The Next Revolution in our Credit-Driven Economy. Schulte Paul

      This book is a timely and comprehensive description of the rapidly changing financial world. It covers not only the changing role of financial institutions but is also one of the first to analyze the profound impact of technology and big data on financial institutions and transactions. There is no question that the tens of billions of dollars in fines levied on the banks will change their ways of doing business. But, when a world top bank announces that it is hoping major institutional depositors will withdraw at least a hundred billion dollars in deposits, something serious must have happened. The book covers, in everyday language, the lead-up to and the current status of this transformation. Best of all, the author draws on his extensive BRIC experience to differentiate an increasingly regional market despite much hyped “globalisation.” It is also a must read for the practitioner, as the author goes beyond descriptions to investment strategies.

      Throughout history, dictators have abused their control of finance to subjugate people and destroy economic vitality. Paul Schulte's exceptional understanding and international experience permit him to show simple metrics by which all can measure when and how finance is abused to the detriment of investors. He shows, moreover, that advancements in technology now offer both the means and a process by which the world can end this sad saga, for everyone's benefit.

      Paul Schulte's book is brilliant, witty and has penetrating simplicity. He moves beyond connecting the dots for a sneak peek on how online-to-offline credit is the Jedi lightsaber which is behind the rise, fall, and renaissance of livelihood, lifestyle and power hubs globally. His book prisms the perfect storms and vast opportunities as Wall Street, Corporates, Government and Digital Continents align and disrupt. Spotlighting the urkraft of bank credit, Schulte presciently lays out how mobile, wireless and cloud data analytics are turbocharging the jump over the garden wall for vast pools of money – the lifeblood of business, nonprofit funding and government. The canvas Schulte unrolls reads like a thriller in fiction – entertaining and more jolting because it is nonfiction.

      After the global financial crisis of 2008, the Queen of England wondered why all the country's economists had failed to sound warnings. Financial instabilities are inherently unpredictable; all you can do is clean up afterwards, quoth Greenspan. But in this important book Paul Schulte explains how crises can indeed be foreseen. For our lifetimes, economic “growth” has been driven by the expansion of credit. Failure to account adequately for the overwhelming importance of credit has led governments and central banks to miss obvious warning signs. Warning signs of another type are being missed today by many of the world's major banks. The second half of this book analyses how their revenue streams are under attack, while their costs are driven ever higher by regulators and governments. This will inevitably lead to the ultimate irony: “too big to fail” will be rephrased as “so big, it must fail.” Customers may be winners; shareholders assuredly will not. At least Queen Elizabeth and Jamie Dimon should read this book. You should, too.

      This book ties together the unethical practices of banks with the growing financial and wealth-gap crisis destabilizing our world.

      Credit allows us to spend money we don't have, to buy goods we don't want, to show off to people we don't like. More prosaically, excessive credit creation over the past half century has fuelled a series of rolling asset price booms and busts to which the solution has always been to create even more credit. Schulte, unlike most policymakers, understands the relationship between credit and real life. This timely work explains these inter-linkages and how the technology and big data revolution is spawning new models of financial intermediation that threaten the very existence of traditional banks.

      Paul is one of the most astute commentators in his understanding of the financial architecture globally. This book gives the reader a ringside seat into the fast evolving creative destruction that is engulfing the financial services industry in the aftermath of the global financial crisis which has altered the regulatory landscape permanently. This interplays with the lightning-speed evolution of Internet-led fulfilment of underserved areas in this space. A tectonic shift is in the making. This book is a must-read for anyone following financial markets.

      This book will bolster Paul's already substantial reputation as a stimulating, original thinker and skilled polemicist. Written in clear, declarative sentences (as he says, “anyone” can understand the arguments), the first section of The Next Revolution in Our Credit-Driven Economy argues for the central role of credit and the credit cycle in economic analysis and financial valuation. He offers insightful recommendations on investment in multiple assets classes through the credit cycle. The book's second section is a wakeup call to bankers on the disruptions to commercial banking's “business as usual” attitude posed by new financial technologies. His observations are telling; his conclusions persuasive.

      Mr. Schulte brings a definitive element of “been there, done that” to his insightful text about how the financial world truthfully operates. As he states from the beginning, he wants to explain it like he was talking to his grandmother, and he delivers. That which appears to be beyond the grasp of the loudest spokesmen of today's Economic Ivory Towers, Paul lays out with the clearest of common sense and the most obvious of logic – CREDIT MATTERS! This text should be highly recommended to any student of Finance and Economics. It should be made compulsory for any practicing central banker.

      Paul Schulte elucidates the impact of the credit cycle on our economies, our politics, and our lives. In the process he provides tools for us to profit from the cycle and to avoid catastrophe when it turns down. The book should be read by financial professionals, regulators, political leaders, and anyone trying to manage a portfolio, even a personal portfolio, of investments.

      Paul Schulte's book outlines in depth the growth of credit in our economy and the importance of the credit cycle as a key driver in both economic growth and investment returns. His illustration of the pendulum swing of the credit cycle and identification of the consistent mistakes made during boom/bust cycles will surely be helpful to those who make business and investment decisions across the global markets. Schulte then helps guide us to the beginning of the cross-section of technology and finance, a merger of two worlds that will likely dominate the global economic discussion for the next decade.

      Facebook, Alibaba, Big Data, geopolitics, crowdsourcing, the Great Recession and 13,000 pages of the Dodd-Frank Act. What do all have to do with an industrial revolution in banking and financial services? To quote William Gibson, the revolution is already here; it is just unevenly distributed. Bankers and the regulators who are meant to provide the guardrails for the bankers may not quite know that the revolution is underway; the visionaries, the paranoiacs and the insurgents know it already. Once this lucidly written and brilliant account by Paul Schulte is evenly distributed, everyone will know about the revolution, what the revolution is being driven by and who might be expected to survive it. With compelling explanations of the impact of credit on economic fundamentals, the changing global financial architecture and chapters on the anatomy of a credit crisis, readers get a “front row seat in this