As a result, capital market transactions and trading income would lose their importance in a context where regulators would demand that some credit risk would be retained on the banks’ books. Due to higher equity ratios, future banks’ profitability (returns on equity) would probably shrink.

In the attempt to face the regulators’ potential actions,  global biggest banks have already been seeking for new strategies and practices. Nevertheless, lower risk-weighted assets and higher capital ratios represent a challenge for increasing assets and profitability.  As a result, global biggest banks seem to shrink under pressure  from regulators.

 

Further reading

Bank of International Settlement (BIS) (2012)  “Post-crisis evolution of the banking sector”, In:  BIS 82nd Annual Report, Basel: BIS. Available at http://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2012e6.pdf (accessed on June 25th, 2013).

Carey, B. (2016)  Cleaned up, shrunken banking sector may now be too small, The Sunday Times, August 7^th.   Available at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cleaned-up-shrunken-banking-sector-may-now-be-too-small-76mwtdvvx

Dermine, J. and Bissada, Y. (2007), Asset and Liability Management: The Banker’s Guide to Value Creation and Risk Control, London and New York: Financial Times and Prentice Hall.

Saunders, A. (1994), Financial Institutions Management: A Modern Perspective, Burr Ridge, IL: Richard D. Irwin.

Saunders, A. and Cornett, M.  (2002), Financial Institutions Management: A Risk Management Approach, Columbus: McGraw-Hill College.

Popper, N. and  Corkery, M. (2016),  Shrunken Citigroup Illustrates a Trend in Big U.S. Banks, New York Time, April 15^th, on line edition http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/business/dealbook/shrunken-citigroup-illustrates-a-trend-in-big-us-banks.html

The Economist (2011) The great unknown. Can policymakers fill the gaps in their knowledge about the financial system?, Jan 13th, print edition