Sticky Power by Daniel Haberly, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters

Although modern civilization revolves around money, the nature of money is paradoxical. It is nothing more than a representation of and medium for decentralized networks of social trust, but its production is controlled by highly centralized networks of firms, places, and governments, andthere is never enough of it to go around. Moreover, given that the creation of money, as credit, is based on expectations, money is at its heart an instrument for human agency to change the future. However, the financial systems that produce money are deeply rooted in the past, and perpetuatethemselves through history. Sticky Power seeks to deepen our understanding of the paradox of money by introducing a novel conceptual lens, Global Financial Networks, to cast new light on the geography, history, politics, and sociology of finance from the Middle Ages to the global financial crisisand beyond. It shows that the power of finance is inherently sticky: apparently new innovations such as offshore finance actually date back centuries, and global financial networks more broadly have adapted to the rise and fall of empires and the development of new technologies while changingsurprisingly little in their basic character, or at most changing very slowly. Haberly and Wojcik argue that a recognition of the mechanics of this durability calls for a new approach to reforming finance-one less reactively focused on regulation, and more proactively focused on building newinstitutional systems with a long-term sticky power of their own. | Sticky Power by Daniel Haberly, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters