This chapter concerns a 2005 Malaysian court case in which the plaintiff defaulted on home-purchasing loan and then claimed he could obtain favourable repayment terms if he switched his borrower from Affin (Islamic) Bank to a regular commercial bank. According to the local regulatory framework, all commercial transactions, including those of Islamic banks, fall under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. The government issued a specific law - namely the Islamic Banking Act 1983, later enhanced as the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 - to regulate the Islamic banking and financial industry. As Malaysia practises a dual banking system, whereby Islamic banking products are offered side by side with the conventional ones, the case presents interesting comparison between the two banking products.

By and large, the relationship between a bank and its customers is contractual and governed by the usual contract rules. Such a relationship is also regulated by various statutes. Still, it is a contract in a specialised market with a long history and, consequently, it has acquired a large raft of terms implied by custom and usage. These may, of course, always be ousted by express terms, but clear and unequivocal words are required for the effect.

The Epilogue takes the story into the late 2000s, as another major economic crisis hit hard. It considers the cultural memory of how the 1930s touched Britain and other parts of the world. By the early twenty-first century, memories of the inter-war past had largely evaporated from popular party politics, but they retained a force in cementing both the self-identity and the entitlements of those people born in the first half of the twentieth century.

In this chapter, signs of basic services will be given, such as getting hydrated (and duly performing ‘bodily function’), getting connected and having access to funds.

This chapter describes the key changes in terms of money, credit and banking in the 1000 to 1500 period within the various kingdoms. It highlights how after a period of late monetization, each Christian kingdom transitioned to centralized models that were well-articulated with their European counterparts while keeping important distinctive traits. Nevertheless, the demand for means of payment on behalf of kings, merchants and other agents stimulated the development of credit. The need for credit spanned the entire Peninsula and the urban/rural divide. Thus, all countries saw the emergence of lively credit markets for (mostly private) borrowers, buttressed by functioning courts and regulations. These markets involved both specialists and non-specialists, but it was only in the Crown of Aragon where financial agents transitioned to institutionalized banks.

This chapter describes the development of the Tokugawa economy, illustrating how its patterns and shifts were experienced by producers and consumers in a particular place and time. In outlining the framing features of the Tokugawa economic world, we draw attention to how the proportion occupied by manufacturing industries and distribution mechanisms increased steadily in tandem with expansion of the economy’s overall volume. Diverse factors accompanied and further spurred these trends: urbanization (in cities and country towns), greater social mobility, expanding trade and communication networks, rising income, the labor of women as producers for the market, and a popular consciousness increasingly oriented toward ordinary consumption. This economic development can be described in either positive or negative terms. Economic historians in recent decades have pointed more to the positive aspects that raised the standard of living for many, whereas many social historians note the groups who lost out in the commercialization process, such as low-ranking samurai and landless commoners. Evidence can be given for both perspectives, underlining the complexity of what we call economy.

Despite the benefits that banks could get from implementing distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), few banks have focused on making full use of it. According to operational experience, DLTs – which are blockchain based in this case – are frequently employed at the level of cryptocurrencies but are seldom used when it comes to banking applications. This chapter aims to provide an overview of the current state of the academic literature on implementing DLT in the banking sector. By providing a comprehensive overview of DLT adoption in the banking sector, this study can contribute to the development of a better understanding of DLT and its potential to transform the banking industry.

The metaverse is a rapidly evolving concept in the business world, representing an inclusive dimension of innovative elements such as technologies, marketplaces, and social interactions. The financial industry is paying close attention to this concept, since it offers limitless potential for virtual customer interactions. Banks are increasingly utilising technology to offer their services and are therefore interested in exploring the metaverse as a natural evolution of their industry to build closer relationships with their customers. However, the added value for banks needs to be carefully evaluated, and the lack of clear regulation could cause hesitation. Additionally, the metaverse could amplify potential risks of cybercrime in the financial and banking sectors. This chapter explores banks’ approaches to the metaverse as a new way to exploit the potential of distributed ledger technologies and presents a summary framework on the development opportunities (and related hazards), for financial intermediaries.

The case of internal improvements at the federal level from 1787 to 1837 suggests that American governance patterns were pragmatic and utilitarian, rather than committed to laissez-faire theory of the small state. Federal power can be used in a variety of ways to create a liberal capitalist state by building transportation and communication infrastructures. While the concessions in America’s constitutional model to small-state Republicans often thwarted the more ambitious plans, it was not laissez-faire theory that prevented the use of federal power for nation-building projects. When government in the first half of the century wanted to promote economic development, “no overriding theory held government back.” The liberal forms of governance that developed in America were not the Lockean minimal state that Louis Hartz famously imagined to be America’s continuous laissez-faire tradition. Rather, the American experience of internal improvements reveals the complicated entanglements of state, law, and capitalism in the nineteenth century and illustrates the continuing problems with neat categories of state and market, public and private, to describe the political economy of capitalism.

Chapter 2. A “gold standard” means a monetary system in which a defined mass of gold coin or bullion is the unit of account in which prices are posted and accounts kept, and gold coin or bullion is the medium of redemption that ordinary currency and bank accounts promise to pay. Once modern banking developed, the vast majority of money was held and spent in the form of banknotes and deposit transfers, not coins. A monometallic gold standard with bank-issued money avoids problems created by legally imposing bimetallism. A series of supply-and-demand diagrams explains how a gold standard works to determine the quantity and purchasing power of money. The diagrams show how market forces stabilize the purchasing power of gold in response to various shifts in money demand and supply. A major gold discovery can change the purchasing power of gold by altering the supply from mining, but large discoveries were historically rare. The resource costs of a gold standard, the expenditure of labor and capital to extract and coin gold, have been over-estimated by economists who assume away the role of the banking system in economizing on the amount of gold used for transactions.

In 1709, Samuel Bernard, the richest man in Europe, failed to pay his debts. His insolvency precipitated a small financial crisis at the Lyon faire, which was the main payments settlement mechanism that connected credit networks in northern Italy, Switzerland, eastern France, and the Netherlands. Bernard’s creditors were ruined, but he received immunity from prosecution and soon recovered his credit. This failure was a particularly dramatic instance of impunity in financial capitalism before the Financial Revolution created corporate forms, liquid capital markets, and constraints on sovereign violations of property rights. Bernard’s failure, and the many other crises of the same time, shows the parameters of impunity as a function of sovereign power. In 1709, as before, impunity was personalized: the prerogative of sovereign authority, granted individually on an ad hoc or arbitrary basis. Sovereigns governed finance through institutions like the chambre de justice of 1716, which was a special court for prosecuting all of the Crown’s creditors. The institutional changes of the Financial Revolution meant that by the time of the 1720 crisis, impunity was instead a characteristic of systemically important managers of capital operating in international markets with limited regulation, oversight, and enforcement.

The economy of many parts of Europe changed significantly during the period from 1450 to 1600. The vast majority of Europeans continued to live in villages and make their living by agriculture, but new, larger-scale processes of trade and production shaped both the cities and the countryside, altering the landscape and leading to environmental problems. Population growth and the worsening climate of the Little Ice Age contributed to food shortages, rising prices of basic commodities, and a growing polarization of wealth. In western Europe landless people often migrated in search of employment, while in eastern Europe noble landowners reintroduced serfdom, tying peasants to the land. Rural areas in both western and eastern Europe became more specialized in what they produced, and in cities wealth increasingly came from trade. Investment in equipment and machinery to process certain types of products, such as metals and cloth, increased significantly, with coal replacing increasingly scarce wood in some areas as a source of heat and power. Successful capitalist merchant-entrepreneurs made vast fortunes in banking and moneylending, while the poor supported themselves any way they could.

In the seventeenth century, the economic center of Europe shifted from Italy to northwestern Europe, because of technological advances, institutions that promoted capital accumulation, and stronger networks of exchange in a booming Atlantic economy. The lack of all these made eastern Europe the least prosperous part of the continent. In western Europe, new crops and crop rotation patterns, improved livestock breeding, the draining of marshes, and other developments led to significant growth in agricultural productivity, though they were also socially disruptive. Demand for new consumer goods increased, spurring both global trade and local production. With a slight improvement in the climate in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with new food crops, better public health measures, and other factors, the population of Europe began to rise more swiftly than it had beforehand. Many people combined agricultural work with handicraft production, or migrated to cities in search of work, gathering together in manufactories organized by investors. Work increasingly involved the use of machines powered by hand, animals, water, wind, and – by the eighteenth century – coal. This transformation occurred first in cloth production, and then in mining, with negative effects on air quality and the environment.

The development of a scientific economic discourse and the expansion of the financial system and markets across the nineteenth century and through the British Empire proved to be rich sources of inspiration to novelists and poets. Fictional writers not only explored the themes of stock market crashes, imperial investments, industrial expansion, gambling and risk taking, fraudulent currencies, and bank failures, but also the failure of political economy to account properly for the inadequacies of the economic system and the people who fell victim to those failures. Examining the interplay, interaction, and coconstitution of literary and economic discourses in the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates the celebratory and critical ways economic writers, essayists, novelists, and poets represented and responded to political economy’s evolution. Reading the history of economic thought alongside the literary texts of the nineteenth century – this chapter argues – reveals their shared investments in value, representation, and human desires.

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, however, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices.

From the late archaic period, all the functions of money – medium of exchange, measure of value, store of value, and medium of payment – were performed by coins, almost always silver, struck by scores of states on a few different weight standards. Market trade, international commerce, and labor were all mediated by money. Finance was an important, and often decisive, factor in statecraft and warfare, and temples were both dependent upon and replete with silver and gold. Agriculture was less monetized; cultural effects are still being debated. Credit was an essential part of both friendship and business: mortgages and eranoi (joint loans by an ad hoc group of lenders) supplied extraordinary personal expenses, while small market loans and larger bottomry loans for overseas expeditions financed both large and small commerce. Banking, in the sense of investing depositors’ money, was a Greek invention. Athenian banks, always family businesses, provided credit, remote payments, money-changing, and a secure place to hide money. Ptolemaic royal banks managed royal revenue and were involved, alongside private bankers, in the local economy; cashless book-transfers were common. The scope of banking was, however, limited by the need for coin reserves, which kept the banks from dominating the economy.

A Financial History of Western Europe is Kindleberger’s self-identified masterwork, an attempt to derive robust theories from centuries of accumulated fact, and then to use those theories as a framework for making sense of the momentous events of Kindleberger’s own life. It is a story of financial development in support of economic development at a global scale, both development processes advancing together in Darwinian evolutionary fashion by means of boom and bust.