The UK financial system (fifth edition)

This book explains the fundamental causes of the bank's failure, including the inadequacy of the regulatory and supervisory framework. For some, it was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that was the overriding cause, not just of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but of the financial crisis as a whole. The book argues that the cause is partly to be found both in weak and ineffective regulation and also in a programme of regulation and supervision that was simply not fit for the purpose. Lehman Brothers' long history began with three brothers, immigrants from Germany, who sold selling groceries and dry goods to local cotton farmers. Dick Fuld, the chairman and CEO, and his senior management, ignored the increased risks, choosing to rely on over-valuations of the firm's assets. The book examines the regulation of the Big Five investment banks in the context of the changes which took place in the structure of banking after the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. It describes the introduction of the European Union's Consolidated Supervision Directive in 2004. The book examines the whole issue of valuing Lehman's assets and details the regulations covering appraisals and valuations of real estate, applicable at the time and to consider Lehman's approach in the light of these regulations. It argues that that the valuation of Lehman's real estate assets was problematic to say the least, as the regulators did not require the investment banks to adopt a recognized methodology of valuation, and that Lehman's own methods were flawed.

In the digital age, markets become property. Today’s most powerful companies are internet giants like Google, Apple, Amazon and Tencent. The dominant platforms now control digital ecosystems that represent a fundamental transformation of capitalism. Liberalism imagined the market as a free space dedicated to the exchange of goods and services, a creator of knowledge and innovation. The internet meta-platforms have transformed the marketplace into a set of tightly controlled domains. This book examines the historical roots of this phenomenon and outlines its contemporary manifestations. It shows how digital surveillance and algorithmic management are employed to control entire markets, and how the same methods appear in the digital labour process. Widening social inequality is one inevitable outcome. What is specific to digital capitalism, the book argues, is the emergence of ‘proprietary markets’. This signals not only an end to the liberal notion of the economy. The conflicts over its future trajectory will be decisive for life chances in digital capitalism.

This book sees Keynes as neither villain nor hero and develops a sympathetic ‘left’ critique. Keynes was an avowedly elitist and pro-capitalist economist, whom the left should appropriate with caution. But his analysis provides insights at a level of concreteness which Marx’s analysis largely ignored and which were concerned with issues of the modern world which Marx could not have foreseen. A critical Marxist engagement can simultaneously increase the power of Keynes’s insight and enrich Marxism. To understand Keynes, whose work is liberally invoked but seldom read, the book first puts Keynes in context, explaining his biography and the extraordinary times in which he lived, his philosophy and his politics. The book describes Keynes’s developing critique of ‘the classics’, of mainstream economics as he found it, and summarises the General Theory. It shows how Keynes provides an enduringly valuable critique of orthodoxy but vital insights rather than a genuinely general theory. The book then develops a Marxist appropriation of Keynes’s insights. It argues that Marxist analysis of unemployment, of money and interest, and of the role of the state can be enriched through such a critical engagement. The book addresses Keynesianism after Keynes, critically reviewing the practices that came to be known as ‘Keynesianism’ and different theoretical traditions that have claimed his legacy. It considers the crisis of the 1970s, the subsequent anti-Keynesian turn, the economic and ecological crises of the twenty-first century, and the prospects of returning to Keynes and Keynesianism.