ABSTRACT

Fundamentally, financial risk, accounting and regulation are social phenomena, and it is often misleading to study them in pure technical terminologies. This chapter examines the history and politics of the finance discipline, the processes of financialisation, teaching in finance, the origins and nature of money, connecting finance to ethics and issues of power and politics and then setting the backdrop for HBOS and the research methodology of this study. It explains why a personal approach has been adapted in the writing of this investigation, expressing the underlying values and motives of this study. It encourages readers to take a personal interest in finance and its academic future to help shape its reform and transformation. Some strongly argue that the modern industry of finance is a powerful fiction – where even the objective treatment of money and measurement is fictitious.