Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theory. Show all posts

Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender Review

Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
Make an estimate of the amount of time you have spent on preparing yourself to earn money, on getting it, and of taking care of it when you have it. Wouldn't it be worthwile to really understand what it is you are spending all this energy on?
Tom Greco has been doing some of that work for you, with integrity, passion and enormous dedication.
The time has come to shed some light on the mysterious workings of our money. Read why it is a losing game for most people, of why it is our master instead of our servant. More important still: what you can do to change it for yourself and for your own community.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender

Cash. Loot. Scratch. Lucre. Bread. Coin. Scrip. Moolah. Green. We all think we know intuitively what money is, and what it can do for us. Tom Greco, director of the Community Information Resource Center, understands and explains money on an eye-popping, fundamental level. Moreover, he provides a roadmap on how to make alternatives to the "legal tender" work for individuals, communities, and local economies.Money will set your mental gears spinning with fantastic ideas. This book explains the mysteries and realities of money in clear and accessible prose, and reveals the true workings, and alarming fragility, of our existing financial system. It also describes concrete and realistic actions that individuals, businesses, social service agencies, and governments can take to enhance productivity and purchasing power, to protect local economies from the ravages of globalization, and to strengthen the bonds of community. Money is a radical critique of our existing financial system, but also a practical and inspirational how-to manual for creating a vibrant and effective community currency system.You'll learn:
the truth about how money is created, and what it actually represents;
why we're all in debt;
how the financial system is structured to inevitably transfer wealth from the poor to the rich; and
how to start a financial revolution in your local community.A retired professor of business and economics, Tom Greco has spent twenty years studying community currency systems around the world, including historical models (such as during the Great Depression), and the scores of contemporary examples now operating in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. He helped establish the Tucson Traders currency in Arizona, and he has served as a consultant for many others. No pie-in-the-sky idealist, Greco offers a realistic vision of how healthy local economies can be supplemented with flourishing community currencies.Anyone who works routinely with money needs this book--this means bankers, stockbrokers, merchants, community organizers, loan sharks, gamblers, investors, bank robbers, hedgefund operators, sports agents, and ordinary people.

Buy NowGet 18% OFF

Click here for more information about Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender

Read More...

Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations Review

Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
I read "Peddling Prosperity" over a vacation, expecting to read a few pages, put it down, and pick up something more entertaining. (I had the latest Grisham waiting in the wings.) How interesting can a book about economics be? Answer- my Grisham never got read. I couldn't put this down.
Typically economic treatises are uniformly dull, the author spending pages re-stating his thesis, over and over and over. As one of my college professors told me, economists have two basic rules-
1) The market can decide best. 2) Anyone who questions rule #1 is a communist.
I would add a third-
3) bore the reader with technical jargon.
Krugman, mercifully, avoids these traps. He distills economics down to its most basic elements in plain English. Krugman is also a more critical thinker than most of his counterparts, carefully making the argument for Keynesian economics and debunking the myths of Reaganomics. Even the most ardent free market enthusiast will find it difficult to explain away Krugman's notes about wealth distribution during the 1980s (the rich got richer, the poor got poorer) and about the disastrous effects of Reagan overseas. Protectionists will have difficulty as well in refuting Krugman's analysis of the disastrous effects of tariff barriers and the insignificance of America's trade deficit.
The author has it all correct- the fallacy of protectionism (the strategic traders), the failure of Reaganomics, the positive role government can play in American economic life. What makes "Peddling Prosperity" such a good book is Krugman's skill in translating his thoughts into passages a reader without a Phd can understand. Good work.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations



Buy NowGet 32% OFF

Click here for more information about Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in an Age of Diminished Expectations

Read More...

ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism Review

ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
I've written quite a bit about the financial crisis, and God knows I've read nearly every book on the subject, and I have no hesitation in saying that if there is one book that gets it whole, and gets it right, and is THE book for the intelligent, thoughtful reader to turn to, it is ECONNED. This is not an anecdotal recitation of deal gossip (like, for example, Sorkin's book); it's not "source-based" journalism reflective of the way certain participants in the dire events that unfolded in 2007-2009 wish themselves to be seen. It lays out, in what is easily as clear, as direct, as smart and with as much force of fact as any financial writing today how exactly the fun and games that have nearly wrecked our economy and the lives of so many of us went down. Yves Smith is, unlike so many other writers feeding off the crisis, writing about it from the inside: with an unfailing grasp of where the details (where the devil lurks) fit into the larger pattern of financial perfidy and destruction, in this Doomsday Machine that Wall Street put together. The intelligent reader will understand that if you want to know why you're suffering from acute ptomaine, you have to understand what went into the sausage you got it from. And then you have to be made to see plain the kind of restaurant or market that serves up this toxic offal. And then the regulatory failures that allow such places to be licensed. We have undergone one of the great crises in this nation's history. It needs to be seen plain and understood. Deadline-driven blahblahblah won't get the job done. But ECONNED does. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Click Here to see more reviews about: ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism



Buy NowGet 35% OFF

Click here for more information about ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism

Read More...

Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Clarendon Lectures in Economics) Review

Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Clarendon Lectures in Economics)
Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)
"Inefficient Markets" is the most thoughtful original treatment of behavioral finance I have found. Unlike most other books on this topic, which either are vapidly light but original or are intellectually rewarding but disjointed compendiums of previously published articles, Shleifer has produced an interesting and intelligent synthesis of behavioral finance. He organizes his materially logically and clearly, covering the central themes of behavioral finance in as unified a manner as the subject permits. He has clearly thought hard about the subject matter, and his book reflects this. Shleifer's writing style is both lucid and academically rigorous, which makes for an enjoyable and informative book.
Shleifer begins by reviewing the theoretical and empirical foundations of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) and introducing the principal challenges to this hypothesis. His review of the EMH is careful, objective, and respectful. His introduction to the principal challenges to the EMH is written with equal integrity, and his analysis of these challenges is non-dogmatic and relatively conservative. He carefully avoids overstating the conclusions of the academic research. While Shleifer clearly feels that financial markets are NOT efficient, as an academic he also acknowledges the inability of empirical research to PROVE with certainty that financial markets are or are not efficient. It is his careful interpretation of the evidence on both sides of the EMH fence that gives this book its tremendous credibility.
The majority of "Inefficient Markets" covers the two principal building blocks of behavioral finance: the theory of limited arbitrage and the theory of investor sentiment. Shleifer demonstrates that arbitrage is of limited usefulness in relatively competitive markets, much less in more complicated environments, and that financial markets should not be presumed efficient. He then presents a model of investor sentiment that incorporates the results of experimental research into individual decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Shleifer also provides an extremely clear overview of the DeLong et al. noise trader model, and concludes the book by highlighting some of the unsolved problems in financial economics.
It should be noted, if it is not already clear, that this book is intended for PhD and advanced MBA students (in fact, the book is a core text for the University of Chicago's PhD course in Behavioral Finance). The analysis in the book is both theoretical and rigorous. Nonetheless, the intellectually curious reader with a basic exposure to microeconomics and/or financial economics will find the book rewarding. You are guaranteed to come away from this book knowing more about that opportunities and challenges facing the field of behavioral finance.
For practitioners, or anyone looking for a more general/popular treatment of behavioral finance, I recommend "Beyond Greed and Fear" by Hersh Shefrin.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Clarendon Lectures in Economics)

The efficient markets hypothesis has been the central proposition infinance for nearly thirty years.It states that securities prices infinancial markets must equal fundamental values, either because allinvestors are rational or because arbitrage eliminates pricing anomalies. This book describes an alternative approach to the study of financialmarkets: behavioral finance.This approach starts with anobservation that the assumptions of investor rationality and perfectarbitrage are overwhelmingly contradicted by both psychological andinstitutional evidence. In actual financial markets, less than fully rational investors trade against arbitrageurs whose resources are limited by risk aversion, short horizons, and agency problems. The book presents models of such markets. These models explain the available financial data more accurately than the efficient markets hypothesis, and generate new predictions about security prices.By summarizing and expanding the research in behavioral finance, thebook builds a new theoretical and empirical foundation for theeconomic analysis of real-world markets.

Buy NowGet 23% OFF

Click here for more information about Inefficient Markets: An Introduction to Behavioral Finance (Clarendon Lectures in Economics)

Read More...