Welcome to Z/Yen

Members Area

Long Finance

Objective

Established in 02007 by Z/Yen Group in conjunction with Gresham College, the Long Finance initiative began with a conundrum – “when would we know our financial system is working?” Long Finance aims to “improve society’s understanding and use of finance over the long-term”, in contrast to the short-termism that defines today’s financial and economic views. The immediate objective of the initiative is to establish a Foundation that can ignite global debate on long-term finance, by examining how commerce should enable and encourage environmental and social sustainability.

Activities

So far we have given presentations around Europe and North America and published a book, The Road To Long Finance, for which we had a successful launch at Gresham College in July 02009 which was attended by 120 financial people. We’ve assembled a “kitchen cabinet” of leading bankers, investors, risk managers, journalists, sharia financiers, students, regulators and politicians. We boast an official historian and a writer-in-residence. We have begun planning and budgeting core activities, as well as starting to assemble over 70 proposed research papers within the eight themes. These proposed research projects range from studying institutions that have demonstrated great longevity, e.g. the Vatican, to what we can learn from economics in harsh climates, to the value of high frequency trading. We aim to target the problems of finance by combining the styles of Long Now, Santa Fe Institute, and London Accord.

Financial Centre Futures

The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) was first produced by the Z/Yen Group in March 2007 following another research project into city competitiveness we undertook in 2005. The aim of the GFCI is to examine the major financial centres globally in terms of competitiveness. The GFCI has been published every six months (although the index is actually produced every three months).

We have been able to increase the number of respondents and additional data in successive editions of GFCI and this has enabled us to highlight the changing priorities and concerns of finance professionals across a period of great economic instability.