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"(Wright and Smith) have written a remarkably lucid and elegantly organized history that keeps the major themes in view, even while discussing the minutiae of crafting and marketing various new insurance products or of managing the firm and its investment portfolio. As the authors themselves point out, the history of life insurance has not attracted much serious scholarship or inspired writing. Fortunately, Mutually Beneficial has both. It integrates the Guardian's career into a wider account of the American life-insurance business and American economic history more generally, and it manages to do so with a light touch."
--Geoffrey Clark, "Harvard Business History Review"

"(Mutually Beneficial is), without doubt, a major contribution to the economics and history of life insurance in the twentieth century. Wright and Smith have provided, for example, the most comprehensive account yet of product development, and the section on investment strategies is also important. In sum this will make a fine addition to the library of insurance historians, and to financial and business historians more generally."
--Robin Pearson, "Accounting, Business & Financial History"

"The matieral is well documented. The authors have produced a nonvanity company history that goes behind the scenes to describe the company's corporate culture and policies and provide a explanation of how ethical and business precepts have led to consistent profitability."
--"Enterprise & Society"

Mutually Beneficial tells the story of the evolution of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, one of the most important life and health insurers inthe history of the U.S. economy and life insurance industry. Relying on exclusive access to the company's archives, interviews with its current executive officers, the public record, and scholarly articles and monographs, Robert E. Wright and George David Smith provide a strategic analysis of Guardian, from its founding to its standing in the insurance world today.

Mutually Beneficial also describes the origin of Guardian's distinctive approach to business-its corporate culture and policy-and how these principles flow from the ethical and business precepts of its founders. By rigorously attending to its policyholders as a matter of practice as well as principle, Guardian has long been one of the most consistently profitable life insurance firms as measured by return on net wealth. This unique history will be of interest to anyone in the insurance business, as well as financial and economic professionals.

Covering essential elements of Islamic Banking and Finance, as well as the latest views on topical debates surrounding the discipline, this text is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand this increasingly important sector of the finance industry. Written by Islamic scholars in the Arab world, this text gives new and pertinent insights into Islamic Banking and Finance, and its global impact.

This book contains selected papers of the International Conference on Industrial Economics Systems and Industrial Security Engineering (IEIS 2020), which is co-organized by Beijing Jiaotong University, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, in July 25-28 2020. This book aims to provide new research methods, theories and applications from various areas of industrial economics and engineering. In detail the included scientific papers analyze and describe communication processes in the fields of industrial economics, industrial system, industrial security and engineering and other related areas. The variety of papers delivers added value for both scholars and practitioners.

This book makes an original and significant contribution to Keynesian macroeconomics. The IS-LM model is a basic workhorse of Keynesian macroeconomics. However, its financial aspects are extremely rudimentary and the link between the real and the financial sector is extremely tenuous. Hence, neither the IS-LM model nor IS-LM-based models can be applied to the major economic issues facing today's world. This book develops alternative models in the Keynesian tradition that incorporate financial institutions and make explicit the intimate link between the processes of generation of income, saving, credit and expenditure. It subsequently uses these models to address the major current macroeconomic issues that India and the rest of the world are confronted with. In the Indian context, it focuses on the issues of unemployment, growth, recession, bank performance, banking sector reforms and corruption. It also seeks to identify the causes of economic crises in Greece and the US. The analysis reveals a common trend in the economies considered here: the policy framework within which they function is recessionary, exploitative and fosters unemployment, inequality and poverty. Further, this framework is leading these economies farther away from the goal that every civilized society should strive to achieve, namely, providing all citizens with suitably gainful jobs and adequate access to quality food, clothing, shelter, education and health care. The book seeks to identify the cause of this malady, and puts forward policies to remedy it. It thus contains takeaways for academia, think tanks as well as policy makers.

Finance is key to every business organisation as well as outside. This book makes sense of the finance world from a non-finance perspective. It introduces, explains and demystifies essential ideas of business finance to those who do not have financial background or training. Lucid, accessible, yet comprehensive, the book delineates the financial workings of businesses and offers an overview of corporate finance in the global context. The volume: Contains effective tools for financial communication, monitoring, analysis and resource allocation; Provides important learning aids such as figures, tables, illustrations and case studies; Highlights fundamental concepts and applications of finance; Surveys global corporate practices, recent trends and current data. This updated second edition contains new sections on Tax Planning, including Income Tax and Goods and Services Tax in India. A guide to building financial acumen, this book will be a useful resource for executive and management development programmes (EDPs & MDPs) oriented towards business managers, including MBA programmes. It will benefit business executives, corporate heads, entrepreneurs, government officials, teachers, researchers, and students of management and business, as well as those who deal with finance or financial matters in their daily lives.

In a stock market environment dominated by professional investors, "A Few Good Eggs in One Basket" o ers a plain-talk approach to pro tability by selecting and managing an investment portfolio of common stocks for an individual.

Author Richard L. Gunderson, who has been an investor for more than forty years, outlines an enduring framework that improves the odds for the individual investor to exceed the performance of the market over the long term by buying good companies at bargain prices. He outlines what constitutes a "good" company and how to determine when a price meets the test of being a "bargain." "A Few Good Eggs in One Basket" also helps individual investors by discussing
what to look for; where to look; when to buy; when to sell; and how many stocks to own.

"A Few Good Eggs in One Basket" presents a prescription designed to take advantage of opportunities created by market overreaction to bad news and disappointing results. Gunderson believes there are always bargains at any time and in any market. The challenge is to consistently apply a disciplined approach to identifying the unusual and favorable opportunities and concentrating a portfolio on those stocks representing the best combination of overall quality and intrinsic value.

Business decision-makers need to think bottom line--and that means after taxes.

Drawing upon more than fifty years of professional experience between them, authors and tax experts John Karayan and Charles Swenson deftly show managers how to get to the bottom line without getting bogged down in the details of taxes.

Strategic Business Tax Planning, Second Edition is the definitive handbook on business tax planning, skipping the unnecessary and minute taxation details and focusing instead on the big picture in taxes. Organized around business processes, this reader-friendly guide shows you how to optimally put tax management principles to work in your business.

Appropriate for undergraduate finance students as well as professionals, this Second Edition is updated to include the newest federal tax acts as well as a host of key cases and administrative pronouncements.

The financial crisis, which originated in developed country financial markets, quickly spread to developing countries. Governments and central banksthough taking many and costly measures were powerless to stop the global economic meltdown, as economies across the globe went into recession. The depth of the financial crisis means that the world economy is in unchartered territory. How do we restore robust growth and prevent another crisis? This book aims to systematically understand current major problems in the financial system, its governance, and in its links to global economic imbalances. It explains how both market actors and regulators behavior, and the prevailing ideology of extreme financial liberalization and deregulation, contributed to the financial crisis. This highly topical book focuses on the transparency and regulatory measures that are necessary to restore confidence in the financial system, to ensure that the financial system performs the roles that it should perform within both developing and developed countries, and to make a recurrence less likely. The book also describes reforms in the global financial architecture that might make the global financial system more stable and more equitable. The book presents sometimes radical, but specific, pragmatic, and politically feasible proposals to try to ensure a more stable, equitable, and growing world economy. Contributions come from both developed and developing countries and are written by leading authorities in their field, including senior nationalas well as internationalpolicy makers, practitioners from the private sector, and leading academics.

This book provides a concise and pragmatic introduction to transfer pricing. Approaching the subject from an economic and business perspective, it familiarizes the reader with the basic concepts without getting sidetracked by tax law. In turn, the book draws on case studies to demonstrate the identification and application of appropriate transfer pricing methods for the most common intercompany transactions. The intuitive step-by-step guidance, together with integrated Excel-based tools, will equip the reader to ensure compliance with the arm's length principle and thus to minimize tax risk. Based on the post-BEPS OECD Guidelines, the book's content is applicable to a global context.

Investing can be fun as well as rewarding. It could certainly earn you much more than you could gain by sticking your money in a bank account. It really does not require much to make money from the stock market - just an understanding of a few simple concepts and the following of a few rules.

Written by the UK's most successful writer on investing, "Get Started in Shares" explains in very clear and simple terms what shares are, how they are traded and what to look out for as an owner of shares.

" "

" "This is a straight-talking guide to the mysteries of investing that assumes no prior knowledge and will build up your understanding of investing in a series of easy steps.

"Constituting Modernity" originated from a critique of a liberal understanding of property relation as one between a person and a 'thing'. States are perceived to be fundamental obstacles on the way to an individual's appropriation of the "thing." State intervention is often considered to be a reason for a presumed absence of private property in non-European contexts. The research presented here contests these assumptions from different perspectives, both in a European and non-European context. As multi-disciplinary as it is wide-ranging, the work ranges from the practices of the 19th century Ottoman administrative government in the constitution of private property rights to the practice of cadastral mapping in British India. These essays, carefully prepared in full collaboration as part of a unified research program, cover Ottoman and British land laws, property rights in the British colonies, and the notion of property as a contested domain and a site of power relations in 19th century China. No such interdisciplinary study of private property exists. "Constituting Modernity" will not only set the tone of much research to come, but reworks the fundamental theory behind the scholarship to date.

This open access handbook, Ten Crises systematically traces the economic historyof China from 1949 to 2020, unravelling the complex domestic and global factorsleading to the cyclical crises identified by WEN and his research team, andexamining the corresponding counteracting policies and measures by thegovernment to resolve or defer the crises. The book offers profound insights intoChina's endeavours and predicaments on the path of modernization, andcontemplates opportunities and lessons for the forging of alternative trajectoriesnot only for China but also for the global south: to reconstruct rural communitiesfor integrated cooperation and governance, and to revitalize ecological civilization.

Portfolio management is an ongoing process of constructing portfolios that balances an investor's objectives with the portfolio manager's expectations about the future. This dynamic process provides the payoff for investors. Portfolio management evaluates individual assets or investments by their contribution to the risk and return of an investor's portfolio rather than in isolation. This is called the portfolio perspective. Thus, by constructing a diversified portfolio, a portfolio manager can reduce risk for a given level of expected return, compared to investing in an individual asset or security. According to modern portfolio theory (MPT), investors who do not follow a portfolio perspective bear risk that is not rewarded with greater expected return. Portfolio diversification works best when financial markets are operating normally compared to periods of market turmoil such as the 2007-2008 financial crisis. During periods of turmoil, correlations tend to increase thus reducing the benefits of diversification. Portfolio management today emerges as a dynamic process, which continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The purpose of Portfolio Theory and Management is to take readers from the foundations of portfolio management with the contributions of financial pioneers up to the latest trends emerging within the context of special topics. The book includes discussions of portfolio theory and management both before and after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This volume provides a critical reflection of what worked and what did not work viewed from the perspective of the recent financial crisis. Further, the book is not restricted to the U.S. market but takes a more global focus by highlighting cross-country differences and practices. This 30-chapter book consists of seven sections. These chapters are: (1) portfolio theory and asset pricing, (2) the investment policy statement and fiduciary duties, (3) asset allocation and portfolio construction, (4) risk management, (V) portfolio execution, monitoring, and rebalancing, (6) evaluating and reporting portfolio performance, and (7) special topics.