The Social Licence for Financial Markets : Reaching for the End and Why It Counts

This book is about what Mark Carney has called ‘the social licence for financial markets’ and how it can point us towards a more sustainable future.Author David Rouch argues that what it reveals contrasts sharply with the usual portrayals of markets as places of unrestrained financial self-interest.Drawing attention to a more complex reality and the presence of justice-focused aspirations in finance can positively impact individual, institutional, and systemic behaviour: change, not imposed by regulators, but emerging from the very substance of market relationships.The finance sector should have a key role in addressing humanity’s increasingly pressing sustainability challenges.Yet the relationship between finance and society has not recovered from the 2008 crisis and the scandals and austerity that followed.The Covid-19 pandemic and its economic fallout is sharpening some of the issues and creating new ones.Recognising that financial markets operate subject to a social licence has the potential to galvanise market participants in tackling these challenges, strengthening social solidarity on which markets also depend, and to provide coordinates for navigating a way through the post-pandemic social, political and economic landscape.