A 'Wreckers Theory' of Financial Distress


Book Description

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that negative excess returns are the equilibrium outcome when a subset of participants is able to draw returns "in kind" from distressed companies. For firms close to bankruptcy, non-cash returns to ownership will be the dominant form of return to equity. If markets expect a contest for control, these returns will show up in stock valuation. The governance problem described here creates a link between the financial position of a firm and real allocation that may amplify macroeconomic real or financial shocks.




A 'Wreckers Theory' of Financial Distress


Book Description

In recent years, a number of papers have established a new empirical regularity. Stocks of distressed firms vastly underperform those of financially healthy firms. It is not necessary to attribute the negative excess returns of distressed firms to inefficient or irrational markets. We show that negative excess returns are the equilibrium outcome when a subset of participants is able to draw returns "in kind" from distressed companies. For firms close to bankruptcy, non-cash returns to ownership will be the dominant form of return to equity. If markets expect a contest for control, these returns will show up in stock valuation. The governance problem described here creates a link between the financial position of a firm and real allocation that may amplify macroeconomic real or financial shocks.




Research in Finance


Book Description

Offers insights into economic systems as packages containing multiple real options where the rational exercise of these options then shapes the outcomes from the system. This title also includes chapters that explore the use of commodities like oil as a means of improving the diversification of portfolios containing equities.




Fatal Risk


Book Description

Long-listed for the FT & Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2011 The true story of how risk destroys, as told through the ongoing saga of AIG From the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the subject of the financial crisis has been well covered. However, the story central to the crisis-that of AIG-has until now remained largely untold. Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide tells the inside story of what really went on inside AIG that caused it to choke on risk and nearly brining down the entire economic system. The book Reveals inside information available nowhere else, including the personal notes and records of key players such as the former Chairman of AIG, Hank Greenberg Takes readers behind the scenes at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Details how an understanding of risk built AIG, but a disdain for government regulators led to a run-in with New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer Fatal Risk is the comprehensive and compelling true story of the company at the center of the financial storm and how it nearly caused the entire economic system to collapse.




Managed by the Markets


Book Description

The current economic crisis reveals just how central finance has become to American life. Problems with obscure securities created on Wall Street radiated outward to threaten the retirement security of pensioners in Florida and Arizona, the homes and college savings of families in Detroit and Southern California, and ultimately the global economy itself. The American government took on vast new debt to bail out the financial system, while the government-owned investment funds of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Malaysia, and China bought up much of what was left of Wall Street. How did we get into this mess, and what does it all mean? Managed by the Markets explains how finance replaced manufacturing at the center of the American economy and how its influence has seeped into daily life. From corporations operated to create shareholder value, to banks that became portals to financial markets, to governments seeking to regulate or profit from footloose capital, to households with savings, pensions, and mortgages that rise and fall with the market, life in post-industrial America is tied to finance to an unprecedented degree. Managed by the Markets provides a guide to how we got here and unpacks the consequences of linking the well-being of society too closely to financial markets.




Financial Statement Analysis


Book Description

Praise for Financial Statement Analysis A Practitioner's Guide Third Edition "This is an illuminating and insightful tour of financial statements, how they can be used to inform, how they can be used to mislead, and how they can be used to analyze the financial health of a company." -Professor Jay O. Light Harvard Business School "Financial Statement Analysis should be required reading for anyone who puts a dime to work in the securities markets or recommends that others do the same." -Jack L. Rivkin Executive Vice President (retired) Citigroup Investments "Fridson and Alvarez provide a valuable practical guide for understanding, interpreting, and critically assessing financial reports put out by firms. Their discussion of profits-'quality of earnings'-is particularly insightful given the recent spate of reporting problems encountered by firms. I highly recommend their book to anyone interested in getting behind the numbers as a means of predicting future profits and stock prices." -Paul Brown Chair-Department of Accounting Leonard N. Stern School of Business, NYU "Let this book assist in financial awareness and transparency and higher standards of reporting, and accountability to all stakeholders." -Patricia A. Small Treasurer Emeritus, University of California Partner, KCM Investment Advisors "This book is a polished gem covering the analysis of financial statements. It is thorough, skeptical and extremely practical in its review." -Daniel J. Fuss Vice Chairman Loomis, Sayles & Company, LP




The Alchemy of Finance


Book Description

George Soros ist unbestritten einer der mächtigsten und gewinnträchtigsten Investoren weltweit; seine Investmentprinzipien sind immer populärer geworden. "The Alchemy of Finance" ist eine Sonderauflage der 1987 erschienenen Originalausgabe des Buches. Sie wurde umfassend aktualisiert und mit erweitertem Vorwort und Einleitung versehen, die Soros zeitlose Investmentstrategien in einen modernen Kontext stellen. Sie enthält ein neues Kapitel, in dem Soros seine Erfolgsgeheimnisse lüftet sowie ein Vorwort des ehemaligen US-Notenbankchefs Paul Volcker. Soros erläutert detailliert seine innovativen Investmentstrategien, die ihm über Jahrzehnte hinweg gute Dienste geleistet haben und gibt eine theoretische und praktische Einschätzung aktueller Finanztrends. "The Alchemy of Finance" erscheint in neuem Design als Band der Reihe 'Wiley's Investment Classics Series'.




Devil Take the Hindmost


Book Description

A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day. Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed—and not changed—over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to “stockjobbing” in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the “assurance of female chastity”; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.







The Wrecking of the Liberal World Order


Book Description

The ‘Liberal World Order’ (LWO) is today in crisis. But what explains this crisis? Whereas its critics see it as the unmasking of Western hypocrisy, its longstanding proponents argue it is under threat by competing illiberal projects. This book takes a different stance: neither internal hypocrisy, nor external attacks explain the decline of the LWO – a deviation from its original lane does. Emerged as a project aiming to harmonize state sovereignty and the market, through the promotion of liberal democracy domestically, and free trade and economic cooperation internationally, the LWO was hijacked in the 1980s: market forces overshadowed democratic forces, thus disfiguring the LWO into a Neoliberal Global Order. The book advocates for a revival of its original intellectual premises, that in the aftermath of World War II marked the zenith of political modernity.