Hardbound. The EMU and the Euro are transforming European banking institutions, regulations, performance, and bank-state relationships. This book analyzes these dynamic challenges and processes. It presents contemporary and historical perspectives to guide an informed understanding of European banks, banking culture, and the role of the banking sector in the EMU's new financial and competitive environment.

The world of finance is again undergoing crisis and transformation. This book provides a new perspective on finance through the prism of popular and formal culture and examines fascination and repulsion toward money, the role of governments and individuals in financial crises and how the Crisis of 2008, like others since 1720, repeat the same patterns of enthusiasm, greed, culpability, revulsion, reform and recovery.

The book explores the political and socio-economic factors which determine fallibility and resilience in financial cultures, periods of crisis, transition and recovery...