With present concerns over the regulation of the banking industry continuing to make headlines, an examination of the historiography of financial crises is timely. With contributions from world-renowned figures such as Niall Ferguson, Adair Turner and William R White, this volume investigates how financial institutions and markets have undergone or reacted to past pressures, the role of financial innovations in this process and the regulatory responses that emerged as a result.

This revised edition is arriving just in time to inform investors how to take advantage of today's slumping U.S. economy. With home foreclosures at an all-time high and the erratic stock market damaging 401(k) accounts, people are looking for innovative ways to invest their money.

Moskowitz explains what tax lien certificates are (liens against property for unpaid taxes), why they are safe (certain states insure them), and how they fit into an overall financial plan. This new edition includes updates to the laws and procedures of states and counties that offer tax lien certificates.

* "The 16% Solution" has been updated to reflect current legal requirements and information.

* Seen as a great investment solution: "If you become a buyer of tax liens, we recommend reading "The 16% Solution" by Joel Moskowitz. It's a worthwhile investment." --Ken and Daria Dolan, "Straight Talk on Your Money."

The complete guide to the principles and practice of risk quantification for business applications. The assessment and quantification of risk provide an indispensable part of robust decision-making; to be effective, many professionals need a firm grasp of both the fundamental concepts and of the tools of the trade. Business Risk and Simulation Modelling in Practice is a comprehensive, in depth, and practical guide that aims to help business risk managers, modelling analysts and general management to understand, conduct and use quantitative risk assessment and uncertainty modelling in their own situations. Key content areas include: * Detailed descriptions of risk assessment processes, their objectives and uses, possible approaches to risk quantification, and their associated decision-benefits and organisational challenges. * Principles and techniques in the design of risk models, including the similarities and differences with traditional financial models, and the enhancements that risk modelling can provide. * In depth coverage of the principles and concepts in simulation methods, the statistical measurement of risk, the use and selection of probability distributions, the creation of dependency relationships, the alignment of risk modelling activities with general risk assessment processes, and a range of Excel modelling techniques. * The implementation of simulation techniques using both Excel/VBA macros and the @RISK Excel add-in. Each platform may be appropriate depending on the context, whereas the core modelling concepts and risk assessment contexts are largely the same in each case. Some additional features and key benefits of using @RISK are also covered. Business Risk and Simulation Modelling in Practice reflects the author s many years in training and consultancy in these areas. It provides clear and complete guidance, enhanced with an expert perspective. It uses approximately one hundred practical and real-life models to demonstrate all key concepts and techniques; these are accessible on the companion website.

Data quality will either make you or break you in the financial services industry. Missing prices, wrong market values, trading violations, client performance restatements, and incorrect regulatory filings can all lead to harsh penalties, lost clients, and financial disaster. This practical guide provides data analysts, data scientists, and data practitioners in financial services firms with the framework to apply manufacturing principles to financial data management, understand data dimensions, and engineer precise data quality tolerances at the datum level and integrate them into your data processing pipelines. You'll get invaluable advice on how to: Evaluate data dimensions and how they apply to different data types and use cases Determine data quality tolerances for your data quality specification Choose the points along the data processing pipeline where data quality should be assessed and measured Apply tailored data governance frameworks within a business or technical function or across an organization Precisely align data with applications and data processing pipelines And more

This book seeks to explore the ethical dimensions of economic governance through an engagement with Adam Smith and a critical analysis of economistic understandings of the Global Financial Crisis. It examines ethical and political dilemmas associated with key aspects of the financialisation of Anglo-American economy and society, including systems of asset-based welfare, modern risk management and debt. In the wake of the financial crisis, recognition of the way in which everyday lives and life chances are tied into global finance is widespread. Yet few contributions in IPE explicitly tackle this issue as a question of ethics. By developing Adam Smith's under-utilised account of how market-oriented behaviour is constituted through a process of 'sympathy', this book provides an innovative way of understanding contemporary issues of economic governance and the possibilities and limits for intervention within it. By taking Adam Smith's moral philosophy seriously, it becomes evident that the ever-deeper enmeshing of finance in our everyday lives is a failed experiment. Turning the common understanding of Smith on its head, we can also turn accepted wisdom about the recent financial crisis on its head and see the urgency of making better known the ethico-political contestation that lies at the heart of financial market relations. It will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE as well as those across the social sciences who wish to question the foundations of contemporary economy and society.

Based on interdisciplinary research into "Directional Change", a new data-driven approach to financial data analysis, Detecting Regime Change in Computational Finance: Data Science, Machine Learning and Algorithmic Trading applies machine learning to financial market monitoring and algorithmic trading. Directional Change is a new way of summarising price changes in the market. Instead of sampling prices at fixed intervals (such as daily closing in time series), it samples prices when the market changes direction ("zigzags"). By sampling data in a different way, this book lays out concepts which enable the extraction of information that other market participants may not be able to see. The book includes a Foreword by Richard Olsen and explores the following topics: Data science: as an alternative to time series, price movements in a market can be summarised as directional changes Machine learning for regime change detection: historical regime changes in a market can be discovered by a Hidden Markov Model Regime characterisation: normal and abnormal regimes in historical data can be characterised using indicators defined under Directional Change Market Monitoring: by using historical characteristics of normal and abnormal regimes, one can monitor the market to detect whether the market regime has changed Algorithmic trading: regime tracking information can help us to design trading algorithms It will be of great interest to researchers in computational finance, machine learning and data science. About the Authors Jun Chen received his PhD in computational finance from the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents, University of Essex in 2019. Edward P K Tsang is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex, where he co-founded the Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents in 2002.

Research work by the IMF's staff on the effectiveness of the country programs the organization supports, which has long been carried out, has intensified in recent years. IMF analysts have sought to "open up the black box" by more closely examining program design and implementation, as well as how these influence programs' effectiveness. Their efforts have also focused on identifying the lending, signaling, and monitoring features of the IMF that may affect member countries' economic performance. This book reports on a large portion of both the new and the continuing research. It concludes that IMF programs work best where domestic politics and institutions permit the timely implementation of the necessary measures and when a country is vulnerable to, but not yet in, a crisis. It points to the need for a wider recognition of the substantial diversity among IMF member countries and for programs to be tailored accordingly while broadly maintaining the IMF's general principle of uniformity of treatment.

Understand Up-to-Date Statistical Techniques for Financial and Actuarial Applications

Since the first edition was published, statistical techniques, such as reliability measurement, simulation, regression, and Markov chain modeling, have become more prominent in the financial and actuarial industries. Consequently, practitioners and students must acquire strong mathematical and statistical backgrounds in order to have successful careers.

Financial and Actuarial Statistics: An Introduction, Second Edition enables readers to obtain the necessary mathematical and statistical background. It also advances the application and theory of statistics in modern financial and actuarial modeling. Like its predecessor, this second edition considers financial and actuarial modeling from a statistical point of view while adding a substantial amount of new material.

New to the Second Edition

• Nomenclature and notations standard to the actuarial field
• Excel exercises with solutions, which demonstrate how to use Excel functions for statistical and actuarial computations
• Problems dealing with standard probability and statistics theory, along with detailed equation links
• A chapter on Markov chains and actuarial applications
• Expanded discussions of simulation techniques and applications, such as investment pricing
• Sections on the maximum likelihood approach to parameter estimation as well as asymptotic applications
• Discussions of diagnostic procedures for nonnegative random variables and Pareto, lognormal, Weibull, and left truncated distributions
• Expanded material on surplus models and ruin computations
• Discussions of nonparametric prediction intervals, option pricing diagnostics, variance of the loss function associated with standard actuarial models, and Gompertz and Makeham distributions
• Sections on the concept of actuarial statistics for a collection of stochastic status models

The book presents a unified approach to both financial and actuarial modeling through the use of general status structures. The authors define future time-dependent financial actions in terms of a status structure that may be either deterministic or stochastic. They show how deterministic status structures lead to classical interest and annuity models, investment pricing models, and aggregate claim models. They also employ stochastic status structures to develop financial and actuarial models, such as surplus models, life insurance, and life annuity models.

This book explores the way in which the financial crisis that began in the US spread to the economy of the European Union. It takes a critical look at the measures adopted by EU institutions in response to that crisis, seeking to explain the rationale behind them, their context, their development and why different exit strategies were not adopted. In doing this, the book makes comparisons with the measures adopted by institutions in the US and the UK. As the crisis has shown that the financial supervision frameworks prevailing in 2007 were not fully able to deal with the largest financial crisis in history, this volume also reviews the proposals that have been designed to reform the supervisory architecture in financial services in the EU. The book concludes that the EU member states under most pressure from financial markets do suffer from intrinsic problems, but that the economic effects of the crisis have been exacerbated by shortcomings in economic governance within the EU. This work will be highly relevant to policy makers and scholars looking at EU integration, finance and market regulation.

David Ricardo, one of the major figures in the history of economic thought, particularly in the English classical political economy, deployed his activities as economist just two hundreds of years ago. Since then his economics has been generally estimated as the culminating point of the classical economics, and his name and theory has been exerting an enduring influence up to the present. This book, consisting of articles contributed by historians economic thought on money and finance, intends to reappraise the Ricardo's monetary and financial thought on the occasion of its bicentenary and to offer historical clues to understanding today's world wide financial crisis. The book consists of eight chapters divided into three parts. The first part is devoted to the historical back ground of Ricardo's thought (Hume, Smith, Thornton etc). It serves to bring in relief the originality of Ricardo's thought in the historical context. The second and central part consists of four chapters discussing the most important aspects of Ricardo's monetary thought: Ricardo and quantity theory of money, the ideal monetary regime conceived by Ricardo very early in his career and matured till the last moment of his life, plan for the establishment of a national bank. In this part, the relation between the quantity of money and its value in Ricardo's theory is examined in a new light and Ricardo as a non-quantity theorist. The two chapters in the third and last part discuss the problems raised after Ricardo in relation to his monetary thought. Tracing Ricardo's economic thought to the early 19th century, this book may provide readers insight to help them understand the present day financial crises through his works.

The principal message of this book is that international financial enterprises must be reoriented towards funding productive activities rather than potentially destabilizing speculation. The effects of financial sector operations are addressed with serious warnings that the dangers of speculative destabilization are increasing as regulatory and market discipline gradually weakens.The Structural Foundations of International Finance examines the ways in which national economies, especially those of industrialized countries, are affected by the operations of international financial markets. Although these markets provide productive funding, there is also much speculative trading in stocks and currencies which can cause booms, slumps and hinder recovery. The authors advocate entrepreneurial coordination by productive enterprises for balanced and stable growth, with reduced risks of financial crises and recessions. This topical and highly engaging book will be invaluable for academics and students of business, economics, political economy, international relations and law.

Set against the backdrop of the recurring waves of financial scandal and crisis to hit Canada, the US, the UK, and Europe over the last decade, this book examines the struggles of securities enforcement agencies to police the financial markets. While allegations of regulatory failure in this realm are commonplace and are well documented in policy and legal scholarship, James Williams seeks to move beyond these conventional accounts arguing that they are based on a limited view of the regulatory process and overlook the actual practices and dilemmas of enforcement work. Informed by interviews with police, regulators, lawyers, accountants, and investor advocates, along with a wealth of documentary materials, the book is rooted in a uniquely interdisciplinary social science perspective. Peering inside the black box of enforcement, it examines the organizational, professional, geographical, technological, and legal influences that shape securities enforcement as a distinctly knowledge-based enterprise. The result of these influences, Williams argues, is the production of a very particular vision of financial disorder which captures certain forms of misconduct while overlooking others, a reflection not of incompetence or capture but of the unique demands and constraints of the regulatory craft. Providing a very different, and much needed, account of the challenges faced by regulators and enforcement agencies, this book will be of enormous interest to current research on enforcement, regulation, and governance both within and beyond the financial realm.

Finance is Excel This book takes you straight into the fascinating world of Excel, the powerful tool for number crunching. In a clear cut language it amalgamates financial theory with Excel providing you with the skills you need to build financial models for private or professional use. A comprehensive knowledge of modeling in Excel is becoming increasingly important in a competitive labour market. The chapters in part one start with the most basic Excel topics such as cell addresses, workbooks, basic formulas, etc. These chapters get more advanced through part one, and takes you in the end to topics such as array formulas, data tables, pivot tables, etc. The other parts of the book discusses a variety of subjects such as net present value, internal rate of return, risk, portfolio theory, CAPM, VaR, project valuation, asset valuation, firm valuation, loan, leasing, stocks, bonds, options, simulation, sensitivity analysis, etc. Finance is Excel This book takes you straight into the fascinating world of Excel, the powerful tool for number crunching. In a clear cut language it amalgamates financial theory with Excel providing you with the skills you need to build financial models for private or professional use. A comprehensive knowledge of modeling in Excel is becoming increasingly important in a competitive labour market. The chapters in part one start with the most basic Excel topics such as cell addresses, workbooks, basic formulas, etc. These chapters get more advanced through part one, and takes you in the end to topics such as array formulas, data tables, pivot tables, etc. The other parts of the book discusses a variety of subjects such as net present value, internal rate of return, risk, portfolio theory, CAPM, VaR, project valuation, asset valuation, firm valuation, loan, leasing, stocks, bonds, options, simulation, sensitivity analysis, etc.

This reissue, first published in 1964, describes the contemporary problems faced and solutions found by the monetary and financial authorities of six African countries: Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, the Rhodesias, the Sudan and Tunisia, from the establishment of their central banks until 1962.This study explores the special economic and social factors of these African countries and places emphasis upon the atmosphere of rapid change, growth and development. The author indicates common denominators, whilst making due allowance for the character of each individual country.

This textbook integrates financial economics and management in the area of agricultural finance. The presentation of financial economics discusses how the credit needs of farmer/borrowers are met by depositors through commercial banks. The financial management content presents methods used to make farm financial decisions including farm accounting, capital budgeting, and the analysis of risk. The textbook begins by developing the farm financial market focusing primarily on the market for debt. Next, the textbook presents an overview of accounting concepts important for the credit market. The accounting section provides a detailed discussion of the Farm Financial Standards Council's suggestions for agricultural financial statements. Following the financial accounting, the book presents the use of ratio analysis applied to the farm firm. Next, the text describes capital budgeting followed by an introduction to risk analysis. Finally, the book presents the effect of debt decisions on the farm firm. In addition to the primary topics, the textbook includes a discussion of agricultural banking and monetary policy and an analysis of the choice of historical cost and market valued accounting methodologies on the farm debt decision.

Under growing pressure from within and outside their economies, countries around the world have recently embarked upon wide-ranging programmes of financial reform. This major Handbook provides country studies of the latest developments in financial reform in a selection of both developed and developing countries from Western Europe, North America, South America, Asia and Australia, written by acknowledged experts in their fields. The outcome is an up-to-date, authoritative and comprehensive account of the current world-wide attempt to refashion the way in which the financial services industry (and especially the banking sector) is regulated and supervised. The contributors find that programmes of reform have embraced all or most of the following elements: * central bank reform * changes in the legal operating environment and market pressures for mergers * consolidation * demutualisation * supervisory reform * measures such as the introduction of explicit deposit insurance schemes. This comprehensive reference work contains a wealth of up-to-date knowledge, presented in an accessible manner and with a standardised format. It will be of interest to scholars of central banking and international banking reforms as well as policymakers, legislators, practitioners and organisations from the banking world.

Developed countries have committed to provide financial support for climate change mitigation and adaptation activities in developing countries. Current financial support is of the order of $10 to $15 billion per year, but over the past few years studies of the cost of mitigation and adaptation in developing countries have estimated the amounts as high as several hundred billion dollars per year. This Special Issue presents the first comprehensive overview of climate change finance in the peer reviewed literature, covering: ' Estimates of the cost of mitigation and adaptation in developing countries; ' The economic issues involved in estimating adaption costs; ' The link between adaptation and development; ' How funds could be raised and effective allocation of the available funds; ' Effective delivery of finance. Assembling and comparing estimates currently available only from a variety of reports, the volume provides a vital overview of the subject of climate change finance for negotiators, policymakers and researchers.

This book was first published in 1985.

The Group of Twenty book will provide a concise examination of the purpose, function and practice of the Group of Twenty (G20) summit with particular attention to its designation as a new "premier forum for international economic cooperation." Although providing a historical account of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors process, the main focus of the book will be on the conditions, events and debates that led to the formation of the permanent, expanded leaders' level forum. The historical span of the G20 Summit process is not long, but the global transformations that precipitated it are crucial for the analysis. Two central themes will guide the analysis of this book; first, an examination of "accumulating global deadlocks," which provide a framework of the functional deficiencies plaguing the global system; and second, "incremental institutional innovations," which will detail the patchwork of reforms to the institutions of global governance that led into the transformation of the G20's role. The book will explore a variety of major debates, including; governance by clubs versus multilateralism; the legitimacy of informal leadership; the issue of the G20's composition of both solution' countries and problem' countries; the role of the emerging powers; and, new conceptions of North-South relationships. It will address the array of functional challenges at the core of the global system. This book will provide insight and analysis on the G20 beyond its composition, offering a detailed examination of the ongoing shift in economic power and the momentum toward global institutional reform. This book takes into account the technical orientation of the G20 Finance and its financial agenda but will drill deeper on contextual issues. This book will also be produced very timely, following the early incarnations of the G20 at the leaders' level. It will draw from experiences of the initial four summits; Washington (Nov'08),

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is intended to radically increase investment and integration along a series of land and maritime routes. As the initiative involves more than 100 countries or international organizations and huge amounts of infrastructure construction, cooperation between many different markets is essential to its success. Cheung and Hong have edited a collection of essays that, between them, examine a range of practical issues facing the BRI and how those issues are being addressed in a range of countries. Such challenges include managing financing and investment, ensuring infrastructure connectivity, and handling the necessary e-commerce and physical logistics. Emphasizing the role of Hong Kong as an intermediary and enabler in the process, this book attempts to tackle the key practical challenges facing the BRI and anticipate how these challenges will affect the initiative's further development. The book provides a holistic and international approach to understanding the implementation of the BRI and its implications for the future economic integration of this huge region. Chapter 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780429467172_oachapter5.pdf

This book brings together the latest research in the areas of market microstructure and high-frequency finance along with new econometric methods to address critical practical issues in these areas of research. Thirteen chapters, each of which makes a valuable and significant contribution to the existing literature have been brought together, spanning a wide range of topics including information asymmetry and the information content in limit order books, high-frequency return distribution models, multivariate volatility forecasting, analysis of individual trading behaviour, the analysis of liquidity, price discovery across markets, market microstructure models and the information content of order flow. These issues are central both to the rapidly expanding practice of high frequency trading in financial markets and to the further development of the academic literature in this area. The volume will therefore be of immediate interest to practitioners and academics. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Journal of Finance.

Case Studies in Finance links managerial decisions to capital markets and the expectations of investors. At the core of almost all of the cases is a valuation task that requires students to look to financial markets for guidance in resolving the case problem. The focus on value helps managers understand the impact of the firm on the world around it. These cases also invite students to apply modern information technology to the analysis of managerial decisions. The cases may be taught in many different combinations. The eight-part sequence indicated by the table of contents relates to course designs used at the authors' schools. Each part of the casebook suggests a concept module, with a particular orientation.

This ambitious book seeks both to revive and revise the idea of 'functional finance'. Followers of this doctrine believe that government budgets should concentrate solely on their macroeconomic impact on the economy, rather than reflecting a concern for sound finance and budgetary discipline. Reinventing Functional Finance examines the origins of this idea and then considers it in a modern context. The authors explore the concept of NAIRU and argue that modern economies can operate at the level of full employment without provoking unmanageable inflation. They also contend that budget deficits do not have the deleterious effects commonly ascribed to them; the belief that they do rests on a misunderstanding of modern money. In this context, they highlight the relevance of Abba Lerner's famous dictum, 'money is a creature of the State'. The authors also debate the merits of various proposals for 'Employer of Last Resort' programs, which combine automatic stabilizers with the buffer stock principle. The book boasts an array of eminent contributors which includes, amongst others, James Duesenberry, Robert Eisner, Robert Heilbroner, Richard Musgrave, Edward Nell and Randall Wray. Financial economists, politicians, policymakers and bankers will welcome this provocative and refreshing book which challenges established economic thinking.