Saunders and Cornett's Financial Institutions Management: A Risk Management Approach provides an innovative approach that focuses on managing return and risk in modern financial institutions. The central theme is that the risks faced by financial institutions managers and the methods and markets through which these risks are managed are becoming increasingly similar whether an institution is chartered as a commercial bank, a savings bank, an investment bank, or an insurance company. Although the traditional nature of each sector's product activity is analyzed, a greater emphasis is placed on new areas of activities such as asset securitization, off-balance-sheet banking, and international banking.

Financial Markets and Institutions is aimed at the first course in financial markets and institutions at both the undergraduate and MBA levels. While topics covered in this book are found in more advanced textbooks on financial markets and institutions, the explanations and illustrations are aimed at those with little or no practical or academic experience beyond the introductory-level finance courses. In most chapters, the main relationships are presented by figures, graphs, and simple examples. The more complicated details and technical problems related to in-chapter discussion are provided in appendixes to the chapters. Since the author team's focus is on return and risk and the sources of that return and risk in domestic and foreign financial markets and institutions, this text relates ways in which a modern financial manager, saver, and investor can expand return with a managed level of risk to achieve the best, or most favorable, return-risk outcome.

The trench raid came to typify the aggression and close-combat of trench warfare on the Western Front. Inevitably, raiding by aggressively minded units had a psychological effect on the enemy. Dominance over the enemy could be established by aggressive raiding. Equally, raiding had an effect on the morale of friendly troops but not always a positive one. Successful raids buoyed spirits but unsuccessful raids could be detrimental because of the casualties sustained for no gain and raiding provoked retaliation from enemy artillery or mortars or a tit-for-tat return raid. Raids came to be the epitome of all-arms operations, combining individual weapons skills with tactical sense and requiring cooperation with artillery and mortar batteries for success. Yet, a raiding party was an ad hoc all-arms combat team put together and trained for a specific operation. In the early days of raiding, the raiders were always volunteers but the steady toll of experienced soldiers led to raiders being told off for the first task like any other. This is the first book to look at how raids were carried out, the successes, the failures, the consequences of raiding, their effect on morale and their contribution to military operations on the Western Front.

This is a reprint of a previously published work. It deals with how emerging technologies have affected financial markets and their regualtion.

This title presents new research highlighting the invention of new weaponry and its front-line combat use. No army went to war in 1914 ready to conduct trench warfare operations. All the armies of the First World War discovered that prolonged trench warfare required new types of munitions alongside the conventional howitzers, large-calibre guns and explosive shells. This volume examines how the British went about inventing and manufacturing new weaponry such as hand grenades, rifle grenades and trench mortars when no body of knowledge about trench warfare munitions existed. It also examines how tactics were developed for these new munitions. Based on new research, this is the first book to discuss the complexity of invention and manufacture of novel weapons such as the Mills grenade and the Stokes mortar, and to consider the relationship between technical design and operational tactics on the ground. In so doing the book presents a different model of the trench warfare conducted by the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, and also provides a blueprint to understanding the relationship between technology and tactics applicable to all types of weapons and warfare. "Continuum Studies in Military History" offers up-to-date, scholarly accounts of war and military history. Unrestricted by period or geography, the series aims to provide free-standing works that are attuned to conceptual and historiographical developments in the field while being based on original scholarship.

In 1933 and 1956, the United States sharply limited the kinds of securities, commercial, and insurance activities banks could engage in. These regulations remain in place despite profound changes in the economic environment, in the structure of the national and international financial markets, and in technology. This book evaluates the case for and against eliminating these barriers. The authors study the consequences of bank regulation in the US as it relates to competition in international financial markets. They examine universal banking systems in other countries, especially Germany, Switzerland, and the UK, and how they work. They then apply the lessons to US banking, paying particular attention to the benchmarks of stability, equity, efficiency, and competitiveness against which the performance of national financial systems should be measured. They propose a level playing field on which any number of forms of organization can grow in the financial services sector, in which universal banking is one of the permitted structures, and where regulation is linked to function.

The objective of "Off-Balance Sheet ActivitieS" is to gain insights into, and propose meaningful solutions to, those issues raised by the current proliferation of off-balance sheet transactions. The book has its origins in a New York University conference that focused on this topic. Jointly undertaken by the Vincent C. Ross Institute of Accounting Research and New York University's Salomon Center for the study of Financial Institutions at the Stern School of Business, the conference brought together academic researchers and practitioners in the field of accounting and finance to address the issues with the broad-mindedness requisite of a group whose approaches to solutions are as different from each other as their respectively theoretical and applied approaches to the disciplines of finance and accounting.

The essays are divided into two sections. The first covers issues surrounding OBS activities and banking and begins with a brief introduction that places the essays into context. OBS activities and the underinvestment problem, whether loan sales are really OBS, and money demand and OBS liquidity are examined in detail. Section two, which also begins with a brief introduction, focuses on issues of securitized assets and financing. A report on recognition and measurement issues in accounting for securitized assets is followed by three separate discussion essays. Other subjects covered include contract theoretic analysis of OBS financing, the use of OBS financing to circumvent financial covenant restrictions, and debt contracting and financial contracting. The latter two contributions are also followed by discussion essays. This unique collection of papers will prove to be an interesting and valuable tool for accounting and finance professionals as well as for academics involved in these fields. It will also be an important addition to public, college, and university libraries.

With the ever-growing interest in Hitler's Atlantic Wall, it comes as a surprise that so little has been written about it in the English language - until now, that is. In this, the first substantial work in English, author Tony Saunders takes a critical look at the history of the wall, how it was built, what was built and the role it played in the Second World War, together with a guide to what remains to see of it today in France. Hitler conceived the Atlantic Wall during the Second World War as a line of impregnable fortifications along the western coast of Europe to protect his newly conquered empire from seaborne invasion. From 1942 until the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, millions of tons of steel-reinforced concrete were poured into the construction of gun emplacements, bunkers, flak batteries, radar stations, command and observation posts, as well as ammunition dumps and U-boat pens. This huge project stretched from the Franco-Spanish border in the south, following the French Atlantic coast north for 1,500 miles passing through Brittany, around the Cherbourg peninsula, along the coast of Normandy and extending right to the North Sea coasts of Belgium and Holland. More than 12,000 concrete structures were built, many of them so massive that they survive today despite being shelled by battleships, and resisting most post-war attempts by Allied army engineers to demolish them. They are now tourist attractions as well as the focus for a growing number of 'fortress' enthusiasts. Richly illustrated, the authoritative text is supported by a selection of contemporary photographs and plans - many rare or previously unpublished - and present-day photographs showing the amazing endurance of these monolithic fortifications.