Sean Turnell is currently Economic Advisor to the Myanmar government, a Senior Research Fellow at the Myanmar Development Institute, and an Associate Professor of Economics at Macquarie University in Sydney. A leading researcher of Myanmar's economy for over 20 years, he has been an adviser about this to various governments, international agencies, NGOs, etc. as well as a key adviser on economic policy to Myanmar's National League for Democracy and its chairperson, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. The author of numerous academic and other studies of Myanmar, his seminal study into the country's monetary and banking history, Fiery Dragons, was published by NIAS Press in 2009.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; Note on Names and Places; Commonly Used Abbreviations; Timeline of Events in Modern Burma; 1. Introduction; 2. The Chettiars; 3. Cooperative Credit to the Rescue?; 4. One Bank, Two Countries: Imaginings of a Central Bank in Colonial Burma; 5. Aristocratic Eagles: The Commercial and Exchange Banks; 6. Reconstruction, a Currency Board and the Union 'Banks' of Burma; 7. Agricultural and Commercial Banking in the Parliamentary Democracy Era; 8. The Road to Ruin: Credit and Banking under Military Rule; 9. 'Reform' under the SLORC/SPDC; 10. The Crash; 11. Microfinance in Burma; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.