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The purpose of this study is to explore stakeholders’ perceptions on money creation and the impact of the accounting treatment for commercial banks’ money lending activity in Malaysia.

A phenomenological approach was used to examine the stakeholders’ perceptions through experience-sharing. A semi-structured interview approach was used to collect the data. Ten individuals from different stakeholder groups have been interviewed with their prior consent. For the data analysis, the current study adopted the inductive thematic approach.

Perceptions on money creation are influenced by the informants’ understanding and awareness of the research issue. Informants have agreed on the accounting treatment (debit loan and credit deposits) but explained the impact of this accounting treatment differently. The accounting treatment creates an opportunity for the commercial banks to create money as they want, and hence, the excess created money can create inflation and threat for the potential financial crisis. On the contrary, it is argued that money creation results from the systematic approach of the fractional reserve banking (FRB) in Malaysia. In addition, this money creation is not a threat to the economy as long as there is a strong controlling role of Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM).

Stakeholders’ perception indicates that awareness of the research issue can be a cause of crucial consequence for money lending activity. Moreover, this study may stimulate the chief regulatory body such as BNM, the central bank of Malaysia, to be more cautious in controlling the commercial banks’ money lending activity to prevent the potential future crisis. Furthermore, findings may help to explain the conflicting concept between the textbook explanation for FRB and current commercial banks’ money lending practice through the accounting treatment.

Monitoring and controlling of money creation and commercial banks’ money lending activity by BNM can be benefited from the stakeholders’ perceptions on this research issue. Because this is the first time study of the stakeholders’ perceptions on money creation and commercial banks’ money lending activity in Malaysia and hence, findings of this study may be worked as the input in the process of monitoring and controlling the money creation activity in Malaysia.

The development of banking in Africa followed the demand of exchange networks from traditional indigenous economies to colonial exchange with the European world. The establishment of European banking institutions reflected the needs of the capitalist economy introduced by colonialism. The banking management of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century European banks adhered to the interests of shareholders. This chapter shows the emergence of well-managed banks in Africa, but after decolonization the political economy of African independence resulted in state capturing of financial institutions in most African countries. The South African banking system developed in close adherence to the British model. State-owned post-independence banks in Africa failed to deliver the development envisaged. The chapter shows the adverse impact of global economic developments on Africa, resulting in high debt levels. Structural adjustment of African economies and new market-oriented policies allowed the development of locally owned private banking institutions. The high-cost structure of the formal banking system from the dominant South African banks incentivised the mobile money innovation, an arena where African entrepreneurs lead global markets. Financial inclusion remains low in Africa.

This chapter discusses salient factors pertaining to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), also called the Great Recession, which gave rise to contagion effects that continue to reverberate across the global financial landscape. The GFC is linked to three primary negative themes: build-up of credit in a global credit super cycle, New Financial Architecture (NFA) and financialization under neoliberalism, and a distorted relationship between laissez-faire economics/finance and normative political imperatives. The conclusion is that we need to rethink understandings of key principles in economics and finance and reform governance mechanisms of the financial system.

The essay examines an empirical phenomenon – the GFC – and discusses themes based upon the author’s insights gained from the vantage point of working in asset management during the Crisis. In addition, the author draws upon material from the academic literature and financial press. He problematizes finance through the lens of the GFC and suggests that the three causal factors being highlighted are enduring sources of instability in the financial system.

The conclusion is that financial crises such as the GFC are not caused by unpredictable exogenous variables but instead pertain to identifiable recurring factors and human failures. Structural, epistemological, and behavioral issues are aggravated by neoliberalism. Finance is integral to economic activity. But under neoliberalism, the global financial economy rapidly assumed a particular form of financialization founded on market fundamentalism and political and regulatory capture. Neo-liberal coöptation of finance, economics, and politics needs to be reversed to place financial and economic activity within more robust frameworks that take into account credit cycles, flaws, and instabilities inherent in the system while applying appropriate regulatory mechanisms to prevent crises.

Scholars and practitioners can draw upon claims made in this essay to propose more substantive reforms to the global financial system. These range from redesigning how finance and economics are understood and taught, to imposing circuit breakers to prevent credit cycles from becoming untenable bubbles.

Neoliberalism is a political project that has distorted understanding of empirical truths while also effecting a paralysis with regard to fixing problems. The market fundamentalism that neoliberalism prescribes and promulgates results, time and time again, in financial crises that have disastrous consequences including massive wealth destruction. It is crucial to reform the system and create more sustainable, less volatile paradigms of financial and economic life.

Arguments in this chapter are simple and straightforward but have significant implications for achieving more nuanced understandings of the financial system. Claims are presented as distillations of how the system actually works, especially the way in which it tends toward conditions of crisis and stress. Mainstream finance and economics are characterized as predicated upon certain erroneous propositions, particularly concerning efficient markets and rational agency, core tenets of the neo-liberal project.

The paper employs a critical version of Abbott’s “system of professions” in order to analyse how new management practices in UK clearing banks have been influenced by competing bodies of expert knowledge promoted by the banks’ own profession, their senior management and outside professions. The main loser in this contest has been the professional expertise represented by the Chartered Institute of Bankers (CIOB). For most of the last 100 years the banks based their management control systems on cultural controls embedded in the branch system. In the 1970s and 1980s, the branch culture was challenged by a new marketing ethos and by the impact of new technology. In the early 1990s, changes in the structure of banks plus a continuing profits crisis induced further changes that saw the introduction of new management accounting techniques such as activity‐based costing. Finally, notes that, while recent commercial and regulatory problems offer potential opportunities for the non‐accountancy finance professions, the banks are unlikely to allow the emergence of a more independent profession within their own organizations.

Argues the need for banks to re‐create the “relationship banker”. Over the last 20 years development has been in making acquisitions, centralization and specialization in order to obtain the full benefits of automation. Increasing competition has produced a glut of “lifestyle” advertising to segment customer bases, but these may be widely regarded as only cosmetic changes. Recommends the need to create a corporate culture based on satisfying or exceeding customer expectations. A centralized structure may still operate as a transmission‐and transaction‐processing “factory”; a parallel less cumbersome structure is needed to allow flexible and rapid response to customers′ needs. Discusses these in detail and embodies the latter in the old‐style branch manager.

The case describes the strategy of a large Indian Public Sector Bank (PSB) to enhance financial inclusion and financial literacy of less privileged people located in poorly accessible parts of India. While pursuing the developmental objective ‘imposed’ by the Central Bank/government, being a listed entity, the PSB had to be mindful of the financial viability of the strategy so as to protect the interest of its minority shareholders. The issues covered are endemic to most developing countries where public enterprises often become instrumentality of the state.

The purpose of this paper is to review studies focusing on the magnitude of money laundering and their effects on a country’s economy. The relevant concepts are identified on the basis of discussions in the literature by prominent scholars and policy makers. There are three main objectives in this review: first, to discuss the effects of money laundering on a country’s macro-economy; second, to seek measurements from other scholars; and finally, to seek previous findings about the magnitude and the flows of money laundering.

In the first part, this paper outlines the effects of money laundering on macroeconomic conditions of a country, and then the second part reviews the literature that measures the magnitude of money laundering from an economic perspective.

Money laundering affects a country’s economy by increasing shadow economy and criminal activities, illicit flows and impeding tax collection. To minimise these negative effects, it is necessary to quantify the magnitude of money laundering relative to economic conditions to identify the most vulnerable aspects of money laundering in a country. Two approaches are used in this study: the first is the capital flight approach, as money laundering will cause flows of money between countries; the second is the economic approach for measuring money laundering through economic variables (e.g. tax revenue, underground economy and income generated by criminals) separately from tax evasion.

The paper offers new insights for the measurement of money laundering, especially for developing countries. Most methods in quantifying money laundering have focused on developed countries, which are less applicable to developing countries.

This study aims to investigate the resilience of Italian companies one year after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak by examining the companies' choices and opinions regarding the welfare state, criminal approaches and mergers and acquisitions (M&As) during the pandemic.

The authors proposed a conceptual framework based on a combination of private vs public protection and business resilience theory and adopted a concurrent embedded mixed-method approach, using an online survey of 219 entrepreneurs.

The authors find the respondents showing high resilience to the crisis and strongly unaffected by organised crime's (OC's) predatory role; the State seems to have quickly and effectively met the financial needs of sampled Italian companies, at least in the short term.

Whilst welfare can be highly effective for companies to combat crime, regulators should recognise that public protection may decrease with time, leaving companies open to long-term challenges.

The authors believe that our study makes a significant contribution to the entrepreneurship literature because this is the first study to explore how entrepreneurs deal with financing problems in a context characterised by a strong impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and OC pressure.

In a paper entitled ‘On reaching the poor’, Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder and the managing director of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh (GBB), reasoned that

The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature of CSR before and in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008. The aim of the research question is to map out the consequences upon CSR derived from the crisis and to derive new principles of future CSR models to come consistent with the consequences of the financial crisis, and to suggest new research as well as policy-making possibilities to highlight the importance and necessary survival of CSR as an instrument for sustainable and financial progress.

This paper uses a literature review of CSR prior to and after the financial crisis 2008, with an emphasis on academic papers published in peer-reviewed journals.

The findings of the paper reveal that post-crisis CSR-models do not articulate anything that has not been mentioned before; however, they do strengthen former values of CSR, but still lack an overall formula of how the financial sector can adopt CSR in the core of their businesses, and transparently display their products, and the risk adhering to them. The paper proposes a new Four-“E”-Principle that may guide new CSR-models to accomplish this deficit. See under “Originality”.

The paper calls for a discussion on ways in which governments and businesses can enhance social responsibility, though balancing the requirements of more engagement from businesses, as well as public sector companies in CSR. This paper suggests some instrumental mechanisms of how governments can engage, not only multinational companies, but also smaller companies, and other kinds of organizations acting on the market, to make them engage more in CSR.

The paper proposes a new Four-“E”-Principle to guide the development of new CSR-models based upon the core of Schwartz and Carroll's “Three-domain CSR-model”, which the Principle extends and revises to: Economy, L/Egal, Environment, and Ethics. This Principle disentangles the dialectic relationship between economic and social responsibility; takes financial products into consideration; refines the definitions of good stakeholder engagement without the illusions of corporate “Potemkinity”; and considers the benefit of replacing the semiotic meaning of the “C” in CSR from “corporate” to “capitalism's social responsibility” in order to extend the concept towards a broader range of market agents.