Bøger af Steven Toms

Financial fraud is a serious and seemingly intractable problem. Financial scandals regularly punctuate newspaper headlines and regulators and auditors appear bereft of effective responses. But has this always been the case?This book quantifies financial crime in the UK using three centuries of data. It demonstrates how financial fraud and scandal vary according to systematic economic and institutional arrangements. In doing so, it retells the history of British capitalism, from the mercantilism of the eighteenth century to the financial capitalism of the twenty-first century, illustrating the often negative consequences of economic ideology, policy and structure. It identifies periods when fraud has been less problematic and contrasts these with times when it has surged. The variation of outcomes reflects the balance of power between the state, industrial and financial sectors, the provision of credit through risky lending, and the effectiveness of audits. "Rogue traders" and other flawed individuals are frequently the focus of blame narratives constructed with the intention of deflecting comprehensive systematic reforms.

This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry, long a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy, for the first time.The cotton and textile industry, at the centre of the industrial revolution, has long been a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy. This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry for the first time. Using a unique underlying data-set drawn from financial business records of over 100 cotton and textile-manufacturing firms based in Lancashire, and ranging from the late eighteenth tothe twenty-first century, Financing Cotton analyses the dynamics of industrial capitalism by uncovering the interaction between financial systems and technological development and innovation. It offers new perspectives onbusiness practices and their evolution, as well as decisions taken by entrepreneurs, managers and employees. The book broadly investigates five questions: how and why were individual firms profitable and what happened to these profits; how did the firms' financial structure and performance influence their attitudes to employment regulation; what were the effects of financial networks and institutions on the characteristics of the first and second phase ofindustrialisation; how did the financial system enable or stifle entrepreneurship and investment in new technology and, finally, why did consolidation and industrial restructuring offer survival options for some firms, but not forothers? STEVEN TOMS is Professor of Accounting at the Leeds University Business School.