How the Global Financial Markets Really Work

I've just received a hard copy of "How the Global Financial Markets Really Work", a new book by Alex Davidson that's endorsed by The Times. It's reasonably priced and a great handbook for people wanting to understand the city. It also has a neat concept of prefacing each chapter with an advertisement and guest article by an organisation with an expertise in that area. The oldest business school in the world has provided one such article, and I was the author. I tried to outline three important elements of markets that are routinely ignored. I decided to be as radical and punchy as possible, for example:

central banks are not market institutions. In the UK our monetary system is centrally planned, by a nationalised bank, which holds a monopoly over the issuance of currency. Each month a committee meets to set the Bank rate of interest, and if they cannot set it any lower they resort to directly expand the supply through quantitative easing. If this were any other industry it would be viewed as the Soviet-style planning board that it is, and we would be duly sceptical about its ability to intervene without creating wide scale misallocations of capital

You can buy the book here, or download my article here (.pdf)

Comments

[speech writing]

Wonderful article, thanks for putting this together! "This is obviously one great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here. Keep it up!"

[debt rescue]

The global financial markets have direct impact of purchasing price parity in different regions and countries , hence the insights of one region have relation with the other .