This paper surveys some of the important literatures on financial, economic and social systems with an eye towards explaining the tendencies towards ‘financialisation’. We focus on important strands of this literature: the French Regulation School, the US-based Social Structures of...

This paper analyses financial crises from a theoretical point of view. For this it reviews what different schools of economic thought have to say about financial crises. It examines first the approaches that regard financial crises as a disturbing factor of a generally stable real economy...

The financial system is a private-public partnership coming from government ceding the right to produce means of payment with the related permission on leveraged lending services, against the acceptance of rules designed to ensure stability for both individual institutions and the financial...

The almost consensual view on the global financial crisis is that it should be attributed to massive regulatory failure. Regulation is either argued to have failed in constraining an inherently instable financial system or to have provoked the crisis by means of inappropriate regulatory changes....

There is no doubt that the shadow banking system played an important role in the global financial crisis. What is in question is whether it played a causal or merely amplifying role. This paper argues in favour of the latter. Focusing specially on the process of the production of CDOs through...

The global financial and economic crisis, and in particular the perceived failure of economics to predict the crisis, has led to questioning of the methodology of economics. Some have championed the methodological approach of ‘critical realism’ as fostering a more realistic economic theory...