This book is about what Mark Carney has called "the social license for financial markets" and how it can point us toward a more sustainable future. Author David Rouch argues that what it reveals contrasts sharply with the usual portrayals of markets as places of unrestrained financial self-interest. Drawing attention to a more complex reality and the presence of justice-focused aspirations in finance can positively impact individual, institutional, and systemic behavior: change, not imposed by regulators, but emerging from the very substance of market relationships.

The finance sector should have a key role in addressing humanity's increasingly pressing sustainability challenges. Yet the relationship between finance and society has not recovered from the 2008 crisis and the scandals and austerity that followed. The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout is sharpening some of the issues and creating new ones. Recognizing that financial markets operate subject to a social license has the potential to galvanize market participants in tackling these challenges, strengthening social solidarity on which markets also depend, and to provide coordinates for navigating a way through the post-pandemic social, political, and economic landscape.