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.
