Mervyn A. King Livres

Uncertainty pervades the big decisions we all make in our lives. How much should we pay into our pensions each month? Should we take regular exercise? Expand the business? Change our strategy? Enter a trade agreement? Take an expensive holiday?We do not know what the future will hold. But we must make decisions anyway. So we crave certainties which cannot exist and invent knowledge we cannot have. But humans are successful because they have adapted to an environment that they understand only imperfectly. Throughout history we have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines our lives.This incisive and eye-opening book draws on biography, history, mathematics, economics and philosophy to highlight the most successful - and most short-sighted - methods of dealing with an unknowable future Ultimately, the authors argue, the prevalent method of our age falls short, giving us a false understanding of our power to make predictions, leading to many of the problems we experience today.Tightly argued, provocative and written with wit and flair, RADICAL UNCERTAINTY is at once an exploration of the limits of numbers and a celebration of human instinct and wisdom.

The past twenty years saw unprecedented growth and stability followed by the worst financial crisis the industrialised world has ever witnessed. In the space of little more than a year what had been seen as the age of wisdom was viewed as the age of foolishness. Almost overnight, belief turned into incredulity. Most accounts of the recent crisis focus on the symptoms and not the underlying causes of what went wrong. But those events, vivid though they remain in our memories, comprised only the latest in a long series of financial crises since our present system of commerce became the cornerstone of modern capitalism. Alchemy explains why, ultimately, this was and remains a crisis not of banking - even if we need to reform the banking system - nor of policy-making - even if mistakes were made - but of ideas. In this refreshing and vitally important book, former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King - an actor in this drama - proposes revolutionary new concepts to answer the central question: are money and banking a form of Alchemy or are they the Achilles heel of a modern capitalist economy?

Während Alchemisten ihrem Ziel, wertlose Materialien in Gold zu verwandeln, bislang nicht näher gekommen sind, können moderne Banken eine bessere Erfolgsbilanz aufweisen: Gold können sie zwar nicht erschaffen, dafür jedoch neues Geld – und das aus dem Nichts. In dieser »modernen Alchemie« verortet Lord Mervyn King, ehemaliger Gouverneur der britischen Zentralbank, die grundlegenden Probleme des heutigen Kapitalismus, deren Ausmaße in der weltweiten Finanzkrise virulent wurden und bis heute die Weltwirtschaft in ständiger Unsicherheit halten. In »Das Ende der Alchemie« fordert er zu einer Umkehr auf. Statt Banken mit der Möglichkeit zu adeln, neues Geld zu schaffen, müssen endlich wirksame Regularien des Bankensektors in Kraft gesetzt werden. Damit sich eine Krise dieser historischen Dimension nicht wiederholt und die weltweite Wirtschaft sich nachhaltig erholt, braucht es kreative Ideen, die Mervyn King in diesem einmaligen Buch liefert. Mit einem exklusiven Vorwort von Lord Mervyn King für die deutsche Ausgabe.