Papers presented by Zi Yang since 2019
2023 Detroit, MI, United States
"The Running Battle between Transparency and Inequality in the UK Financial Market, and What Can We Learn from the US History and Modern Technology. "
Zi Yang, Aston University
Abstract:
The article explores what transparency ought to be in the context of the contemporary UK financial regulatory system, against soaring social inequality and the emergence of blockchain innovation. By asking transparency to whom and for what, the article distinguishes transparency from information disclosure. It criticises the UK financial regulatory system for being hijacked information disclosure both before and after the Financial Crisis of 2008. As a notion of transparency, information disclosure suits regulators and market participants’ pursuing of efficiency. But it also feeds into the excessive speculative culture and leads to excessive concentration of information, wealth, and power in financial intermediaries. This excessive inequality caused the Financial Crisis of 2008 and is still dividing the society. Looking back into history, transparency was strongly associated with morality. The Pujo Report 1912 unveiled the Money Trust in the US stock market, hence, called for people to take actions against banks’ unfair exploitation. Similarly, in Benedict v Ratner, Judge Brandeis challenged off-balance sheet accounting, thus ensuring fairness in distribution of wealth among creditors. These historical notions suggest that transparency can serve a higher purpose of easing the concentration of information, wealth, and power in society. Nevertheless, historical transparency reforms failed to keep the public informed and unified in the long-term. This article argues that social media and de-centralised blockchain technology could overcome these obstacles by sharing knowledge, decision-making power and access to investment with the public. Thus, technology innovation contains the seed for achieving transparency to the public in contemporary financial market. However, it is also undeniable that the public’s involvement in investments is highly speculative. This article argues that such speculation mimics the excessive speculative culture in the traditional financial market, which highlights the urgency to change the narrowed focus on efficiency and embrace transparency to the public.