By: Andrew Sheng and Ajit Singh
From humble beginnings in the 1990’s, Islamic finance has become a trillion-dollar industry. And, despite scepticism regarding accommodation between Islamic and global finance, leading banks are buying Islamic bonds and forming subsidiaries specifically to conduct Islamic finance.
HONG KONG – With Britain now in talks to sell part of the government’s 82 percent stake in the Royal Bank of Scotland to Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth funds, the Islamic world’s growing financial clout is once again on display. That clout also poses a systemic challenge to the dominant way that finance is now practiced around the world.
From humble beginnings in the 1990’s, Islamic finance has become a trillion-dollar industry. The market consensus is that Islamic finance has a bright future, owing to favourable demographics and rising incomes in Muslim communities.
Despite scepticism regarding accommodation between Islamic and global finance, leading banks are buying Islamic bonds and forming subsidiaries specifically to conduct Islamic finance. Special laws have been enacted in non-Muslim financial centres – London, Singapore, and Hong Kong – to facilitate the operation of Islamic banks and associated financial institutions.
How should these developments be viewed from the perspective of Western finance and mainstream economic analysis? Does Islamic finance really constitute a viable alternative financial system?
The very fact that such a question is asked nowadays is significant. Not so long ago, Islamic finance was superficially dubbed a zero-interest-rate system that would lead to inadequate and inefficient resource mobilization and utilization. Ironically, mainstream central bankers today routinely use precisely such policies when pursuing massive “quantitative easing.”
There are two central precepts of Islamic finance: absolute prohibition on charging interest on financial transactions, and high moral standards on the part of lenders and borrowers. Interestingly, the best economic rationale for a zero-interest-rate system is provided in John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory:
Keynes suggested that only a very low or zero interest rate could ensure continuous full employment and distributional equity. Keynes’s endorsement of such a policy does not necessarily make it right, but his analysis does suggest that it should be regarded as a serious proposition.
Importantly, although interest is prohibited under Islamic finance, profit is not; the latter is derived from various arrangements that combine finance and enterprise. In essence, this is a profit-sharing and risk-sharing system that is based entirely on equity finance.
Islamic finance thus contrasts with the current dominant system based on interest-bearing debt, in which risks are theoretically transferred to debt holders, but in practice are socialized during crises. Other things being equal, most economists will agree that debt finance leads to greater instability than equity finance.
It follows from the second major tenet of Islamic finance that if people adhered strictly to its ethical requirements, there would be fewer moral-hazard problems in Islamic banking. Moral hazard exists in all systems in which the state ultimately absorbs the risks of private citizens.
But, whether any particular system is efficient in avoiding moral hazard is a matter of practice, rather than of theory. Many would agree that, historically, Christian morality played an important role in the rise of Western capitalism. Secular capitalism, however, has experienced an erosion of values, whereby the financial sector has put its own interests above those of the rest of society. If the ethical values in Islamic finance – grounded in sharia religious law – can further deter moral hazard and the abuse of fiduciary duties by financial institutions, Islamic finance could prove to be a serious alternative to current models of derivative finance.
Moreover, the basic tenets of Islamic finance force us to re-think the ethical basis of modern monetary arrangements, which have evolved into a global reserve-currency system founded on fiat money. In the past, gold had been the anchor of monetary stability and financial discipline, even if it was deflationary.
Andrew Sheng, President of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong and Chief Adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, is a former Chairman of the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong. Ajit Singh is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. This article is based on their forthcoming Cambridge Centre for Business Research Working Paper on Islamic finance.
