In May 2017, Alan Pickering won the award for the `Greatest Single Contribution to Occupational Pensions (1998-2017)' at the Professional Pensions UK Pension Awards. It was a well-received tribute to the role he had played for more than twenty years. The Pickering Report, commissioned by the Blair government, had been a blunt, brutally honest and pragmatic assessment of what needed to be done if Britain's leadership position in occupational pensions was to be maintained. In this biography, Paddy Briggs, who worked closely with the subject, focuses on the world of pensions and Pickering's leading role in it. But the story is broader and more human than the highly technical world of retirement benefits. Pickering is a baby boomer who grew up in modest circumstances in the City of York. As a child, he was diagnosed with a degenerative eyesight disease, and by his twenties he was totally blind. His disability became more of a spur to ambition and accomplishment than a restraint. This included athletic achievements such as running marathons and being a serious participant in competitive race walking. He has reached the highest levels in the world of financial services and also became a well-known racehorse owner and a vice-president of the Racehorse Owners Association.

This book presents a general theory of the economics of prosperity. Drawing upon both historic and contemporary Austrian economic thinking, it looks beyond merely identifying various isolated causes of economic growth and development to describe and explain the process of economic progress. It brings together various economic principles related to production, exchange, the market division of labor, capital, technology, entrepreneurship, and economic calculation, and a further understanding of how different institutional settings and specific policies all affect the process of economic progress. It also provides a helpful critique of modern growth theory. The author argues that economic prosperity is not monocausal. It is the happy consequence of a highly developed division of labor, taking advantage of an expanding capital structure, embodied in technically advanced capital goods, all wisely invested by entrepreneurs. All these sources of prosperity require the social institutions of private property and sound money to function well together, facilitating economic progress and human civilization. The Economics of Prosperity provides a comprehensive explanation of the myriad of factors influencing economic growth and development for scholars, policy makers and economists.

Buy bank-owned properties at fire-sale prices

Banks and lending institutions today own more than one million foreclosed properties, more are in the foreclosure pipeline. Banks desperately want to get these properties off their balance sheets, but there aren't enough buyers. The result is a soft real estate market with prices investors and homeowners may not see again in their lifetime.

In recent years many bargain-hunting investors and homebuyers made the mistake of trying to get foreclosure prices via short sales and pre-foreclosure-- before the bank reclaimed the property. They've been burned by endless delays and uncertainty of the messy foreclosure process. With bank-owned properties, that's over. You deal directly with a motivated seller--the bank--and get the foreclosure price without the hassles and complexity of a short sale or pre-foreclosure.

This book shows you how to negotiate the best possible terms with the real estate owned (or REO) department of a bank or lender, including step-by-step instructions and no-nonsense advice on finding great deals, estimating fair market value, and closing the deal. You don't need a ton of cash, because REO investing at fire-sale prices is affordable for almost any investor or homebuyer.Provides detailed, step-based guidance on buying REO propertiesWritten by a super-successful REO investor with fifteen years of experience