Tettered Money: Managing Digital Currency Transactions presents a comprehensive discussion of financial transactions using digital currencies, with the author, Gideon Samid, making the case for their expansion in tethered money. Exploring the technical, legal, and historical aspects of digital money, the author discusses how the emerging technology of money specified for a specific need or to perform a particular task will affect society. The ability to dictate, Samid argues, how money is spent could increase control over our lives and resources, enabling us to practice a certain efficiency that would, in due time, become a pillar of civilization. Informative and thought-provoking, the book describes an evolving future that, in some quarters, has already arrived.

The rapid advancement in encryption and network computing gave birth to new tools and products that have influenced the local and global economy alike. One recent and notable example is the emergence of virtual currencies, also known as cryptocurrencies or digital currencies. Virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin, introduced a fundamental transformation that affected the way goods, services, and assets are exchanged. Virtual currencies are experiencing an increasing popularity in the financial markets and in portfolio management as can be classified as financial asset or commodities on a scale from pure medium of exchange advantages to pure store of value advantages. As a result of its distributed ledgers based on blockchain, cryptocurrencies offer some unique advantages to the economy, investors, and consumers, but also pose considerable risks to users and challenges for regulators when fitting the new technology into the old legal framework. Bitcoin for example may be useful in risk management and ideal for risk-averse investors in anticipation of negative shocks to the market. The core objective of this proposed book is to provide a comprehensive discussion on the important issues related to cryptocurrencies ranging from pricing, financial, legal to technological aspects.

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

This book explores the system of financing local governments in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Using evidence from the last two decades, the authors, experts on their particular countries, describe the development of the current local government finance system in each nation, and the major challenges and policy options they face. The contributions in this book provide comprehensive coverage of a transitional Europe that encompasses both modern local public finance theory and specific applications in the target countries. The book is a recommended read not only for students of local government and local public finance, but also practitioners and all those who have to deal with the accountability and financial issues at local government level in Central and Eastern Europe.

When just a handful of economists predicted the 2008 financial crisis, people should wonder how so many well educated people with enormous datasets and computing power can be so wrong. In this short book Ionut Purica joins a growing number of economists who explore the failings of mainstream economics and propose solutions developed in other disciplines, such as sociology and evolutionary biology. While it might be premature to call for a revolution, Dr. Purica echoes John Maynard Keynes in believing that economic ideas are "dangerous for good or evil." In recent years evil seems to have had the upper hand. "Nonlinear Dynamics of Financial Crises" points to their ability to do good.

Focusing primarily on the banking system in the United States, this book offers an innovative framework that integrates a depository bank's liquidity and its capital adequacy into a unified notion of funding that helps to explain how the 2007-2008 crisis unfolded, why central banks succeeded in resolving the crisis, and how the conceptual legacy of the crisis and its resolution led to lasting changes in bank funding regulation, including new objective requirements for bank liquidity. To provide a comparative context, the book also examines the funding models of nonbank intermediaries like dealer banks and insurers. This book provides a nuanced understanding of bank funding practices for legal academics interested in banking regulation or corporate finance and helps place prudential regulation and the private law of funding in the context of the banking business model. Business model scholars, financial academics, and bank regulators will appreciate its readable, integrated approach to understanding some of the most current and conceptually challenging aspects of prudential regulation.

This book provides a thorough understanding of the fundamental concepts of financial mathematics essential for the evaluation of any financial product and instrument. Mastering concepts of present and future values of streams of cash flows under different interest rate environments is core for actuaries and financial economists. This book covers the body of knowledge required by the Society of Actuaries (SOA) for its Financial Mathematics (FM) Exam.The third edition includes major changes such as an addition of an 'R Laboratory' section in each chapter, except for Chapter 9. These sections provide R codes to do various computations, which will facilitate students to apply conceptual knowledge. Additionally, key definitions have been revised and the theme structure has been altered. Students studying undergraduate courses on financial mathematics for actuaries will find this book useful. This book offers numerous examples and exercises, some of which are adapted from previous SOA FM Exams. It is also useful for students preparing for the actuarial professional exams through self-study.

This book starts from the application scenarios of artificial financial intelligence regulation, commercial banking, wealth management and payments, etc., and makes a detailed study of the main scenarios of the application of China's artificial intelligence in the financial field, and also analysis specific application cases of China.With the popularization of smart phones and the rapid development of e-commerce, mobile payment, big data and other technologies are in the ascendant in China in recent years. In particular, artificial intelligence technologies in the form of facial, speech and semantic recognition are showing preliminary advantages in the field of FinTech, and the future era of Intelligent Finance has quietly come. The Chinese government has clearly put forward "China should rely on a robust cycle of domestic demand and innovation as the main driver of the economy while maintaining foreign markets and investors as a second engine of growth", science and technology innovation is the basic motivation of economic and social cycle, to implement the " dual circulation strategy ", it is necessary to understand the key role of scientific and technological innovation in financial innovation services, and improve financial services must be driven by science and technology. There is a natural relationship between artificial intelligence and financial services, because financial services are credit and information intermediaries, and data is the most critical for finance, while artificial intelligence has a super ability in dealing with complex data. At present, many Chinese Banks have applied artificial intelligence to their daily operations and management, such as accurate customer identification, enhanced process tracking, intelligent marketing, and product process transformation, so as to simplify financial service processes and shorten service cycles. In General, this book both pays attention to practical application and theoretical, which is a useful reference book in theoretical research and practical work, and also helps readers to understand the application of intelligent finance in China.