John Kay

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2016We all depend on the finance sector. We need it to store our money, manage our payments, finance housing stock, restore infrastructure, fund retirement and support new business. But these roles comprise only a tiny sliver of the sectors activity: the vast majority of lending is within the finance sector. So what is it all for? What is the purpose of this activity? And why is it so profitable?John Kay, a distinguished economist with wide experience of the financial sector, argues that the industrys perceived profitability is partly illusory, and partly an appropriation of wealth created elsewhere - of other peoples money. The financial sector, he shows, has grown too large, detached itself from ordinary business and everyday life, and has become an industry that mostly trades with itself, talks to itself, and judges itself by reference to standards which it has itself generated. And the outside world has itself adopted those standards, bailing out financial institutions that have failed all of us through greed and mismanagement.We need finance, but today we have far too much of a good thing. In Other Peoples Money John Kay shows in his inimitable style what has gone wrong in the dark heart of finance.

El sector financiero es, sin duda, necesario, pero… ¿lo es también todo lo que le rodea? En los últimos tiempos, el mundo de las finanzas ha crecido demasiado, se ha distanciado de los negocios ordin

El sector financiero es, sin duda, necesario, pero… ¿lo es tambien todo lo que le rodea? En los últimos tiempos, el mundo de las finanzas ha crecido demasiado, se ha distanciado de los negocios ordinarios y de la vida cotidiana, para convertirse en una industria muy rentable que principalmente comercia consigo misma, habla consigo misma y se juzga a si misma segun unas reglas propias. El afamado y prestigioso economista John Kay pone el dedo en la llaga y expone una incisiva critica al actual sector financiero, que debe replantearse sus principios y metas, y sobre todo no puede olvidar que su principal cometido es administrar un dinero que ha sido creado fuera de su orbita y que no es suyo.

In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, John Kay unravels the truth about markets. He explains why market economies outperformed socialist or centrally directed ones, but also why the imposition of market institutions often fails. Kay's search for the truth about markets takes him from the shores of Lake Zürich to the streets of Mumbai, through evolutionary psychology and moral philosophy, to the flower market at San Remo and Christies' saleroom in New York. Through this range of material he shows that market economies function because they are embedded in a social, political and cultural context, and cannot work otherwise.

An original, widely-applicable concept from one of the world's foremost economists.