Philip Roscoe – How to Build a Stock Exchange

Dr Philip Roscoe from the University of St Andrews spoke on ‘How to Build a Stock Exchange’.

Our financial markets are full of contradictions. They are ubiquitous, sophisticated, and timeless, yet chaotic, messy and contingent. All-knowing – almost magical – they are a conjurer’s contraption of cogs and wires. In this lecture, Philip opens the black box of finance.

Based on his newly published book How to Build a Stock Exchange, he uses a series of pivotal moments in the history of financial markets – extraordinary, hilarious, even horrifying – to show how they became an inescapable aspect of modernity. But finance is also a social technology: we made it, and we can unmake it.  In view of the many challenges facing our collective future, the lecture asks: what do we want finance to be?

The event took place on 27 April 2023 at 18:30 BST at The Library of Mistakes,