Imagine a world without a financial crisis. No moral hazard, so brokers won't sell mortgages without carrying out appropriate credit checks. Imagine banks not deliberately selling complex derivatives, knowing that they will be worthless. No short-selling speculation, so companies tinkering on the edge won't be pushed over. Imagine a world with Islamic finance.
"The practices that caused the financial crisis would not have passed muster with sharia boards – committees of religiously inspired legal scholars who conduct a religious audit of a bank's activities. Neither the securitisation of sub-prime loans nor credit-default swaps are acceptable in Islamic finance," says Ibrahim Warde, author of Islamic Finance in the Global Economy and a professor at Tufts University.
"Similarly, negative Islamic attitudes towards short-selling were vindicated by the role short-selling played in many aspects of the crisis and subsequent limits placed on short-selling in London and New York. Some old-fashioned principles such as the distrust of excessive leverage and of open-ended innovation proved well founded. As for the systematic vetting of new products by sharia advisers, it could be looked at as a system of checks and balances, a useful corrective to the groupthink that had overtaken conventional finance..."