Books by Gerard Caprio

The recent financial crisis was an accident, a "perfect storm" fueled by an unforeseeable confluence of events that unfortunately combined to bring down the global financial systems. Or at least this is the story told and retold by a chorus of luminaries that includes Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan.

In Guardians of Finance, economists James Barth, Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine argue that the financial meltdown of 2007 to 2009 was no accident; it was negligent homicide. They show that senior regulatory officials around the world knew or should have known that their policies were destabilizing the global financial system and yet chose not to act until the crisis had fully emerged.

Barth, Caprio, and Levine propose a reform to counter this systemic failure: the establishment of a "Sentinel" to provide an informed, expert, and independent assessment of financial regulation. Its sole power would be to demand information and to evaluate it from the perspective of the public--rather than that of the financial industry, the regulators, or politicians.

Understanding twenty-first century global financial integration requires a two-part background.  The Handbook of Key Global Financial Markets, Institutions, and Infrastructure begins its description of how we created a financially-intergrated world by first examining the history of financial globalization, from Roman practices and Ottoman finance to Chinese standards, the beginnings of corporate practices, and the advent of efforts to safeguard financial stability. It then describes the architecture itself by analyzing its parts, such as markets, institutions, and infrastructure. The contributions of sovereign funds, auditing regulation, loan markets, property rights, compensation practices, Islamic finance, and others to the global architecture are closely examined.  For those seeking substantial, authoritative descriptions and summaries, this volume will replace books, journals, and other information sources with a single, easy-to-use reference work.

• Substantial articles by top scholars sets this volume apart from other information sources
• Diverse international perspectives result in new opportunities for analysis and research
• Rapidly developing subjects will interest readers well into the future

Political and social forces exert pressure on our globalized economy in many forms, from formal and informal policies to financial theories and technical models. Our efforts to shape and direct these forces to preserve financial stability reveal much about the ways we perceive the financial economy. The Handbook of Safeguarding Global Financial Stability examines our political economy, particularly the ways in which these forces inhabit our institutions, strategies, and tactics. As economies expand and contract, these forces also determine the ways we supervise and regulate. This high-level examination of the global political economy includes articles about specific countries, crises, and international systems as well as broad articles about major concepts and trends..

• Substantial articles by top scholars sets this volume apart from other information sources
• Diverse international perspectives result in new opportunities for analysis and research
• Rapidly developing subjects will interest readers well into the future

The sharp realities of financial globalization become clear during crises, when winners and losers emerge. Crises usher in short- and long-term changes to the status quo, and everyone agrees that learning from crises is a top priority. The Evidence and Impact of Financial Globalization devotes separate articles to specific crises, the conditions that cause them, and the longstanding arrangements devised to address them. While other books and journal articles treat these subjects in isolation, this volume presents a wide-ranging, consistent, yet varied specificity. Substantial, authoritative, and useful, these articles provide material unavailable elsewhere.

• Substantial articles by top scholars sets this volume apart from other information sources
• Rapidly developing subjects will interest readers well into the future
• Reader demand and lack of competitors underline the high value of these reference works

This volume assembles and presents a new database on bank regulation in over 150 countries. It offers the first comprehensive cross-country assessment of the impact of bank regulation on the operation of banks, and assesses the validity of the Basel Committee's influential approach to bank regulation. The treatment also provides an empirical evaluation of the historic debate about the proper role of government in the economy by studying bank regulation and analyzes the role of politics in determining regulatory approaches to banking. The data also indicate that restrictions on the entry of new banks, government ownership of banks, and restrictions on bank activities hurt banking system performance. The authors find that domestic political factors shape both regulations and their effectiveness.

This volume summarizes the key lessons of financial history for emerging market and developing economies, mostly drawn from when OECD economies themselves were industrializing and did not possess the checks, balances, and supervisory capabilities they have today. The topics include the role of central banks, debates on how to make banking secure and sound, the relative efficiency of universal banking (compared with the Anglo-American commercial banking model), and the role of savings banks, nonbanks, and securities markets in development.

This volume addresses one of the most topical and controversial issues in banking and financial policy. It explains why governments have felt the need to liberalize banking and finance, for example, by privatizing banks and allowing interest rates to be set by the market. It describes how the consequences have not always been smooth, and considers how financial liberalizations could be approached better in the future. In addition to a clear and concise presentation of current theories and global experience, there are six carefully chosen country case studies.

This study, the first to look at the analytics of and experience with financial reform, examines a number of issues: the relationship between the financial and real sectors, and how this behavior can affect the economy at large; the process of reform and the sequencing of various elements, including in particular the timing of opening of the capital account; the impact of financial reforms on the efficiency with which capital is allocated.

'Finance for Growth' is the result of a generation of research based on statistical data from around the world. This book provides an integrated view of how financial sector policy can be optimized in the new century. It concludes that policy choices need to create and support the infrastructure which is essential to the efficient functioning of financial markets. Authorities must work with the market to help coordinate private incentives with public interest.

The book focuses on making finance effective in delivering growth, preventing and minimizing crises, on government failure in finance, and on harnessing the potential of a technology-driven world of finance without frontiers.

A copublication of the World Bank and Oxford University Press.