Our prosperity requires the enterprise of innumerable individuals and businesses who exercise their imagination and judgment-and bear responsibility for outcomes. And it is through dialogue and relationships that widespread enterprise is fostered, not merely prices in anonymous markets. Yet modern finance blatantly neglects these necessary elements for enterprise, and the dynamism of the real economy is stifled. For the last several decades finance has become increasingly centralized, distanced, and mechanistic. Instead of thousands of lending officers making judgments about borrowers who they know, credit decisions are the output of the models of a few Wall Street wizards and credit agencies whose mistakes have widespread, sometimes disastrous consequences. A Call for Judgment explains in a clear way how bad theories and mis-regulation have caused this dangerous divergence between the real economy and finance. Bhide accessibly lays out how so-called advances in modern finance helped mass-produce toxic products, based on backward-looking, top-down models that have no place in today's dynamic and decentralized world. Thanks to excessively tight securities laws and loose banking laws, anonymous transactions have displaced relationship-based finance. Returning to relationships and case-by-case judgment requires at a minimum tough rules that limit banks-and all deposit taking institutions-to basic lending and nothing else. Financing the Venturesome Economy is essential reading for anyone interested bringing the economy back to a point at which decisions can be made that foster organic economic growth without the potentially disastrous risks currently accepted by modern finance.

This book contains a series of clinical cases that address and illustrate difficult problems in obstetric ultrasound. The approach is strongly didactic and will aid trainees in maternal-fetal medicine and obstetrics to appreciate potential pitfalls and recognize rare presentations. Each case sets out one page of text, then one of treatment algorithms, and then presents sample ultrasound scans. Learning objectives are given for each case, together with a short list of references and background reading.

Largely ignored by modern research, entrepreneurs - and the businesses they start and build - are a crucial source of employment and productivity growth. By comparing their common features to the more systematically researched world of large and established companies, the author identifies the distinctive nature of the opportunities that founders of new businesses exploit, the problems they encounter, the strategies they adopt, and the economic and social role they play. The market includes students in business schools, anyone who is (or thinking of) building a new business, and business managers who want to incorporate the vitality of entrepreneurial activity within going concerns.

This book contains a series of clinical cases that address and illustrate difficult problems in obstetric ultrasound. The approach is strongly didactic and will aid trainees in maternal-fetal medicine and obstetrics to appreciate potential pitfalls and recognize rare presentations. Each case sets out one page of text, then one of treatment algorithms, and then presents sample ultrasound scans. Learning objectives are given for each case, together with a short list of references and background reading.

Many warn that the next stage of globalization--the offshoring of research and development to China and India--threatens the foundations of Western prosperity. But in "The Venturesome Economy," acclaimed business and economics scholar Amar Bhide shows how wrong the doomsayers are.

Using extensive field studies on venture-capital-backed businesses to examine how technology really advances in modern economies, Bhide explains why know-how developed abroad enhances--not diminishes--prosperity at home, and why trying to maintain the U.S. lead by subsidizing more research or training more scientists will do more harm than good.

When breakthrough ideas have no borders, a nation's capacity to exploit cutting-edge research regardless of where it originates is crucial: "venturesome consumption"--the willingness and ability of businesses and consumers to effectively use products and technologies derived from scientific research--is far more important than having a share of such research. In fact, a venturesome economy benefits from an increase in research produced abroad: the success of Apple's iPod, for instance, owes much to technologies developed in Asia and Europe.

Many players--entrepreneurs, managers, financiers, salespersons, consumers, and not just a few brilliant scientists and engineers--have kept the United States at the forefront of the innovation game. As long as their venturesome spirit remains alive and well, advances abroad need not be feared. Read "The Venturesome Economy" and learn why--and see how we can keep it that way."