The first major global economic contraction of the 21st century, or the 'Great Recession', as it is more commonly known, began in December of 2007, and would prove to be one of the most catastrophic economic events in postmodern history. The bursting of the American housing bubble and the subprime mortgage crisis that followed are widely attributed as being the primary causes for this economic downturn.The content of this book presents an in-depth analysis of several of the leading causes of the subprime crisis, as well as the subsequent measures that were used to contain a widespread economic recession. It is the aim of this book to provide adequate information and tools for readers to gain insight on how we can prevent the same mistakes from happening again. This analysis also explores an interesting question when considering public policy; was the economic disaster, that ensued, caused by overzealous consumers who borrowed more than they could afford, or was it caused by institutional entities that gambled away the American economy?

The goal of Angel Financing is to get deals funded by providing useful, research-grounded, relevant, practical information to investors, entrepreneurs, and intermediaries.

This area of investment is the "pre-IPO," characterized by private placement transactions primarily equity in nature. Entrepreneurs must understand the problem, face the challenge, and possess the skills necessary to address the problem. Because their resources, time, and training are limited, entrepreneurs must understand the private placement, a unique process that demands a capitalization strategy.

Most importantly, entrepreneurs must embrace the investor perspective. In this one-of-a-kind book, Angel Financing provides a strategy that works. Hundreds of people have used the principles detailed in this book to raise millions of dollars.

The value of the angel investor, after all, can no longer be denied: Angel capital is the primary source of capital for early-stage deals. This fact alone accounts for the plethora of matching networks, seminars, and venture forums on the subject. Although the huge contribution of the angel capital market in creating jobs, expanding the tax base, and increasing our global competitiveness through technological innovation is well known, little is understood about the angel equity market and how deals really get done.

Moreover, over the last ten years, the authors have built the largest angel database in North America and interviewed thousands of investors about the nature of the pre-IPO investment process. Through their proprietary research and their comprehensive development of a typology of investors, the reader will not only be better positioned to identify and qualify investors, but will also be better sensitized to prepare the documents and the sales strategy to close their deals.

In Angel Financing, the angel investors tell their stories in their own words. The reader learns in depth about the forces that create this investment opportunity in high-risk investing. The reader journeys through the investors’ hedging strategies, risk assessments, syndication orientation, financial return expectations, deal structuring preferences, monitoring investments, harvesting returns, and realistic exit strategies.

What’s more, many investors themselves do not understand the valuation process involved in "blue sky" deals where there are no historical financials available. The valuation process is an art form in early-stage investing and for the first time it is candidly reviewed.

Even more important is the due diligence process. Angel Financing answers the most basic questions that sometimes even investors are too embarrassed to ask. So for straight talk on how to make money in this market, get the insights of the successful investors who have made millions.

In the United States, two million investors possess the discretionary net worth necessary to invest in pre-IPO private placements. Why is it that only 250,000 to 300,000 are active each year? The reason is that these investors–while interested–do not understand the process, do not understand how to find the deal, do not know how to determine which deal justifies their efforts, and do not know how to develop a hedging strategy.

Whether you are a dreamer, dream maker, or providing services to either, Angel Financing is the ultimate practical reference guide to add to your professional business development library.

GERALD A. BENJAMIN is Senior Managing Partner of International Capital Resources, a capital sourcing firm headquartered in San Francisco, California. He is the founder of the largest database of angel investors in the United States and developed the largest investor-entrepreneur matching network in North America. Mr. Benjamin is publisher of the Private Equity Review, the Executive Director of the Northern California Venture Forum, and Executive Director of the Angel Capital Summit (the largest annual angel capital conference in the United States). He is also a founding partner in Angel Lake Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital fund specializing in medical, telecommunications, Internet and high-tech manuals.

Get the money your start-up business needs

"Finally, two experienced fundraising advisors demystify the process for entrepreneurs and individual investors. This should be required reading for ALL start-up companies because an outside capital investment is paramount to their existence." – Lori King CEO and Founder NVST.COM, Inc.

"Angel Financing presents an innovative capitalization strategy that works. Based on extensive academic research and filled with practical advice, it is an invaluable resource for all participants in the early-stage capital formation process." – E. Jeffrey Lyons Managing Director Marquette Consulting Group, Inc.

"I think Angel Financing must be read by all those looking to raise capital. It is also a great resource for those angel investors with little experience but the desire to get involved with early- stage companies." – George A. Mathews President Southwest Capital Resources, Inc.

"Angel Financing is the most comprehensive guide for private investments that I have seen. A must-read for angels and entrepreneurs!" – Jerry E. White Business Founder, Owner, and Chairman/CEO ICR Licensee

A successful financial planner is someone who does more than just crunch numbers and present an annual investment plan to clients. There is a psychological component to effective client care as well as to issues involving clients’ overall financial well-being. People skills, as well as financial planning skills, are necessary to build a successful financial planning business. This comprehensive guide teaches both new and veteran financial professionals how to relate to their clients in meaningful ways, thus growing their business by increasing the long-term retention of those clients. Offered here are insights into such issues as how to determine which clients to accept, how to propose a plan clients can use, how to tread carefully in family situations, how to develop sensitivity and communications skills, and how to work with the media and recognize the importance of building your business one lasting relationship at a time.

Karen Caplan Altfest, PhD, CFP (New York, NY), is Vice President of L. J. Altfest & Co., a financial planning and investment management firm. She is also the Director of the Financial Planning and Investments Program at the New School.

What distinguishes this book from other texts on mathematical finance is the use of both probabilistic and PDEs tools to price derivatives for both constant and stochastic volatility models, by which the reader has the advantage of computing explicitly a large number of prices for European, American and Asian derivatives.The book presents continuous time models for financial markets, starting from classical models such as Black-Scholes and evolving towards the most popular models today such as Heston and VAR.A key feature of the textbook is the large number of exercises, mostly solved, which are designed to help the reader to understand the material.The book is based on the author's lectures on topics on computational finance for senior and graduate students, delivered in USA (Princeton University and EMU), Taiwan and Kuwait. The prerequisites are an introductory course in stochastic calculus, as well as the usual calculus sequence.The book is addressed to undergraduate and graduate students in Masters of Finance programs as well as to those who wish to become more efficient in their practical applications.Topics covered:

Since 2007, the repeated financial crises around the world have brought to the headlines financial practices and models considered to fuel the economic instabilities. Deep Dive into Financial Models: Modeling Risk and Uncertainty comes handy in demystifying the underlying quantitative finance concepts. With a limited use of mathematical formalism, the book explains thoroughly the models, their hypotheses, principles and other building blocks. A particular care is given to model limitations and their misuse for investment strategies, asset pricing, or risk management. Its reader-friendly nature provides readers with a head start in quantitative finance.

The Complete Debt Relief Manual is the definitive guide to paying off and eliminating any kind of debt. Written from a procedure writer's perspective, it will guide you, with detailed steps, sample letters, and checklists, through the processes of budgeting, deciding the best way to pay off debts, negotiating settlements with credit card companies or the IRS without getting scammed by debt settlement or consolidation companies, dealing with debt collector calls and hassles, handling or avoiding lawsuits, determining whether or not to declare bankruptcy and how to avoid it, and repairing your credit and improving your credit score. Foreclosure is not dealt with due to its specialized nature and the risks involved of tackling it without an attorney. Born from the author's painful lessons learned and personal experience, The Compete Debt Relief Manual is a treasure of accurate and effective procedures to guide your every step on your journey to debt freedom.

When author and operational excellence consultant Menno R. van Dijk joined ING Domestic Bank in the Netherlands, the company had already been using the Lean system a few years. But van Dijk felt something was missing-the fun factor: experiments, improvements, a supportive management style, and teamwork. He wasn't seeing the sense of invigoration and renewal that comes when employees on the shop floor experience the improvement brought on by a Lean implementation.

He went to work and created a new approach-Super7-that took the Lean system in financial services to the next level. It radically reduced customer waiting times with less management and more responsibility on the shop floor. In Super7 Operations, he discusses Super7 in detail-how it was developed, what it does for customers, how it changes culture on the shop floor, and how it affects employees and managers. He explains its benefits, which include

flexible capacity to cope with fluctuating demand-no inventory, no waiting;

small, autonomous teams committed to getting the job done for their customers;

output management and delegated responsibilities; and

continuous improvement of performance without the need for tight controls.

Including case studies, this guide provides valuable tips and tricks for implementing Super7 in an organization that is looking for ways to improve their customers' experience.

Decision-makers in business and economics face a staggering array of problems. For example, managers of growing firms have to decide when to expand their business, governments have to decide whether to undertake large infrastructure investments, and managers of oil firms must decide how rapidly to deplete their reserves. While these problems seem quite diverse, they all share many important features. In each case, the decision-maker must choose when to take a particular action that will be potentially impossible to reverse, and the consequences of taking (or not taking) that action are uncertain. Also, the timing and nature of these actions directly affect the cash flows generated by the entities they manage. This book explains how techniques originally developed to price financial derivatives can be used to analyze real-world decisions, and provides the tools necessary to put them into practice.
The real options analysis approach to decision-making is built on strong theoretical foundations, and is widely discussed in practitioner literature, but often only at a fairly intuitive level. What practitioners need-and what this book delivers-is a structured approach to systematically applying real options analysis to the wide variety of problems they will meet in business and economics.
Real Options in Theory and Practice focuses on building up a general approach to solving real options problems from the ground up. Rather than aiming to build a "black box" to solve a small set of standardized real options problems, it describes the building blocks of any successful real options analysis and shows how they can be assembled in a way that is appropriate to the problem being analyzed. And for all of the numerical examples in the book, there is an accompanying CD that contains spreadsheets ready to use on the wide variety of applications the book brings into the picture. For both practitioners and academics, Real Options in Theory and Practice will serve as an authoritative and invaluable resource for those looking for effective and practical solutions to complex, real-life problems.

Microfinance investment funds are a recent development that will grow in importance. These funds expand the range of opportunities for financing microfinance institutions, enabling them to offer greater outreach and diversity of products for microentrepreneurs and small businesses. Microfinance now spans the range of finance, from the most simple enterprise to the complexity of capital markets. KfW actively promotes microfinance investment funds and other activities that facilitate the growth of microfinance. This book is an expression of KfW's role as information broker and trend setter. The authors who contributed to this collection offer a comprehensive range of perspectives and themes related to microfinance investment and its promotion.

Two of the most important factors contributing to national and international economy are processing of information for accurate financial forecasting and decision making as well as processing of information for efficient control of manufacturing systems for increased productivity. The associated problems are very complex and conventional methods often fail to produce acceptable solutions. Moreover, businesses and industries always look for superior solutions to boost profitability and productivity. In recent times, artificial neural networks have demonstrated promising results in solving many real-world problems in these domains, and these techniques are increasingly gaining business and industry acceptance among the practitioners. ""Artificial Neural Networks in Finance and Manufacturing"" presents many state-of-the-art and diverse applications to finance and manufacturing, along with underlying neural network theories and architectures. It offers researchers and practitioners the opportunity to access exciting and cutting-edge research focusing on neural network applications, combining two aspects of economic domain in a single and consolidated volume.

This book provides an effective antidote to the small business owner's frustration with government, demonstrating how to cut through regulations, red tape, and political corruption. Even as the American economy has slumped and every institution-private, municipal, and federal-strives to cut costs, government continues to grow more complex, intrusive, and expensive. Small businesses already bear a disproportionate share of regulatory costs and suffer more than large competitors when corruption distorts local markets. This situation will soon get worse: looming federal health care as well as environmental and financial mandates will push vast new oversight responsibilities into the states-and onto businesses' backs. Amy H. Handlin applies her 20 years' experience in state government and politics to provide this practical, results-oriented guide that teaches how to successfully navigate the jungle of overlapping federal, state, and municipal rules-skills that will become more essential as regulations balloon. Readers will learn how government works, get insight into the mindset of bureaucrats and politicians, and discover specific, nuts-and-bolts strategies for dealing with even the most unwelcoming, recalcitrant, or even dishonest officials. Provides model advocacy materials Includes end-of-chapter summaries that reinforce key concepts Presents vignettes dubbed "Tales from the Dark Side" that portray the worst in government bungling and help reinforce points in the text Contains a glossary clarifying common bureaucratic and political jargon

Wealth inequality has been not only rising at unsustainable pace but also dissociated from income inequality because of the fact that wealth is increasing without concomitant increase in savings and productive capital. Compelling evidence indicates that capital gains and other economic rents are mainly responsible for wealth inequality and its divergence from income inequality. The main argument of the book is that interest-based debt contracts are one of the drivers of wealth inequality through creating disproportional economic rents for the asset-rich. The book also introduces the idea of risk-sharing asset-based redistribution, which is a novel and viable policy proposal, as an effective redistribution tool to address the wealth inequality problem. Furthermore, a large-scale stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model, which is step by step constructed in the book, sheds light on the formation of wealth inequality in a debt-based economy and on the prospective benefits of implementing risk-sharing asset-based redistribution policy tools compared to traditional redistribution policy options. The research presented in this book is novel in many respects and first of its kind in the Islamic economics and finance literature.

This book is the first of the two volumes featuring selected articles from the 14th Eurasia Business and Economics conference held in Barcelona, Spain, in October 2014. Peer-reviewed articles in this first volume present latest research breakthroughs in the areas of Accounting, Corporate Governance, Finance and Banking, Institutional and International Economics, and Regional Studies. The contributors are both distinguished and young scholars from different parts of the World.

This book brings together a good mix of academics and practitioners for a discussion that focuses on how to change financial practice and the academic field of finance in order to understand the current financial crisis and deal with future turbulent financial times. The volume is based on contributions by prominent academics and practitioners from Europe, Asia and the USA. The book contains several essays, most prominently by Maurizio Murgia, an internationally renowned European corporate finance scholar, and Robert E. Krainer, a senior professor with banking and business cycles research interest from University of Wisconsin-Madison. This book also deals with pedagogical, empirical and theoretical considerations in light of the crisis.

The prosperity and stability of any economic structure is reliant upon a foundation of secure systems that regulate the movement of money across the globe. These structures have become an integral part of contemporary society by reducing monetary risk and increasing financial security. Analyzing the Economics of Financial Market Infrastructures is a pivotal reference source for the latest scholarly research on the current developments in financial systems and how these processes are evolving due to new regulations and technical advances. Featuring extensive coverage on a range of relevant topics on payment systems, central securities depositories, central counterparties, and trade repositories, this book is an essential reference source for professionals in the financial sector, analysts, IT professionals, and academicians concerned with emerging research on financial markets. This book features timely, research-based chapters on a variety of crucial topics including, but not limited to, payment timing, multi-layer networks, transaction simulations, payment system analysis, and regulation of financial marketplaces.

Eleven papers in this volume present some current interesting and important research in finance. Based upon the CAPM, Chen and Kane show that double taxation and differential tax rates on a personal and capital-gains income, affect corporate stock values and financial policies in nonneutral ways. Sengupta shows tax evasion decisions of a monopolist in a price-ceiling regulatory environment. In their paper, Osterberg and Thomson empirically examine the impact of state-level deposit preference laws on resolution type and costs for all operating FDIC-BIF insured commercial banks that were closed, or required FDIC financial assistance, from January 1986 through December 1992. Peek and Wilcox show that during periods of international financial crises, or of domestic economic stress, the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) are well suited to stabilize mortgage markets. In their paper, Chen, Robinson and Siems empirically show the association between banks' subordinated debt and their loan sales activities and its implications in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy.

Also in this volume, Lin et al. use the Granger causality test to examine the linkage between the euro exchange rate and the money supply and GDP in the euro community, as well as its impact on the UK exchange rate and the London stock exchange market index. In their paper, Kane and Muzere extend the Diamond-Dybvig model of bank runs to an open market economy and show that adding the central banks and the IMF, guarantees will reduce, but not eliminate the banking as well as currency crises. The paper by Chung et al. empirically shows the presence of a long memory, property in currency, future markets, anddiscusses its hedging implications. In their paper, Lee, Lee and Yu develop a valuation model for the pension benefit guarantees that incorporates the plan termination conditions as well as a stochastic interest rate. In a case study, Hung et al. empirically show that the specially designed dividends (SDD) have positive signals in the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Finally, in their paper, Guerard and Mark show that the use of an R&D quadratic term enhances the mean-variance efficient portfolios and stockholder returns.

The book provides a detailed analysis of the nature and determinants of finance and trade and their relationship with Africa's competitiveness. Investment is examined in its various forms (financial vs. physical), and sources (private, public, domestic and FDI), as well as its relation to the size of domestic markets and export potential. The dimensions of trade related to financial development, trade costs, development of value chains and regional integration are also studied. The capacity of finance and investment to boost Africa's competitiveness is assessed to inform continent-wide economic policy.

This second edition of the authoritative resource summarizes the state of consumer finance research across disciplines for expert findings on-and strategies for enhancing-consumers' economic health. New and revised chapters offer current research insights into familiar concepts (retirement saving, bankruptcy, marriage and finance) as well as the latest findings in emerging areas, including healthcare costs, online shopping, financial therapy, and the neuroscience behind buyer behavior. The expanded coverage also reviews economic challenges of diverse populations such as ethnic groups, youth, older adults, and entrepreneurs, reflecting the ubiquity of monetary issues and concerns. Underlying all chapters is the increasing importance of financial literacy training and other large-scale interventions in an era of economic transition. Among the topics covered: Consumer financial capability and well-being. Advancing financial literacy education using a framework for evaluation. Financial coaching: defining an emerging field. Consumer finance of low-income families. Financial parenting: promoting financial self-reliance of young consumers. Financial sustainability and personal finance education. Accessibly written for researchers and practitioners, this Second Edition of the Handbook of Consumer Finance Research will interest professionals involved in improving consumers' fiscal competence. It also makes a worthwhile text for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in economics, family and consumer studies, and related fields.