In the wake of million-dollar scandals brought about by Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, and their like, Wall Street seems like the province of rampant individualism operating at the outermost extremes of self-interest and greed. But this, Mitchel Abolafia suggests, would be a case of missing the real culture of the Street for the characters who dominate the financial news. Making Markets, an ethnography of Wall Street culture, offers a more complex picture of how the market and its denizens work. Not merely masses of individuals striving independently, markets appear here as socially constructed institutions in which the behavior of traders is suspended in a web of customs, norms, and structures of control. Within these structures we see the actions that led to the Drexel Burnham and Salomon Brothers debacles not as bizarre aberrations, but as mere exaggerations of behavior accepted on the Street. Abolafia looks at three subcultures that coexist in the world of Wall Street: the stock, bond, and futures markets. Through interviews, anecdotes, and the author’s skillful analysis, we see how traders and New York Stock Exchange “specialists” negotiate the perpetual tension between short-term self-interest and long-term self-restraint that marks their respective communities—and how the temptation toward excess spurs market activity. We also see the complex relationships among those market communities—why, for instance, NYSE specialists resent the freedoms permitted over-the-counter bond traders and futures traders. Making Markets shows us that what propels Wall Street is not a fundamental human drive or instinct, but strategies enacted in the context of social relationships, cultural idioms, and institutions—a cycle that moves between phases of unbridled self-interest and collective self-restraint.

This book examines place and place-making in London’s Borough Market. In particular, it uses topo/graphy (‘place-writing) to interrogate the ways in which Borough Market’s material, social-sensual and discursive relations assemble to reproduce Borough Market as a place, market and marketplace. Its central premise is that market-processes – the negotiation and exchange of commodities –are place-processes. This means that the often-abstract relationships that ultimately define what we think of as the economy are embedded in the rich and every materiality, sociality, sensuality and meanings associated with place. By tracing out these different elements, topo/graphy illustrates the ways in which economic reproduction is grounded in particular and often discrete practices. However, by assembling them together, this highlights the ways in which place and place-making are the driving force behind the economy at large.

This book focuses on market law and policy in sub-Saharan Africa, showing how markets can be harnessed by poorer and developing economies to help make the markets work for them: to help them integrate into the world economy and provide a better standard of living for their people while preserving their values of inclusive development. It explores uses of power both by dominant firms, often multinationals, and incumbent governments and cronies, to ring-fence their market positions and deprive rivals - often the indigenous people - from fair access to markets and highlights how competition authorities are pushing back and winning fair access, lowering prices of goods and services especially for the poorer population. The book also examines the next level up - regionalism - and provides the facts that show how regionalism has so far failed to meet its promise of freeing markets from cross-border restraints by large firms that operate across national borders. On the more technical side, the book takes a deep look at the competition policies of sets of nations in sub-Saharan Africa - West, South-eastern, and South. It examines the performance of the competition authorities of particular nations, including how they handle cartels, monopolies and mergers; their standards of illegality, and their methodologies for incorporating public interest values into their analyses. Observing the good works by a number of the national competition authorities, the book is optimistic about the role of the national competition authorities in protecting the people from abuses of economic power, and, perhaps in the future, the role of regional authorities and less formal networks in promoting an African voice in defence of competition.

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of the global economy today is the rise of emerging market economies (EMEs). Many states have experienced rapid economic growth over the past two decades that has led to an increasing share of global wealth. Such dramatic changes are highly relevant because they raise important issues about the distribution of global monetary and fiscal power. As the EMEs have gained importance in the global economy, their influence and significance have grown across a wide range of policy domains. One particularly relevant example is the increasingly critical role of EMEs in addressing climate change. Contrary to the popular belief that the level of development determines a country’s ability to produce positive environmental outcomes, this book shows that the variation in environmental outcomes among the EMEs is due to differences in the types of economic institutions prevalent in their economies. Since EMEs differ dramatically on a number of variables, examining national variations in economic institutions helps explain why international climate policy has been more successful in some countries than in others. To assess how variations in capitalism may influence important outcomes, this book explores a representative sample of 31 EMEs and employs a mixed method research design that incorporates both conventional regression analysis and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to explain these outcomes. The analysis shows that although liberal market economies were expected to perform better than other types of capitalism, their performance fell below expectations. On the contrary, economic institutions related to coordinated types of capitalism (like those found in China and Brazil) have led to greater Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) market participation. Theoretically informed, this book employs innovative ways of understanding a broad set of increasingly important but under studied states in an effort to highlight the interactions found in complex socio-political and ecological systems. With the growing importance of the EMEs, a better understanding of how to design market-based policies with them in mind will be required if future efforts across a range of policy issues are to be meaningful and effective.

The best way to get water where you want it is to dig a ditch and let it flow; so also, getting people to use energy efficiently can be achieved by contouring the economy in the appropriate manner, according to the scientists, engineers, economists, and other experts who gathered at the International Scientific Forum on Energy in Washington, DC, Oc

During the nineteenth century, Yucat&án moved effectively from its colonial past into modernity, transforming from a cattle-ranching and subsistence-farming economy to a booming export-oriented agricultural economy. Yucat&án and its economy grew in response to increasing demand from the United States for henequen, the local cordage fiber. This henequen boom has often been seen as another regional and historical example of overdependence on foreign markets and extortionary local elites. In The Making of a Market, Juliette Levy argues instead that local social and economic dynamics are the root of the region&’s development. She shows how credit markets contributed to the boom before banks (and bank crises) existed and how people borrowed before the creation of institutions designed specifically to lend. As the intermediaries in this lending process, notaries became unwitting catalysts of Yucat&án&’s capitalist transformation. By focusing attention on the notaries&’ role in structuring the mortgage market rather than on formal institutions such as banks, this study challenges the easy compartmentalization of local and global relationships and of economic and social relationships.

Introduces the constructivist approach to understanding world affairs. The author shows how narrow the standard approaches are and how much we miss as a consequence. His conceptual framework for state making, self making and mind making seeks to put notions such as "globalization" in a new light.

If you have experience in option trading, or a strong understanding of the options markets, but want to better understand how to trade given certain market conditions, this is the book for you. Many people have some knowledge of trading strategies, but have no idea how to pull it all together. Mark Sebastian’s latest book will teach trade evaluation, using Greeks, trading various spreads under different market conditions, portfolio-building, and risk management. Sebastian’s approach will help traders understand how to find edge, what kind of trade under what conditions will capture edge, and how to create and successfully hedge to help you build your own personal Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch. The book demonstrates how to structure a portfolio of trades that makes more money with less risk. Click here to watch the author's interviews with Fox Business and Nasdaq: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/5759956686001/ https://youtu.be/dOEJ118vMnA

Macro Markets puts forward a unique and authoritative set of detailed proposals for establishing new markets for the management of the biggest economic risks facing society. Our existing financial markets are seen as being inadequate in dealing with such risks and Professor Shiller suggests major new markets as solutions to the problem. Shiller argues that although some risks, such as natural disaster or temporary unemployment, are shared by society, most risks are borne by the individual and standards of living determined by luck. He investigates whether a new technology of markets could make risk-sharing possible, and shows how new contracts could be designed to hedge all manner of risks to the individual's living standards. He proposes new international markets for perpetual claims on national incomes, and on components and aggregates of national incomes, concluding that these markets may well dwarf our stock markets in their activity and significance. He also argues for new liquid international markets for residential and commercial property. Establishing such unprecedented new markets presents some important technical problems which Shiller attempts to solve with proposals for implementing futures markets on perpetual claims on incomes, and for the construction of index numbers for cash settlement of risk management contracts. These new markets could fundamentally alter and diminish international economic fluctuations, and reduce the inequality of incomes around the world.