OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
The finance industry plays a vital role in addressing the world’s most pressing problems. Yet, although there are many studies of finance industry, few that start by asking “what is its purpose”; and therefore few which are aimed at telling us whether it serves that purpose well. Those that do are very challenging; the most definitive, for example, calculates that, as far as the “real economy” is concerned there has been no increase in the productivity of intermediation in over more than a century.
Reflection on how the industry is currently structured can give us clues to this very poor performance, and suggest how we might begin a process of reform. But to do so will mean that we need to move away from the exclusive use of “competitive markets” and “regulation”, which dominate today’s policy discussion.
