Inertia Purposeful Inefficiencies in Financial Markets

This book demonstrates how long-standing social relationships within the investing world contribute to a state of inertia, which prevents substantive change to the status quo. In financial markets-as in many other settings-social groups persist through habit, routine, and path dependency. Financial intermediaries, for their part, use their positions to maintain and reproduce a state of affairs from which they benefit. Although financial professionals portray their world as one of dynamism and continuous innovation, in reality a strategic and purposeful inertia often prevails. An incisive sociological analysis of the communities that constitute financial markets, Inertia offers new insight into the social structures and dynamics that shape economic action.