This book is all about events, discoveries and ideas which may have seemed small and insignificant at the time but later changed the world. DDT and LSD, Frick & Frack, the Basel Mission and the Zionist World Congress, Tadeus Reichstein and Friedrich Nietzsche, the first printed edition of the Koran and much else provide the stuff of which exciting stories are made in Basel, the hub of the universe.

Tower of Basel is the first investigative history of the world's most secretive global financial institution. Based on extensive archival research in Switzerland, Britain, and the United States, and in-depth interviews with key decision-makers -- including Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Sir Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England; and former senior Bank for International Settlements managers and officials -- Tower of Basel tells the inside story of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS): the central bankers' own bank. Created by the governors of the Bank of England and the Reichsbank in 1930, and protected by an international treaty, the BIS and its assets are legally beyond the reach of any government or jurisdiction. The bank is untouchable. Swiss authorities have no jurisdiction over the bank or its premises. The BIS has just 140 customers but made tax-free profits of 1.17 billion in 2011-2012. Since its creation, the bank has been at the heart of global events but has often gone unnoticed. Under Thomas McKittrick, the bank's American president from 1940-1946, the BIS was open for business throughout the Second World War. The BIS accepted looted Nazi gold, conducted foreign exchange deals for the Reichsbank, and was used by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a secret contact point to keep the channels of international finance open. After 1945 the BIS -- still behind the scenes -- for decades provided the necessary technical and administrative support for the trans-European currency project, from the first attempts to harmonize exchange rates in the late 1940s to the launch of the Euro in 2002. It now stands at the center of efforts to build a new global financial and regulatory architecture, once again proving that it has the power to shape the financial rules of our world. Yet despite its pivotal role in the financial and political history of the last century and during the economic current crisis, the BIS has remained largely unknown -- until now.

In a financial revolution, new determinants of performance arise and interest in the way performance is measured and communicated to stakeholders grows. This book presents a wide and accurate analysis of the impact that regulation, structural changes and new financial products have on the performance of markets and intermediaries.

The turmoil in financial markets that resulted from the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States indicates the need to dramatically transform regulation and supervision of financial institutions. Would these institutions have been sounder if the 2004 Revised Framework on International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards (Basel II accord)—negotiated between 1999 and 2004—had already been fully implemented? Basel II represents a dramatic change in capital regulation of large banks in the countries represented on the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: Its internal ratings–based approaches to capital regulation will allow large banks to use their own credit risk models to set minimum capital requirements. The Basel Committee itself implicitly acknowledged in spring 2008 that the revised framework would not have been adequate to contain the risks exposed by the subprime crisis and needed strengthening. This crisis has highlighted two more basic questions about Basel II: One, is the method of capital regulation incorporated in the revised framework fundamentally misguided? Two, even if the basic Basel II approach has promise as a paradigm for domestic regulation, is the effort at extensive international harmonization of capital rules and supervisory practice useful and appropriate? This book provides the answers. It evaluates Basel II as a bank regulatory paradigm and as an international arrangement, considers some possible alternatives, and recommends significant changes in the arrangement.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) sets the guidelines for world-wide regulation of banks. It is the forum for agreeing international regulation on the conduct of banking. Based on special access to the archives of the BCBS and interviews with many of its key players, this book tells the story of the early years of the Committee from its foundation in 1974/5 right through until 1997 - the year that marks the watershed between the Basel I Accord on Capital Adequacy and the start of work on Basel II. In addition, the book covers the Concordat, the Market Risk Amendment, the Core Principles of Banking and all other facets of the work of the BCBS. While the book is primarily a record of the history of the BCBS, it also provides an assessment of its actions and efficacy. It is a major contribution to the historical record on banking supervision.

Echinoderms are an ancient and diverse group of marine animals with a rich fossil record. They occur abundantly in all modern oceans and at all depths, where they contribute importantly to patterns in biodiversity and to the structure and functioning of marine systems. It is therefore vital to understand how they will respond to a rapidly cha

This book analyzes the impact of Basel Accord in Bangladesh. More specifically, it focuses on the credit risk homogenization under standardized approach of Basel Accord where External Credit Rating Agencies (ECAIs) are allowed to rate the exposures, the potential risk of allowing sub-ordinated debt (Sub-debt) as Tier 2 capital, and multiple bank distress cases as a real-world scenarios. In doing so, the book explores why the ECAIs rating fail to capture the real credit risk of exposure and to what extent sub-debt is reliable as regulatory capital. With that, the book's scope is categorized into three tracts (i) analyzes the ECAIs incentive and sanction issues from institutional economics perspective (ii) discusses the ill-impact of Naïve adoption of sub-ordinated debt as regulatory capital and its associated risk on financial system, and (iii) providing readers an empirical illustrations of bank distress when an economy tapped into institutional failures in the above-mentioned tracts (i) and (ii).