Digital platforms are marketplaces where a variety of participants gather to exchange goods, information, or services. This chapter examines what makes digital platforms special kinds of marketplaces. Platforms create value by allowing users to connect with each other and interact or transact in some way. The additional benefits include improved matching, trust, and liquidity, and lower costs of search and transaction. Digital platforms may thus create exceptionally efficient markets. However, the market for platforms themselves is anything but competitive and efficient. The benefits of scale in markets are not surprising, but the ability of digital markets to scale globally is much more recent. After platforms achieve critical mass, there is often no point for a rival to even enter, at least if the entrant offers no radical innovation. As a result, network effects allow platforms to concentrate vast market power.

A financial system channels funds from net savers to net spenders. But it does more than that, for the pie need not be fixed in size. Through its power of credit creation, the financial system can fuel economic expansion. The process is prone to fragility, however, and overshoot can end in crisis. A financial system encompasses financial intermediaries, which issue claims against themselves in order to provide funds to users (e.g., banks creating deposit accounts to make loans), and financial markets, which facilitate the direct exchange of claims between suppliers and users of funds (e.g., stocks and bonds). A diversity of channels for financing undertakings allows for the management and dispersion of risk. Interest rates and asset prices are determined in financial markets, with movement in the opposite direction of one another. Variation among the economies of Emerging East Asia is nowhere more stark than in the realm of finance. Hong Kong is home to the highest ratio of financial assets to GDP in the world while in the least developed economies of the region banking systems are rudimentary and capital markets little more than an idea.

The digitalised medical and health records of citizens are stored in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) of hospitals or clinics, and Personal Healthcare Records (PHR). The quality of medical care is improved when physicians can access the past records of patients. A user-friendly service that enables individual citizens to share their health and medical records in PHR with their physicians is essential to achieve this. In order to encourage patients and physicians to share medical records utilising PHR, while avoiding conflict with the recent trend demanding that citizens have autonomous control of their own personal information, governments have to develop legal measures to encourage individual citizens to take the initiative to record their medical and health data in their PHR and to give their physicians access to it. The author proposes mathematical schemes that can be implemented in the legal incentives deemed suitable for such encouragement.

Banks fail when an illiquidity event depletes capital reserves. Liquidity is sourced from assets that can readily be transformed into cash or from wholesale funding markets and central banks. Basel III strengthens bank balance sheets by allowing supervisors to release capital and liquidity reserves during times of market liquidity stress. This chapter analyzes the implementation of the Basel III capital and liquidity reforms in Hong Kong, banking sector stability during the 2008–9 global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, and systemic supervision. Hong Kong is a unique international financial centre because it is overwhelmingly populated by domestic systemically important banks. Universal banking and Basel III compel banking sector supervision of Hong Kong’s securities and insurance sectors, despite falling outside the supervisory design of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. This chapter argues that different supervisory structures and models affect the regulation and supervision of financial stability in Hong Kong’s banking sector. Insurance and wealth management products in the banking industry can produce systemic risks that might be overlooked by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Supervisory bias towards the banking sector in conjunction with cross-sectoral underlap could cause financial instability and a systemic banking crisis in Hong Kong.

Financial crises have a tendency to expose the financial system’s inability to absorb large systemic shocks, the critical role of liquidity channels, and financial institutions with fragile balance sheets. Pinpointing the causes of systemic risk challenges supervisors because the range of risks are virtually unlimited. This chapter argues that the definition of financial stability must be revisited to enhance the efficacy of financial supervision by drawing upon the lessons learnt from the 2008–9 global financial crisis. Defining systemic risk requires a real-time perspective of risk transmissions between the financial system components. Supervisors should appreciate financial agglomeration, the interconnectedness of the financial system, and behavioural economics when regulating systemic risk. Liquidity mismatches that destabilize financial institutions’ balance sheets and the capacity to raise funding can cause financial instability. The inability of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to control monetary policy constrains its power to fully manage these liquidity risks. Mitigating financial instability caused by systemic liquidity risks requires an understanding of prudential regulation and the management of monetary policy to stabilize bank balance sheets. Financial architecture must be properly utilized by supervisors to restore the orderly and rational functioning of the financial system.

Seamus Heaney's attention to the landscape has obscured his interest in riverbanks, lough shores and coastlines. Images of water and liquidity are critical to his writing, as are narratives of the sea and its crossings. This chapter traces Heaney's fluid aesthetic throughout his career, with particular attention to his declension of water in all its forms as evolving metaphors for mortality. Reading a series of texts across the breadth of Heaney's career, it engages his work with critical conversations in archipelagic literature.

The traditional business of banking is taking deposits and providing loans. Banks have a comparative advantage over other financial institutions in providing liquidity. They have also developed technologies to screen and monitor borrowers in order to reduce asymmetric information between the lender and the borrower. These liquidity-providing and monitoring functions also give banks a key role in modern capital market transactions. Risk is fundamental to the business of banking. Progress in information technology, combined with demands by supervisory authorities, has spurred the development of advanced risk management models. This, in turn, has prompted the centralisation and integration of some management functions such as risk management, treasury operations, compliance, and auditing. This integrated risk management method is designed to ensure a comprehensive and systematic approach to risk-related decisions throughout the banking group. Banks with an integrated risk management unit can exploit diversification opportunities at the group level. The Chapter ends by describing the European banking market, which is made up of 27 national banking systems.

Based on a thorough analysis of the BIS Annual Reports from the early 1970s to the late 2010s, this chapter traces the evolution of the BIS’s thinking on the international monetary and financial system. It demonstrates how – as a result of the growth of the Eurocurrency markets in the 1970s and of the sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s – the BIS’s traditional focus on exchange rates and their potential impact on monetary stability gradually shifted to global capital flows and to the risks posed by an increasingly complex and interconnected banking system. The 1995 Mexico crisis and 1997–8 Asian crisis reinforced this shift and led to an overriding concern with the procyclicality of the financial system as a potential threat to financial stability. While recognising that the focus of the BIS on a macro-financial stability framework has contributed a lot to advancing the work of the Basel-based committees and standard-setting bodies, the chapter also concludes that not much progress has been made in coordinating monetary policies or in addressing the fundamental problem of excessive elasticity of the financial system.

Chapter 2 explains why middling people were so vulnerable to imprisonment through analysis of structures of credit and wealth. Drawing on debtors’ schedules, or inventories of wealth generated by the imprisonment process, the credit networks and patterns of wealth-holding of middling households are reconstructed. I argue that the portions of middle ranking wealth bound up in credit, changing structures of credit and middling people’s positions within credit networks rendered them vulnerable to failure. Analysis of how middling people held their wealth suggests that they did not lack assets, but rather faced problems of liquidity. Incarceration was the consequence of endemic structural insecurities.

With the creation of the Brady Plan – a program developed by US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady in 1989 to convert national debt into bonds following the Latin American debt crisis – emerging market countries joined their wealthier cousins as important participants in global bond and equity markets. The subsequent profitability and popularity of emerging market bonds combined with the securitization of other debts (most notably the packaging of mortgages into tradable securities), the creation of a wide range of increasingly sophisticated finance instruments and the normalization of free capital mobility led to a dramatic surge in the growth of private-sector liquidity and sparked the development of the extraordinarily highly interconnected global financial marketplace that we live in today. The resulting globalization of finance has transformed the international financial system from one dominated by official, public sources of capital to one in which private-sector components of liquidity now permeate virtually all facets of the financial system.