The aim of this report is to assess the state of Islamic banking in North Africa, examine why it has failed to take-off and consider its future potential and how it can contribute to the economic development. The rationale for Islamic finance is explained and its essential features described. Once shari’ah compliant financing facilities become available, funds that otherwise might not be available can be harnessed for both commercial and development projects. In addition to diversifying funding sources, Islamic finance can ensure better monitoring of how funds are deployed, improving the effectiveness of financial intermediation

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. This project was completed as part of my thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. For more on my broader thesis work exploring the use of new media to make sense of a increasingly complex world, visit my website here. or email me at: jonathan.jarvis@gmail.com

Writing, direction, animation & sound by Jonathan Jarvis
Narration by John Levoff
Music by DJ Sol Rising

I am a professional singer, singing teacher and image consultant. In this blog, however, I talk about anything and everything that interests me - and there are a lot of things that interest me! I may or may not know anything about the things I blog about but I promise I will try to make them interesting for you too. Some of my blogs will be finance and banking related. I really DO know something about that as I spent 17 years of my life working at a senior level in banks and I have a Finance MBA. Everything else is just fun though.... I also blog about singing as singingiseasy and about image consultancy as francescoppolaimage.

This new Vox eBook presents a collection of essays by leading European and US economists that offer solutions to the crisis and proposals for medium- to long-term reforms to the regulatory framework in which financial institutions operate.

Speech by Andrew Haldane - executive director for financial stability- at the future of finance conference, London 2010

If this risks sounding metaphysical, so it should as the Euro faces its own existential crisis. A follow up to an earlier article on the perils of printing more and more money without the controlling influence of gold.

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

For more than a year, the American Bankers Association has pushed to limit the power and budget of the government’s newest consumer watchdog agency. The association, which includes the nation’s largest banks as members, is spending about $2 million every four months on lobbying, according to the Associated Press, most of it to limit the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act that created it.
But there’s at least one area where the ABA wants more regulation instead of less: FarmVille.
In a letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the bank association asked the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to consider regulating virtual currencies, like those used on FarmVille and Second Life.

The great financial crisis has been marked by the failure of models both qualitative and quantitative. During the past two decades the United States has suffered the decline of manufacturing; the ballooning of the financial sector; that sector’s capture of the regulatory system; ceaseless stimulus whenever the economy has wavered; taxpayer-funded bailouts of large capitalist corporations; crony capitalism; private profits and public losses; the redemption of the rich and powerful by the poor and weak; companies that shorted stock for a living being legally protected from the shorting of their own stock; compromised yet unpunished ratings agencies; government policies that tried to cure insolvency by branding it as illiquidity; and, on the quantitative side, the widespread use of obviously poor quantitative security valuation models for the purpose of marketing.

I HAVE a solution for the problem of bankers who take risks that threaten the general public: Eliminate bonuses.
Related News
More than three years since the global financial crisis started, financial institutions are still blowing themselves up. The latest, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy protection last week after its chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, made risky investments in European bonds. So far, lenders and shareholders have been paying the price, not taxpayers. But it is only a matter of time before private risk-taking leads to another giant bailout like the ones the United States was forced to provide in 2008.

I am Sustainability Manager within the think tank of the Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales.

I am one of four co-founders of The Finance Innovation Lab, the largest social innovation project in Europe focused on finance.

I am also and one of five co-founders of UnLtd*Future, a programme of support for social entrepreneurs with sustainable and disruptive business models in partnership with WWF, Nesta, UnLtd*, Shirlaws and Imperial College.

Nearly £13 billion worth of bank notes were destroyed by the Bank of England last year, either by being burned or turned into compost.

a graphical representation of banking consolidation in the US since 1990

The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was created to broaden and accelerate the development of new economic thinking that can lead to solutions for the great challenges of the 21st century.

The havoc wrought by our recent global financial crisis has vividly demonstrated the deficiencies in our outdated current economic theories, and shown the need for new economic thinking – right now.

INET is supporting this fundamental shift in economic thinking through research funding, community building, and spreading the word about the need for change. We already are a global community of thousands of new economic thinkers, ranging from Nobel Prize winning economists to teachers and students who have emerged out from the shadows of prevailing economic thought, attracted by the promise of a free and open economic discourse.

Mick Jagger is wearing a cool pink shirt, slim black trousers, and bright red socks. His hair is--well, there's a lot of it. But don't let the look fool you. Mick is all business. That's business with a capital "B," as in the stuff we write about all the time in the pages of FORTUNE.
I'm up in Jagger's suite in Boston's Four Seasons hotel just before the Stones kick off their worldwide Licks tour. Mick turns down the volume on a boom box, packs off two of his young kids with their nannies, and then holds forth on product pricing, economics, and business models. Jagger is eloquent and informed, but he has a disclaimer: "I don't really count myself as a very sophisticated businessperson," he says as he leans back on the couch. "I'm a creative artist. All I know from business I've picked up along the way. I never really studied business in school. I kind of wish I had, kind of, but how boring is that?" he says with a grin.

The History of a Music Business Revolution by Roy Davies from Exeter

well written. but seems a little embedded in guilt and blame.

the fundamental difficult is associating a positive moral judgement with saving. saving provides the funds with which banks, and other financial institutions make amoral investment decisions based upon 1. the return, 2. the security, 3. the law. Saving removes our money from our control - it is a payment to 'feel' secure.

our mission:

to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public.
to skeptically examine and, where necessary, attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become.
to liberate oppressed knowledge.
to provide analysis uninhibited by political constraint.
to facilitate information's unending quest for freedom.

broadly libertarian and monetarist blog on the economy. detailed posts with many comments.

Capital - it's going up in smoke, right? That's what, for example, Meredith Whitney - the analyst who predicted the banking meltdown - argued recently: that trillions in capital has been destroyed by the ongoing macro crisis.

It's more accurate to say that what's being destroyed never really existed in the first place. If my car's a Ford - but I call it a Ferrari - capital hasn't been formed, and value hasn't been created. I've simply created a fiction - like those we belatedly discovered Wall St was peddling.

The macro crisis tells us in no uncertain terms that we've got to shed the stale economic logic of the 20th century. Economies are powered by capital. Whitney, Bernanke, and the bankers of the universe are right about one thing: we've got to recapitalize a starving economy. But they're getting the bigger picture wrong: to power a wave of new industrial revolutions, we've got to seed it with newer, more valuable kinds of capital entirely.

Enlightenment Economics is a consultancy specialising in the economic and social effects of new technologies. 
Our principal areas of expertise are: Technology marketsInnovation and competitionCorporate governance and institutional reformImplications of globalisation for business and policyOur clients include global corporations and financial institutions, and international agencies. We look at the fundamental long-term strategic issues facing businesses, governments and individuals. We have worked on mobile telephony in emerging markets, on the use of new technologies and social networking in disasters, on innovation systems, and on the social impacts of information and communication technologies. 

This paper examines some of the ways in which the everyday is becoming connectedinto the world of nance, a process facilitated through so-called derivatives. The increasing use of derivatives is traced to the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement and theways in which innovative developments in nancial engineering were used to overcomethe uncertainties of interest rate, currency and price risks that grew apace from the early1970

David G.W. Birch is a Director of Consult Hyperion, the IT management consultancy that specialises in electronic transactions, where he provides specialist consultancy support to clients around the world. Before helping to found Consult Hyperion in 1986, he spent several years working as a consultant in Europe, the Far East and North America. He graduated from the University of Southampton with a B.Sc (Hons.) in Physics.
Described by The Independent newspaper in 2004 as a “grade-A geek”, by the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation in 2005 as “one of the most user-friendly of the UK’s uber-techies” and by Financial World in 2006 as “mad”, Dave is a member of the editorial board of the E-Finance & Payments Law and Policy Journal and of the advisory board for European Business Review, a columnist for SPEED and UK correspondent to the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce.

excellent audio visual presentation on debt crisis

The accounting layer in a money system implemented in financial cryptography is responsible for reliably [1] holding and reporting the numbers for every transaction and producing an overall balance sheet of an issue.
It is in this that BitCoin may have its greatest impact -- it may have shown the first successful widescale test of triple entry [2].
Triple entry is a simple idea, albeit revolutionary to accounting. A triple entry transaction is a 3 party one, in which Alice pays Bob and Ivan intermediates. Each holds the transaction, making for triple copies.
To make a transaction, Alice signs over a payment instruction to Bob with her public-key-based signature [3]. Ivan the issuer then packages the payment request into a receipt, and that receipt becomes the transaction.
This transaction is digitally signed by multiple parties, including at least one independent party [4]. It then becomes a powerful evidence of the transaction [5].
The final receipt *is the entry*. [6]

nef (the new economics foundation) is an independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being.

We aim to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues. We work in partnership and put people and the planet first.

nef was founded in 1986 by the leaders of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) which forced issues such as international debt onto the agenda of the G7 and G8 summits.

We are unique in combining rigorous analysis and policy debate with practical solutions on the ground, often run and designed with the help of local people. We also create new ways of measuring progress towards increased well-being and environmental sustainability.

nef works with all sections of society in the UK and internationally - civil society, government, individuals, businesses and academia - to create more understanding and strategies for change.

zerohedge's mission is to widen the scope of financial, economic and political information available to the professional investing public.to skeptically examine and, where necessary, attack the flaccid institution that financial journalism has become.to liberate oppressed knowledge.to provide analysis uninhibited by political constraint.to facilitate information's unending quest for freedom.

Here's the Economist rocking some hardcore 20th century thinking.

So what happens when every credit card company is exploiting every cognitive bias across markets? Simple: another credit meltdown, as nonpayment correlations spike.

Sound familiar? It should: it's the same systemic flaw in organization that is causing today's crisis.

The point is this. We cannot organize tomorrow's businesses - or economy - like yesterday's. What do I mean? Simple. How should we organize and manage how firms interact with consumers? The Economist thinks it's "creepy" but cool to trick consumers, because it's profitable.

Is it?

A few simple changes to the banking system can stop the banks from blowing up the economy again in the future, and mean that we’ll never have to bail out another toxic bank. We can also remove banks' power to create money, and use that privilege responsibly for the benefit of society and the economy as a whole.

Britain is not alone; almost all the world’s major economies have dabbled in QE since the financial crisis struck in 2008. This year the European Central Bank (ECB) sheepishly joined Britain, the US and Japan. In the spring, it was widely assumed that QE programmes had run their course, having pumped the targeted amount into their economies. But now policymakers in big western economies are considering “QE2”: another burst of monetary mysticism.

Yet as the world’s central bankers reach for their magic cash machines again, odd, unintended consequences of QE with social, political and even diplomatic repercussions are coming to light. For a start, the world’s leading economists seem unable to agree whether it has worked or not. The IMF’s verdict in August 2009 was that QE is “not a panacea… does not have to be a curse… and is not a non-event.” So at least we know what it is not. But what it is remains a mystery.

The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee was organized in the fall of 1998 to expose, oppose, and litigate against collusion to control the price and supply of gold and related financial instruments. The committee arose from essays by Bill Murphy, a financial commentator on the Internet (LeMetropoleCafe.com), and by Chris Powell, a newspaper editor in Connecticut.
Murphy's essays reported evidence of collusion among financial institutions to suppress the price of gold. Powell, whose newspaper had been involved in antitrust litigation, replied with an essay proposing that gold mining and investor interests should act on Murphy's essays by bringing antitrust lawsuits against financial institutions involved in the collusion against gold.
The response to these essays was so favorable that the committee was formed and formally incorporated in Delaware in January 1999. Murphy became chairman and Powell secretary and treasurer.

States accounting for two-thirds of the global economy are either holding down their exchange rates by direct intervention or steering currencies lower in an attempt to shift problems on to somebody else, each with their own plausible justification. Nothing like this has been seen since the 1930s.

FinanceAndEconomics.Org was established by Alasdair Macleod to educate decision-makers and other interested people in finance and economics. F&E.O's unique coverage allows clients to make informed risk assessments about current economic events and the likely outlook.The service is targeted at all levels of financial and economic literacy. By avoiding jargon, focusing on simple concepts and above all keeping clear of mathematical expressions, anyone can understand it.
In short, this is a much needed service at a time of great uncertainty.

Amid the blizzard of economic data that the government puts out every week, last Tuesday’s report analyzing G.D.P. industry by industry got little notice. But it contained one very interesting piece of data: in 2008, for the first time in sixteen years, the finance and insurance industry shrank. Since 1980, this sector’s share of the economy has grown by almost half. Now, apparently, the worm has turned.

We believe that everyone should be able to understand how the financial crisis came about, what it means for all of us, and what our options are for getting out of it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of all writing about the crisis - including this blog - assumes some familiarity with the world of mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and so on. You’ve probably heard dozens of journalists use these terms without explaining what they mean. If you’re confused, this page is for you. Over time, we will be adding more explanations and more links to external sources, so check back for updates. (Some of the explanations on this page are simplified and not 100% accurate; their goal is to explain the key concepts to a general audience.)