Toward Rational Exuberance

2002-05-30
 |  Business & Economics
Toward Rational Exuberance

Author: B. Mark Smith

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 9781429930888

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 288

View: 165

Get eBOOK →
The True History, and Dangerous Myths, of the Modern Stock Market. The stock market is big news now, influencing every aspect of the modern economy. Accepted wisdom has it that the market will provide retirement security for anyone willing to diligently save and invest.Yet many people can remember a time when the stock market was little more than a primitive insiders' game, viewed by most Americans with skepticism and suspicion. In Toward Rational Exuberance, B. Mark Smith, a professional stock trader with two decades of practical experience, tells the fascinating story of how this stunning transformation occurred. Smith traces the evolution of popular theories of stock market behavior, showing how they have become widely accepted over time. He also clarifies some of these theories -- such as the notion that the market is often susceptible to speculative "bubbles" that will inevitably burst -- and explains how they are based on faulty interpretations of market history. The central thesis of Toward Rational Exuberance is that the modern stock market is the product of a dynamic evolutionary process; it cannot be predicted by extrapolating arbitrary historical standards into the future. It is only by understanding the way the modern market has been created that today's investor can begin to understand the market itself.

Learning Economics

2004-09-13
 |  Business & Economics
Learning Economics

Author: Arnold Kling Ph.D.

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

ISBN: 1462834205

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 376

View: 725

Get eBOOK →
This book introduces the subject of economics using clear prose, rather than the graphs and equations common in many textbooks. The focus is on contemporary issues, particularly technological innovation and growth. To browse through the book or read some endorsements of the book, click here. The link below only gives you a brief excerpt.

When Wall Street Met Main Street

2011-06-01
 |  Business & Economics
When Wall Street Met Main Street

Author: Julia C. Ott

Publisher: Harvard University Press

ISBN: 9780674061217

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 300

View: 382

Get eBOOK →
The financial crisis of 2008 made Americans keenly aware of the impact Wall Street has on the economic well-being of the nation and its citizenry. Ott shows how the government, corporations, and financial institutions transformed stock investment from an elite to a mass practice at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Rational Exuberance for Renewable Energy

2011-02-02
 |  Technology & Engineering
Rational Exuberance for Renewable Energy

Author: Srinivasan Sunderasan

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

ISBN: 9780857292124

Category: Technology & Engineering

Page: 113

View: 308

Get eBOOK →
Rational Exuberance for Renewable Energy is a beyond-the-hype account of the underlying issues that encourage or plague widespread dissemination of renewable energy (RE) technologies. Renewable energy operates in the real world, and it cannot be assumed that the conventional theories and incentive structures of economics and business do not apply. The author argues that grants and subsidies could be provided to support research, development and technology improvement efforts, but should not be employed as an instrument of state policy to intervene in specific markets. It is important to recognize that although investors often demonstrate an appetite for market risk, they find technology risks and policy uncertainty much less appealing. Rational Exuberance for Renewable Energy blends classical economic theory with the everyday realities of the RE industry to identify incentive structures contributing to the success – or otherwise – of project implementation involving renewable sources and appropriate technologies. The book is a compilation of articles that analyze individual RE technologies, and offer multiple perspectives of the RE industry and markets. Rational Exuberance for Renewable Energy is intended for policy makers, advanced students of energy economics and sustainable development, and for potential mainstream investors.

The Age of Acquiescence

2015-02-17
 |  History
The Age of Acquiescence

Author: Steve Fraser

Publisher: Hachette UK

ISBN: 9780316333740

Category: History

Page: 480

View: 712

Get eBOOK →
A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.

Corporate Finance and Investment

2006
 |  Capital investments
Corporate Finance and Investment

Author: Richard Pike

Publisher: Pearson Education

ISBN: 0273695614

Category: Capital investments

Page: 790

View: 356

Get eBOOK →
This text has a practical orientation with a wealth of examples and case studies. Recommended by the CIMA and ACCA, it includes new material on derivatives, treasury management and restructuring.

Bubbleology

2002-07-23
 |  Business & Economics
Bubbleology

Author: Kevin Hassett

Publisher: Currency

ISBN: 9781400045129

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 192

View: 213

Get eBOOK →
There are only two types of stocks: those safe from bubbles and those that are not. This is a fact of investing many discovered as they saw their fabulous gains whittled away by the extreme calamity of the Internet sector. But what about the future? Is there a way for investors to capture the enormous potential for profit that exists at the frontier of the economy, the place where innovation and genius operate, without placing their fortunes in jeopardy? Is there a way to evaluate price increases—and declines—and identify whether they are happening for good or bad reasons? Bubbleology makes it possible to separate the winners from the losers. It is a brilliant, practical, and original analysis of the stock market that bashes the conventional wisdom about bubbles, showing that such famous examples as Tulipomania were not, in fact, bubbles at all. Bubbleology shows that the traditional way of evaluating risk—equating it with volatility—is inherently flawed and incomplete. If a stock fluctuates a lot in price it is regarded as risky. If the price is stable, then it is not. What this simplistic way of thinking leaves out is the simple fact that companies trying something completely new that may fundamentally alter the economic landscape are operating at the frontier. The stock of such a company swims in a sea of ambiguity, its circumstances uncertain, since there is little to provide guidance about the future. But when nobody knows for sure what will happen, pundits tell us again about Tulipomania, the South Seas Bubble, and now the debacle of the Internet to scare investors away from potentially enormous profits. To realize those profits, however, investors have to understand the role that uncertainty and ambiguity—the absence of reliable information about future events—play in the modern stock market. Those who equate ambiguity with bubbles will miss the great opportunities of the future. Bubbleology provides a new way to observe what is really going on in the market, enabling you to understand whether a stock or a sector is suspicious—whether it is in a bubble and therefore something to be avoided. Finding bubbles requires knowing where to look and what to look for. Bubbleology will help you avoid both streaming into speculative manias and shying away from perfectly good business opportunities. It tells you why you need to avoid both pontificating pundits and overconfident stock analysts. With this unique and forward-thinking book, you can inspect suspicious stocks, accurately discern risk, and diagnose a blossoming bubble before it vanishes along with your money.

Wall Street

2004
 |  Securities industry
Wall Street

Author: Charles R. Geisst

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

ISBN: 0195170601

Category: Securities industry

Page: 450

View: 689

Get eBOOK →
In this wide-ranging volume, a financial historian updates the first history of Wall Street, recounting the speculative fever of the 1990s and the scandals at Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and Conseco. 27 halftones.

The Equity Culture

2015-08-04
 |  Business & Economics
The Equity Culture

Author: B. Mark Smith

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN: 9781466894303

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 352

View: 940

Get eBOOK →
An Expert Chronicle of the Market's Ever-Growing Role Worldwide The modern stock market, B. Mark Smith's new book makes clear, is only one component of a much broader "equity culture"-a lively and complex international market involving stocks, bonds, mutual funds; joint stock and limited liability corporations; and trading in grain, gold, diamonds, and currency. The Equity Culture is the story of how that market came about-from shipping magnates banding together in eighteenth-century India to the railroad robber barons of nineteenth-century America to currency traders such as George Soros. Smith's spirited and colorful telling makes two points especially clear: that the equity culture has always been international, with globalization as merely its current phase; and that the equity culture is often surprisingly self-adjusting, with "manias, panics, and crashes" making possible ever greater risk and innovation.

Markets On Trial

2010-07-07
 |  Social Science
Markets On Trial

Author: Michael Lounsbury

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

ISBN: 9780857242075

Category: Social Science

Page: 405

View: 902

Get eBOOK →
Since the mid-20th century, organizational theorists have increasingly distanced themselves from the study of core societal power centers and important policy issues of the day. This title addresses the global financial crisis debates and struggles around how to organize economies and societies around the world.

Harriman vs. Hill

2013-10-01
 |  Transportation
Harriman vs. Hill

Author: Larry Haeg

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

ISBN: 9781452939902

Category: Transportation

Page: 384

View: 121

Get eBOOK →
In 1901, the Northern Pacific was an unlikely prize: a twice-bankrupt construction of the federal government, it was a two-bit railroad (literally—five years back, its stock traded for twenty-five cents a share). But it was also a key to connecting eastern markets through Chicago to the rising West. Two titans of American railroads set their sights on it: James J. Hill, head of the Great Northern and largest individual shareholder of the Northern Pacific, and Edward Harriman, head of the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific. The subsequent contest was unprecedented in the history of American enterprise, pitting not only Hill against Harriman but also Big Oil against Big Steel and J. P. Morgan against the Rockefellers, with a supporting cast of enough wealthy investors to fill the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria. The story, told here in full for the first time, transports us to the New York Stock Exchange during the unfolding of the earliest modern-day stock market panic. Harriman vs. Hill re-creates the drama of four tumultuous days in May 1901, when the common stock of the Northern Pacific rocketed from one hundred ten dollars a share to one thousand in a mere seventeen hours of trading—the result of an inadvertent “corner” caused by the opposing forces. Panic followed and then, in short order, a calamity for the “shorts,” a compromise, the near-collapse of Wall Street brokerages and banks, the most precipitous decline ever in American stock values, and the fastest recovery. Larry Haeg brings to life the ensuing stalemate and truce, which led to the forming of a holding company, briefly the biggest railroad combine in American history, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the deal, launching the reputation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as the “great dissenter” and President Theodore Roosevelt as the “trust buster.” The forces of competition and combination, unfettered growth, government regulation, and corporate ambition—all the elements of American business at its best and worst—come into play in the account of this epic battle, whose effects echo through our economy to this day.