There are already many papers and books on the causes and course of the current financial crisis, but this is the first and, for the moment, only such book to focus on the regulatory response to it. There are two main attributes that a bank needs to remain in business during a period of turmoil, liquidity to enable it to pay its debts when due, and capital, to absorb losses. Both have been insufficient. Charles Goodhart describes what went wrong and what needs to be done, alongside discussions of deposit insurance, credit rating agencies, prompt corrective action, etc. Charles Goodhart is the senior British economist specialising in financial stability issues. As the turmoil began, continued and exploded into crisis, he has kept up a series of commentaries, all since September 2007. These have been brought together, plus some new and additional material, to provide the reader with an overview of what went wrong in the regulatory framework for the financial system, and what now needs to be done to put that right. This will be required reading for financial regulators, practitioners in banking and finance, academics and students of finance, and those just wanting to know what went wrong and what to do now.

"The Evolution of Central Banks" employs a wide range of historical evidence and reassesses current monetary analysis to argue that the development of non-profit-maximizing and noncompetitive central banks to supervise and regulate the commercial banking system fulfils a necessary and natural function.Goodhart surveys the case for free banking, examines the key role of the clearing house in the evolution of the central bank, and investigates bank expansion and fluctuation in the context of the clearing house mechanism. He concludes that it is the noncompetitive aspect of the central bank that is crucial to the performance of its role. Goodhart addresses the questions of deposit insurance and takes up the "club theory" approach to the central bank. Included in the historical study of their origins are 8 European central banks, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Board of the United States.Charles Goodhart was appointed to the newly established Norman Sosnow Chair of Banking and Finance at the London School of Economics in 1985. For the previous 17 years he served as a monetary economist at the Bank of England, becoming a Chief Adviser in 1980.