This chapter provides a snapshot of the recent developments on Chinese security interest law. Several questions will be explored. Firstly, were there any needs for changes? Secondly, what are the recent changes? Thirdly, have these changes achieved the purpose? I will offer some critical reflections of the law in terms of clarity, simplicity, convenience, and fairness. Not only are the relevant background and statutory framework of the security interests explained, but its theoretical structure and several practical issues will also be discussed. For instance, where a loan has been secured by both a personal guarantee and a mortgage, in the absence of any agreement, will the creditor have a free choice on which one to enforce first? Another question to be addressed is in situations where more than two securities had secured a loan (including a personal guarantee and mortgages) on a joint and several liability basis, in the absence of any agreement, can a security provider indemnify from the others after it fulfilled its security obligation in case of the debtor’s insolvency ?

This interlude pivots from the neofeudal to the neoliberal, terms that are sometimes used synonymously in contemporary political theory. It addresses two popular film adaptations of Austen and Scotts novels: Clueless and Rob Roy. Released during the mid-1990s, an era of hyperactive economic speculation, both films dramatize the perils of a quantifiable form of social relations made possible by mass financialization. However, while the films critique financialized honor, this time it is an aesthetic derived from Austen, and not Scott, that deftly undercuts honor codes premised on credit and debt.

In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.

Shakespeare inherited from the Middle Ages a long-standing association between debt and death. As a consequence of the Reformation’s elimination of purgatory, however, the relationship between debt and death had recently undergone a sea change. This chapter aims to show how a repeated pun of Shakespeare’s, one binding ‘debt’ to ‘death’, signals a shift in the relation between the living and the dead in early modern England: one brought about by the Reformation, and specifically its denial of purgatory. The reconfiguring of relations between the dead and their survivors turned largely on the idea of debt, especially that of a spiritual debt accrued over a lifetime as the commission of sins exceeded their remission. For the people of pre-Reformation England, purgatory was a debtor’s prison in which souls would suffer a temporal punishment for sins that had been forgiven, but for which they still owed a debt. Central to a post-Reformation understanding of the relation between debt and death was the growing practice of double-entry bookkeeping. Double-entry’s key idea of ‘balance’ bore heavy theological implications, evoking the scales of justice and the symmetry of a divine plan.

Britain in the “long eighteenth century” was the stage for some of the most momentous phases in the emergence of modern capitalism, from the founding of key financial institutions to stock market crashes, rapid urbanization, the beginnings of industrialization, and the expansion of empire. This chapter traces the often-formative role of imaginative writing in conceptualizing monetary and socioeconomic transformation. Prior to the division of disciplines, figures such as Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville moved between modes now differentiated as “literary” and “economic” while, at the end of the period, even exponents of emergent political economy such as Thomas Malthus and Jane Marcet felt called to answer the representations of a poet, and a verse satire helped to shift government economic policy. The chapter examines by turn the place of literature in framing and contesting the new centrality of credit, the defining metaphors that marked the route to a “de-moralized” economic science, and how the focus on landed property and wealth inequality in the work of realist and Gothic novelists relates to heterodox traditions, outside neoclassical economics.

After one year, Henry Clay Frick quit the university he was attending and, with two cousins and a friend, founded the Frick Coke Company. The plan was simple. Using a beehive oven, they would turn coal into coke fuel. Coke is an important ingredient in making steel.

Henry’s father had been a farmer and an unsuccessful businessman in Pennsylvania, and Henry vowed that his life would be different. Soon after establishing the Frick Coke Company, however, disaster struck – and it seemed that Henry would follow in his father’s footsteps. A financial crisis in 1873 had reduced the price of coke to 90 cents per ton and Henry’s business partners wanted out. But Henry chose to stay on, wrote a letter to an old family friend, Andrew Mellon, and received a loan of $10,000. For him, depressions were times of expansion; with his new loan he bought out his partners and acquired several coal mines from timid competitors at very low prices.

Religious networks were part of the Ancient Greek economy and formed the basis of the Greek expansion in the Mediterranean. From the archaic period onwards, emporia and port cities were cosmopolitan environments in which different rituals and cults coexisted. Sanctuaries hosted cults, which often supported the activity of traders, but they were themselves economic centers under the authority of Greek cities. The property of the gods soon became the basis of economic development, including building activity, lending, and renting practices. As business units, Greek sanctuaries easily attracted large numbers of people, especially during religious festivals. They facilitated the development of commercial activities thanks to their financial capacity. The interactions of a sanctuary thus created several forms of sociability not limited to trade with the gods. Through several institutional mechanisms, as for instance asylia, many Greek cities were able to make their sanctuaries protected places where common codes of behavior applied to all participants. Myths and cults also supported the initiatives of cities to build new networks.

From the late archaic period, all the functions of money – medium of exchange, measure of value, store of value, and medium of payment – were performed by coins, almost always silver, struck by scores of states on a few different weight standards. Market trade, international commerce, and labor were all mediated by money. Finance was an important, and often decisive, factor in statecraft and warfare, and temples were both dependent upon and replete with silver and gold. Agriculture was less monetized; cultural effects are still being debated. Credit was an essential part of both friendship and business: mortgages and eranoi (joint loans by an ad hoc group of lenders) supplied extraordinary personal expenses, while small market loans and larger bottomry loans for overseas expeditions financed both large and small commerce. Banking, in the sense of investing depositors’ money, was a Greek invention. Athenian banks, always family businesses, provided credit, remote payments, money-changing, and a secure place to hide money. Ptolemaic royal banks managed royal revenue and were involved, alongside private bankers, in the local economy; cashless book-transfers were common. The scope of banking was, however, limited by the need for coin reserves, which kept the banks from dominating the economy.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.

Chapter 5 extends our framework to credit markets, which are not usually analyzed by scholars of the welfare state, yet fulfill many of the same income-smoothing functions. Much like in private insurance markets, more and better information allows for better risk classification, which enables lenders to tie interest rates more directly to default risk. This results in inequality because individuals with a higher risk of default are almost always lower income, and more information either raise their interest rates or cut them off from credit markets altogether. The welfare state matters, too, because generous social protection lowers default risk – something lenders take into account. Based on a data set containing the 39 million single-family loans that Freddie Mac purchased or guaranteed in the past two decades, we show that the interest rate spread markedly increased over time and we test, using a regression discontinuity design, whether information could have plausibly caused this increase. We also test whether social protection influences access to credit for different income groups and find that it does.

In order to extract economic criteria for European fiscal federalism, Chapter 3 examines public accounts statistics and the economic literature on EMU from 1992 through the European sovereign debt crisis. It follows a chain of macroeconomic indicators running from nominal interest-rate convergence to the sovereign debt crisis. It examines nominal interest-rate convergence; structural determinants of sovereign bond yields; real interest rates; private-sector domestic credit; cross-border credit flows; consolidated banking claims; current-account imbalances; real effective exchange-rates; public and private-sector debt; the sovereign-bank feedback loop; and fiscal policy. The analysis finds that the Euro Crisis was a private debt crisis, not a public one. The causa sine qua non of the crisis is a severe mispricing of private and public debt caused by a failure of Articles 121-126 TFEU to induce markets to differentiate between sovereign borrowers under a (now realised) bailout expectation – not sovereign debt.

The introduction describes the aims and approach taken in this book. This is a study of money as social technology in the early modern world, written from the vantage point of the Dutch Republic. It aims to view early modern money 'from the inside' by studying everyday practices of makers and users of money, especially in a rural society in the east of the Dutch Republic. It analyses how public institutions (through minters, assayers, and government officials) and private individuals (farmers, merchants, and accountants) interacted in the creation and maintenance of Europe’s system of currencies. The specific focus of this book is on accounting practices and practices of material scrutiny because they offer a key to understanding the internal logic of early modern money.

Chapter 1 develops the notion of money as social technology which carries the analysis throughout the subsequent, more narrative chapters. The vivid case of a clandestine Catholic congregation in the east of the Netherlands, which used money to restore its social and material fabric, is placed alongside insights drawn from scholarship about Chinese, African, and Pacific history. The core idea is that technology is a relationship between people, objects, and meaning. Technology refers to a technique exercised within a social context which gives meaning to both the maker and the made object. In the present case this means that an object is turned into money when makers and users make it fungible, that is, when they imbue it with qualities that allow it to be reliably exchanged for something else. This technological approach brings into focus how money objects bring forth and change social structure; and, conversely, where social structures are techniques that create and transform money objects.