A few days from the tenth anniversary of the bankruptcy of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers, September 15, an event that has become a symbol of the most recent global financial crisis, whose aftershocks have characterized the last decade both in the United States and in Europe.
Emilio Barucci, signature Who will save finance (Egea 2018; 208 pages; 22 euros; epub 14,99), volume that takes stock of the legacy of those events, including the ineffectiveness demonstrated by the European institutions in guaranteeing the stability of Italian banks in the cases of MPS, cooperative banks and bank non-performing loans, questioning who, and how, will be able to save the finance.
The reference to ethics, to the fact that it is right for a managing director to earn more than a bank teller, is not the best way to approach the question: what is needed is a reflection on how it is possible to plan good finance, starting from its founding principles.
The financial crisis has clearly shown that there is good finance and bad finance as the former is well constructed while the latter is not. They are good or bad technique that make good or bad finance rather than the greed of men.
This is the point that the author tries to investigate, in the belief that a careless use of some important cornerstones of financial theory, the lobbying action of the financial industry and the blunder/impotence of the regulatory/political authorities, have ended to produce a poorly constructed finance that has not been able to deliver on its promises of being useful to society.
The volume reflects on the mechanisms behind what happened, with the aim not so much of identifying the culprits as of understanding the reasons for the root crisis, evaluating the legacy and identifying possible solutions.
Among these, there is also a look at the Fintech revolution, which has some characteristics that have fueled the imagination of those who have shown impatience with the financial system.
Will Fintech be the solution to all problems? "Probably not", argues Barucci, "but it will be part of the future, opening up a very interesting perspective".
There are some key words that recur in the world of Fintech and which explain the great attention it is attracting: freedom and flexibility, trust and community, tailor-made. These characteristics could open up completely new scenarios with a disintermediation and with a centrality of the saver/investor hitherto unknown.
Emilio Barucci is Professor of Financial Mathematics at the Politecnico di Milano. Director of QFinLAb, Quantitative Finance Lab. Author of over sixty scientific publications in national and international journals, he has published six volumes, including Financial engineering (Egea, 2009).
