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Analyzing how the post-Soviet transition interacts with the crisis of market finance exhibits a new “greed-based economic system” in the making. Asset grabbing is at its core and hinders capital accumulation. All the various privatization schemes have triggered off asset grabbing, asset stripping, and asset tunneling. A global contagion of such behavior has spread the power and cohesion of managers/shareholders (oligarchs) worldwide. Financial asset grabbing is less straightforward, though much widespread, and operates in financial markets through new financial products, securitization, firms buying their own shares, hedge funds, stock price manipulation, short selling, and the distribution of stock options.Shadow banking, and more generally a global informal economy, results from grabbing strategies in financial markets that breach the formal rules of capitalism. In alleviating and circumventing the rules, the oligarchy paves the way for economic malpractices and crime, calling capitalist laws into question.In such context, systemic greed underlies unconstrained maximization of relative wealth, for which asset grabbing is a rational means, in a winner-take-all economy. At the present stage of our research, a greed-based economy cannot yet be theoretically defined as a transition either to a new phase of capitalism or to another different system.

This paper aims to propose a new model of economic behaviour in which activities are led by greed rather than by the traditional formal rules of capitalism.

This paper relies on the empirical observation of bad practices that developed in synchrony during the collapse of the former communist economic system and the rise of global financial capitalism. Both were fuelled by greedy behaviour of asset grabbing, and paved the way to an emerging greed-led economic system.

First, microeconomic individual greedy behaviours that drive asset grabbing are identified, such as rigged or corrupt privatisation drives, subprime mortgage loans, Ponzi schemes, lending to insolvent clients, bad loan securitisation, stock options, fraudulent accounting and online betting on fixed matches. Then systematic changes in the traditional formal rules of capitalism that favour those having adopted a greedy strategy are pointed at; greedy behaviour is institutionalised when these capture the state and successfully lobby for rules change. Contrary to capitalism, systemic greed uses asset grabbing, instead of capital accumulation, as its major means for wealth maximisation without constraint, in a winner-take-all economy beneficial to oligarchs.

The implications of this new systemic behaviour have implications for further economic modelling.

The emergence of systemic greed will have implications for the design of regulatory systems.

This paper proposes that a greed-controlled economy is replacing the traditional capitalist economy.

This study aims to investigate impacts of classic transaction cost-related factors (i.e. partner selection cost, specific asset investment and extorting rent cost) on joint venture (JV) partner’s cooperative and opportunistic behaviour, from the perspective of transaction cost economics.

Item measurements, based on which the questionnaire was developed, were derived according to a thorough search and review of related literature. In all, 226 valid responses from manufacturing enterprises in China were collected. A structural equation modelling approach was used to analyse the data and examine the fitness of the proposed model.

This study shows that partner selection cost, specific asset investment and extorting rent cost are positively related to a JV partner’s cooperative behaviour. Specific asset investment exerts the most significant influence on partner’s cooperative behaviour. The results also reveal that partner’s opportunistic behaviour is not significantly affected by specific asset investment but is negatively influenced by extorting rent cost. Both partner selection cost and extorting rent cost show positive impacts on specific asset investment.

The investigation focused on only manufacturing enterprises in one country. Future research could be directed to investigating other countries to increase the generalizability of the findings.

The findings suggest that increasing the extorting rent cost to promote the probability of specific asset investment is a core element to enhance JV partner cooperation.

The study not only empirically investigates the relative importance of classic transaction cost-related factors on JV partner opportunism and cooperation, but also enables a deeper understanding of the interrelationship among the classic transaction cost-related factors and their influences on partner cooperation and opportunism.

The purpose of the article is to show the changing behavior of investors in the post-pandemic period, the continued development of “emotional communities” in the financial market, as well as the factors contributing to their formation and the role of such communities in the elaboration of investors' decisions.

The research includes an analysis of the popularity of various terms searched in the US segment of Google in the financial category from 2004 to 2022, their correlation with financial market indicators and theoretical observations around these data.

The results obtained by the author allow him to draw the following conclusions: (1) the change in investors' behavior indicates the formation of the new distributed community-centric model of the financial market; (2) the main distinguishing feature of the behavior of many retail investors is gamification; (3) the networking of investors contributes to a significant change in their priorities in the elaboration of investment decisions; (4) the fundamental indicators of the financial market play an ever decreasing role in the decision-making of individual investors.

To the best of the author's knowledge, the formation of emotional communities of investors and their role in the elaboration of mass investor decisions is not widely covered in the literature. The paper develops a framework for further studies on the role of emotional communities in the financial market and in changing behavior of retail investors.

Pledging collateral to secure loans is a prominent feature in financing contracts around the world. Existing theories disagree on why borrowers pledge collateral. It is even more challenging to understand why in some countries collateral coverage exceeds, for example, 300% of the value of a loan. This study looks at the association between collateral coverage and country-level governance and various institutional proxies. It investigates the economic implications of steep collateral coverage and sketches policy options to lower ex-ante asymmetric information and ex-post agency problems. Within this framework, should a lender collect the debt forcibly on default and liquidated assets fetch prices below outstanding loan values, the lender’s loss is covered through credit insurance, which would significantly reduce the need for steep collateral coverage. This proposal may increase level of private credit, investment and growth; particularly, in a number of developing countries where collateral spread is the main inhibitor of finance.

The surging stock market in the late nineties lifted the funding level of most pension plans and led to plan management decisions that left them vulnerable to the stock market decline of 2000-2002. In this study, an analysis was conducted on the descriptive data of 51 state pension plans for the period 1998-2003 and it was found that overfunded plans were more likely to substantially increase benefits while simultaneously reduce contributions. This led to widespread underfunding and a need for sudden increase in contributions as market conditions grew worse and funding levels dropped sharply. This investment cycle emphasizes the need for more prudent surplus management strategies to protect pension plans from the consequences of stock market volatility.