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Finance is the lifeblood of an economy. Businesses require capital in order to start up, and usually require additional resources to maintain or expand their activities. In some cases, they may simply reinvest their profits. But expansion on a significant scale may require more than this. Thus, businesses may also seek to borrow funds or to solicit investments in return for the investor's share of future profit. One of the basic means by which this latter strategy is pursued in industrial societies is for businesses to solicit investments from the public through the initial public offering of shares, and for subsequent buying and selling of shares by investors who expect the value of the shares in question to rise or fall. Securities markets are thus integral to a nation's economic system.

This study aims to draw out the common characteristics of frauds associated with pandemics and to identify any risks unique to them.

It considers the range of frauds and their reporting lags and examines what is known about current frauds against individuals, businesses and government, principally using public and private sector data from Australia and the UK.

The study identifies some novel crime types and methodologies arising during the current pandemic that were not seen in previous pandemics. These changes may result from public health measures taken in response to COVID-19, the current state of technologies and the activities of law enforcement and regulatory guardians. It shows that many frauds would occur anyway, but some specific – mainly online – frauds occur during pandemics, and because of large scale government assistance programmes to businesses and individuals, far more opportunities were created from COVID-19 than in previous eras.

The study concludes with a discussion of the policy implications for prevention, resilience and for private and public policing and criminal justice. It stresses that plans for future pandemics must include provisions for better early monitoring and control of fraud and associated procurement corruption and notes that these require greater political will and organisation. It recommends a more serious analysis of the impact of prevention communications outreach to citizens, businesses and government.

The study uses fresh data on frauds from the private and public sectors and assesses some measures of control in a holistic way.

This paper examines the security risks associated with conducting commercial transactions through the use of electronic technologies such as the Internet. It will not deal with the many other problems which arise out of online commerce such as those relating to misleading and deceptive practices which create particular concerns for consumer protection agencies. Instead, it focuses on the ways in which the various electronic payment systems may be abused for fraudulent purposes.

LOUGHBOROUGH was the first of the post‐war schools to be established in 1946. This resulted from negotiations of representatives of the Library Association Council with technical and other colleges which followed their failure to secure facilities within the universities on the terms of the L.A. remaining the sole certificating body. The late Dr. Herbert Schofield accepted their terms and added a library school to already varied fields of training within his college.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis (GFC) governments lost confidence in market fundamentalism and realised the inadequacies of regulatory measures. The purpose of this paper is to outline the proximate causes of the financial crisis of 2007‐2009 and to investigate the role of the shareholder wealth maximization (SWM) objective in the GFC.

The methodological procedure used in this paper is based on the historical case‐study approach. Case reviews of individuals and world‐level role models of the financial crisis have been cited in this paper. From this aggregated material, the paper examines the side effects of the SWM objective in order to develop the argument that the SWM objective played a role in the present crisis.

The case studies revealed that unethical behaviour, agency issues, CEO compensation, creative accounting and risk shifting are some of the side effects of SWM. These cases indicate that the assumptions on which SWM are based are questionable. Further, it can be argued that the root cause of the GFC is excessive greed and the single‐minded pursuit of SWM.

Though many studies have attempted to identify the proximate causes of the GFC, this paper is novel in highlighting the impact of the SWM objective function.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.