Re-Define produces solutions to current and long-term public challenges and helps policy makers implement them
Re-Define Book, The Financial Crisis - Causes and Cures
Re-Define Book, The Financial Crisis - Causes and Cures
(Download the Book by Clicking Here)
Conservative bankers may sound like an oxymoron now, but there was indeed a time and age when bankers were known for their prudence. Within a matter of decades, bankers went from being considered ‘pillars of society’ to being widely reviled.
‘Credit’ comes from the word for trust in Latin (accreditivus) so it is scarcely a matter of surprise that this breakdown of trust overlaps with the biggest credit crunch in a generation. Clearly, governments need to continue to make efforts to restore credit flows in the economy in the short term. However, restoring trust in financial services to the extent that credit can again flow without the help of government support will be much harder.
This trust can only be earned through a combination of structural changes to banking, eagle-eyed supervision, tougher regulations, and limiting incentives to take on excessive risks with perhaps a little bit of banker contrition.
The exciting, adrenaline-inducing age of banking that led us into the crisis is a recent phenomenon. Right up to the mid 1970s banking was considered to be a ‘boring’ profession. The age of gilded mind-boggling bonuses is also new. While banking was relatively well-paid, compensation for bankers was only modestly higher than for other professions such as teaching.
What happened? How did bankers go from being conservative and rather boring to being considered reckless, greedy and mistrusted?
Did this have anything to do with triggering the biggest financial crisis in living memory?
How are policy makers around the world responding to this? And will it be enough to restore the flow of credit and trust in banking? How do we make sure we do not end up here again?
Developing an Effective Crisis Management Framework for the Eurozone
Developing an Effective Crisis Management Framework for the Eurozone
(An excerpt from a forthcoming paper for the European Parliament)
Background
While the discussion of the Eurozone crisis has focused primarily on issues in the sovereign debt market, it is instructive to remember at the outset that this crisis is not primarily a sovereign crisis but one that originated in the private financial sector. As often happens in credit crises, private sector debt is taken on to public balance sheets which makes them fragile and can, as in this case, result in serious dislocations of the sovereign debt market.
Finance Market Watch, Alternatives to Austerity, Lessons from Developing Countries, Green Finance, FTD, Le Monde, NRC, De Volkskrant, Der Tagesspiegel and Euractiv
Re-Define is in a very active mode and we are in the process of readying our Finance Market Watch initiative that we put together in early 2008, for a public launch in the autumn.
We are also embarking on three fascinating new projects looking into 1) Alternatives to Austerity 2) Lessons for Europe from the Developing World and 3) Making a Green Financial System.
New Re-Define Book, Bank Levies, Financial Transaction Taxes, Compensation Controls, Climate Finance, Development Finance...
Re-Define launched its new Book "The Financial Crisis - Causes and Cures" in Brussels at the end of April. This will be widely circulated and made available free of Charge in the last week of June as part of our public service mission. It will also be downloadable from the Re-Define website.
We are also publishing New Papers on Bank Levies, Financial Transaction Taxes, Tackling Compensation in the Financial Sector, the Development Footprint of Financial System Reform and Climate Finance in the next two weeks.
Please also see our recently published paper on 'Tackling the Triple Crises of Finance, Tax and Climate' commissioned by the European Parliament (available in our publications section).
And Watch this Space!
What Europe Needs to Do to Tackle the Triple Crises of Tax, Finance & Climate
Our new paper for the European Parliament highlights how old approaches to international governance are increasingly out of date in the day and age of increasing globalization. We now live in a world that is highly interconnected, is full of externalities and is increasingly fast paced. (Available for download in our publications section)
The ever faster and larger cross-border flows of commerce, people, and information technologies has reduced the idiosyncratic risks by allowing us access to an increasing array of options for example for investments or suppliers. At the same time, the higher degree of interconnectedness that this has brought about means that the risk of system wide failure – the dominoes all falling together - has increased significantly as demonstrated by the recent world wide collapse in cross border finance and trade.
Existing international governance structures to pursue shared global goals and manage externalities were designed at a time when systemic risk, externalities and the pace of change was much slower. These institutions and their approach to global governance now look increasingly out of touch. There is an urgent need to plug this governance gap that grows by the day.
Financial Transaction Taxes: Tools for Progressive Taxation and Improving Market Behaviour
Read the blog for a summary of this new Policy Brief by Sony Kapoor. Download the paper from the link below
Financial Transaction Taxes: Tools for Progressive Taxation and Improving Market Behaviour
The discussion on financial transaction taxes is reaching a climax. There have been several suggestions for the form such a tax should take and many estimates for how much revenue levying such taxes would generate often running into hundreds of billions of dollars.
In a new Re-Define policy brief we have addressed the all important question of the incidence of financial transaction taxes, seeking to answer the question ‘who pays in the end’, should FTTs be widely introduced. We also demonstrate how a differentiated transaction tax regime can address market behaviour issues such as churning and excessive short termism as well as help reduce systemic risk.
Re-Define Managing Director Sony Kapoor is interviewed by Euractiv.com
Ex-Lehman banker says EU should crack down on big banks
Tue, 2010-02-09 11:49
Instead of addressing fundamental issues like the role of finance, politicians seem stuck in assuaging public anger, argues Sony Kapoor, manager of the international think-tank Re-Define, in an interview with EurActiv.
Tackling Tax Havens - Adressing Fiscal Deficits, Financing Development and Stabilizing Finance
Anna Gibson, Research Associate, Re-Define
The German government recently decided to purchase stolen data revealing tax avoiders hiding money in Swiss bank accounts. This is a risky move diplomatically, but, for Germany, the gains from tackling this tax flight appear to outweigh the risks. It is also illustrative of the proliferating efforts by individual governments and the international community to clamp down on tax flight: the loss of tax revenue due to cross border tax evasion or avoidance.
However, the recent spat between Switzerland and Germany is merely the tip of the iceberg; symptomatic of what is one the most serious systemic failures of our time: the lack of intergovernmental cooperation on cross-border financial matters.
Tackling Sovereign Debt Systematically - If Not Now then When?
Anna Gibson, Research Associate, Re-Define
Development actors have long argued for an overarching international mechanism that would resolve sovereign debt crises in a fair, transparent, and consistent manner. Such a mechanism would assist poor countries that often suffocate under unsustainable levels of (sometimes odious) debt, lacking the political power and legal rights to negotiate with their creditors in an impartial and efficient forum. It would make handling sovereign debt problems less messy, more predictable, and the burden sharing simpler and fairer. It would also provide incentives to curtail irresponsible lending policies on behalf of creditors.
Re-Define Managing Director Sony Kapoor testimony at the European Parliament Hearing on Alternative Investment Funds
Please Click Here to see an archived webcast of the hearings which were held on the 27th of January. The written testimony will be available both here and on the European Parliament Website by the end of next week.
