The Financial Crisis on Trial: What Went Wrong

Americans demanded retribution from the mortgage lenders whose subprime loans defaulted and from investment bankers whose mortgage-backed securities sharply declined in value in 2007, leading to financial panic and the Great Recession. From 2008 to 2019, the federal government extracted hundreds of billions in fines from dozens of corporations, but few individual business executives were held accountable, and no senior banker was convicted of a crime. I use the trial court record of five government enforcement cases against individuals to explain this apparently anomalous result. I conclude that, in addition to a lack of funding, the prosecution effort was hindered by the government’s erroneous selection of cases to pursue. Further, the diffused nature of decision making in the mortgage finance market made it difficult to prove that any one senior-level participant had the criminal intent necessary for a conviction or a Securities and Exchange Commission civil fine or injunction. The trial results also support the argument that the growth and consolidation of investment banks from 1990 to 2008 created incentives for misconduct within the firms.

Embodied Urbanisms: Corruption and the Ecologies of Eating and Excreting in India's Real Estate Economies

This article studies metabolic systems of food, body, and waste within the urban development politics of the city of Gurgaon (now Gurugram) in India’s National Capital Region. I link rapid urban transformation within the region, the labor required to produce it, and the speculative real estate economy that governs it to the phenomenology of body politics in the region. In particular, I examine corruption as both a political-economic and a physical, caste-based narrative to argue that corruption connects embodiment and urban development ecologies to each other. This allows corruption discourses in Gurgaon to form a critique of real estate economies; changing urban environments are felt and critiqued through body politics and experienced at once as a peril and a pleasure. This work is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in the construction industry in NCR involving members across the production chain of real estate, including landowners, investment bankers, developers, engineers, architects, foremen, and laborers.

Perspectives on Corporate, Social, and Employee Purpose among Investment Bankers: A Qualitative Research Study

There are increasing calls to re-establish the role and responsibility of banks towards society to repair trust and enhance financial stability. Through in-depth interviews with senior investment bankers, this study asks what bankers themselves think about the corporate (i.e. the industry’s core business), social (i.e. its moral responsibilities to wider society), and employee (i.e. bankers’ own feelings of purposefulness) purposes of the investment banking industry. Existing research tells us that there are significant reciprocal benefits to organisations, employees, and society at large when the three are aligned. The study’s findings suggest that while there have been important shifts in corporate and social purposes over time, bankers remain sceptical about their banks’ underlying motives and this has resulted in multiple disconnects. Perhaps surprising, the study finds that meaningful work that is also socially focused is something that investment bankers are seeking in some way. These insights should prompt banks to ensure that social purposes reflect and align with their corporate purposes; to move beyond rhetoric and virtue-signalling to action; and to help employees identify their contribution to it all.

The Mediating Effect of E - Satisfaction on E - Service Quality and E - Loyalty Link in Securities Brokerage Industry

The rising popularity and use of the internet - based e in India offers huge potential in the internet connected (e-commerce) market and economy, and in specific for the stock brokerage category, leading to improved electronic service quality (e-SQ), electronic satisfaction (e-Satisfaction), and electronic loyalty (e-Loyalty) and becomes powerful components for investment bankers and stock brokers to attract and keep traders in the online market. To cope and handle with advances in Technology (ICT) and the varying expectations and demands of stock traders, the relationship between e-SQ, e-Satisfaction, and e-Loyalty should be continuously reviewed. Nonetheless, the design of e-SQ for retailers in any industry remains an open question. In this study, E-SERVQUAL was combined with several other e-SQ scales to assess the e-SQ of major share brokers in India. The e-SQ frameworks in particular are Design, Functionality, Privacy, Reliability, and Recovery. An online questionnaire is used in the research and the sampling method used was convenience sampling. From the distributed questionnaire, 50 sets of finished and productive responses were returned by the traders and investors. The findings suggested that the five proposed dimensions of e-SQ for stock brokers in the share market be developed. Every aspect of e-SQ was observed to have significant positive and notable effect on stock dealers' e-satisfaction. The responsiveness of e-SQ had the greatest impact on online shoppers' e-satisfaction. The customer's e-Loyalty to use an online retailer's website on a regular basis was significantly influenced by their e-Satisfaction. The study's findings serve as the foundation for discussion on managerial and theoretical implication.

Luxury, Banking, and Finance

Luxury-specific production has expanded through upstream–downstream integration, from commodities (silk, precious metals, etc.) to processing industries and luxury houses. Banks financed companies, trade, foreign exchange, and flows of payment. They were partners for the valuation of treasuries and for the lightening of the debts of their clients. They accompanied them through the transferrals of property, within dynasties or outside. Starting in the 1980s, business bankers supported companies building capital for luxury firms: they helped them to integrate the game of financial markets, to open their capital and to ensure the dynastic transition within family companies. For managers of companies in the luxury sector, the challenge has ever been to create strong self-financing capacities in order to allow a distribution of dividends that will ensure the loyalty of family shareholders, finance investments (workshops, shop networks), and contain indebtedness. The volatility of markets and the financialisation of capitalism led investment bankers to join offensive or defensive pools when bids were launched, or to be part of the M&A teams.

Neanderthal and the fossilization of the Third World

Neanderthal is the quintessential scientific Other. In the late nineteenth century gentlemen-scientists, including business magnates, investment bankers and lawmakers with interest in questions of human and human societal development, framed Europe’s Neanderthal and South Asia’s indigenous Negritos as close evolutionary kin. Simultaneously, they explained Neanderthal’s extinction as the consequence of an inherent backwardness in the face of fair-skinned, steadily-progressing newcomers to ancient Europe who behaved in ways associated with capitalism. This racialization and economization of Neanderthal helped bring meaning and actual legal reality to Negritos via the British Raj’s official ‘schedules of backward castes and tribes’. It also helped justify the Raj’s initiation of market-oriented reforms in order to break a developmental equilibrium deemed created when fair-skinned newcomers to ancient South Asia enslaved Negritos in an enduring caste system. Neanderthal was integral to the scientism behind the British construction of caste, and contributed to India’s becoming a principal ‘Third World’ target of Western structural adjustment policies as continuation of South Asia’s ‘evolution assistance’.