The Zen of Thrift Conversions


Book Description

"Though no one speaks about them, thrift conversions have been tremendously lucrative for savvy investors." If you dream of digging up hidden treasure in the stock market, you'll want to read this book. You're about to discover a niche that portfolio managers and top investment experts can't touch - even if they knew about it! It's an area you have a huge advantage on Wall Street. It's a place where the potential returns are high and the risks are low, and most of the stocks are acquired at a substantial premium. Here's your guide to these secret stocks: - Discover how to systematically uncover these hidden gems- Invest even before they go public- Find banks so cheap they're worth more dead than alive- Analyze how to buy them and what to look for - even let pro analysts value them for you- Get expert insight from investors who dominate this niche- Supercharge your returns by getting these top professionals to work for you - for free!This book provides step-by-step guidance for investors and offers case studies of current and past stocks. You'll have the tools to find attractive risk-adjusted returns in small banks. James F. Royal, Ph.D., got hooked on special situation investments after he discovered that the stock market sometimes gives away companies for free and occasionally even pays you to take them. He worked at The Motley Fool as an analyst managing a portfolio of spinoffs and thrift conversions. He has been investing in stocks for over 20 years and has a doctorate from the University of Florida.




Imperial-Way Zen


Book Description

During the first half of the twentieth century, Zen Buddhist leaders contributed actively to Japanese imperialism, giving rise to what has been termed "Imperial-Way Zen" (Kodo Zen). Its foremost critic was priest, professor, and activist Ichikawa Hakugen (1902–1986), who spent the decades following Japan’s surrender almost single-handedly chronicling Zen’s support of Japan’s imperialist regime and pressing the issue of Buddhist war responsibility. Ichikawa focused his critique on the Zen approach to religious liberation, the political ramifications of Buddhist metaphysical constructs, the traditional collaboration between Buddhism and governments in East Asia, the philosophical system of Nishida Kitaro (1876–1945), and the vestiges of State Shinto in postwar Japan. Despite the importance of Ichikawa’s writings, this volume is the first by any scholar to outline his critique. In addition to detailing the actions and ideology of Imperial-Way Zen and Ichikawa’s ripostes to them, Christopher Ives offers his own reflections on Buddhist ethics in light of the phenomenon. He devotes chapters to outlining Buddhist nationalism from the 1868 Meiji Restoration to 1945 and summarizing Ichikawa’s arguments about the causes of Imperial-Way Zen. After assessing Brian Victoria’s claim that Imperial-Way Zen was caused by the traditional connection between Zen and the samurai, Ives presents his own argument that Imperial-Way Zen can best be understood as a modern instance of Buddhism’s traditional role as protector of the realm. Turning to postwar Japan, Ives examines the extent to which Zen leaders have reflected on their wartime political stances and started to construct a critical Zen social ethic. Finally, he considers the resources Zen might offer its contemporary leaders as they pursue what they themselves have identified as a pressing task: ensuring that henceforth Zen will avoid becoming embroiled in international adventurism and instead dedicate itself to the promotion of peace and human rights. Lucid and balanced in its methodology and well grounded in textual analysis, Imperial-Way Zen will attract scholars, students, and others interested in Buddhism, ethics, Zen practice, and the cooptation of religion in the service of violence and imperialism.




Sheep, Goat, and Cervid Medicine - E-Book


Book Description

**Selected for Doody's Core Titles® 2024 in Veterinary Medicine** Get practical answers from the only guide on the care of sheep, goats, and cervids! Authoritative yet easy to read, Sheep, Goat and Cervid Medicine, 3rd Edition covers all the latest advances in the field, including diseases and medical treatment, surgery, pain management, theriogenology, and nutrition. Clear instructions and hundreds of full-color photographs guide you step by step through common procedures including restraint for examination, administration of drugs, blood collection, and grooming. New to this edition is coverage of deer and elk medicine, reflecting the growing interest in these ruminants. Written by an expert team led by Dr. D.G. Pugh, this comprehensive reference is ideal for veterinarians and also for owners of sheep and goats. - Clear writing style and consistent organization makes the book easy to understand and use, with disease chapters including pathogenesis, clinical signs, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. - Coverage of both surgery and medicine in each body systems chapter makes it easier to choose between treatment options for specific disorders. - Superbly illustrated surgical procedures clearly demonstrate the steps to follow in performing medical and reproductive surgery. - Diverse, expert contributors include the most experienced authorities, each providing current information on the care of valuable breeding stock as well as pets. - Useful appendixes, now including veterinary feed directives, offer convenient access to information on drugs and drug dosages, fluid therapy, and normal values and conversions. - Consistent, logical format in each body systems chapter makes information easy to find by beginning with physical examination and diagnostic procedures, followed by discussions of common diseases that involve the system. - Comprehensive Feeding and Nutrition chapter covers diet evaluation, method of balancing rations, total parenteral nutrition, and examples of nutritious diets. - Explanation of the differences in normal behavior between sheep and goats shows how they are not the same, and require different methods of treatment. - NEW! Coverage of cervids has been added to chapters throughout the book, reflecting the growing popularity of deer and elk. - NEW! Thorough content updates are made throughout the book and reflect the latest research evidence. - NEW! 170 new clinical photos have been added. - NEW! Anesthesia and Pain Management chapter includes a new section on pain management strategies, reflecting the emphasis on controlling pain in small ruminants. - NEW! Expert Consult website offers an online version of the book, making it easy to search the entire book electronically. - NEW! Two new authors are respected and well-known veterinary medicine experts and educators: Dr. Misty Edmondson and Dr. Thomas Passler.




Bank Investing


Book Description

Bank Investing: A Practitioner's Field Guide offers you the essential toolkit to become a successful bank investor. It packages practical lessons, theoretical knowledge, and historical context, all into one compelling and hopefully entertaining book. The book includes conversations with investors and management teams. Investors include activists, financials specialists, credit investors, and multibillion-dollar asset managers. Management teams have a broad representation from the c-suite of a broad spectrum of participants ranging from a fintech to a bank with over $30bn in assets. Banks are the oil that lubricates the economy. An understanding of how they operate is essential for analyzing any part of the economy since banks represent a large investing universe and control a sizeable portion of assets. With over 800 public tickers representing over $3 trillion market cap, banks are larger than several other industry groups. Banks are the largest financial intermediaries in the U.S., controlling $15 trillion in financial assets. Their relative size can amplify effects. For example, a small regulatory or environmental change can cascade and ripple through financial markets and have a major impact on the economy. As fintechs gain in prominence, a fundamental grasp of topics related to banking will help enhance understanding of fintech. Bank investing can be a fruitful pursuit: The most successful investor of our times, Warren Buffett, has had a sizeable investment in banks over time (close to a third of his portfolio weight used to be in banks). Banks allow you to make macro-economic bets since they are highly levered to business cycles. Bank investing allows you to scale your knowledge, as they have relatively homogenized business models... ...at the same time, banks are diverse enough to drive meaningful dispersion in price performance. This divergence of performance can be taken advantage of by an astute and prepared securities analyst. Banks are good vehicles to make specific investment plays on geographic regions, demographic trends (suburban to urban migration, aging), industries (agriculture, tech, energy), news flow (trade/tariffs, weather), real estate subsectors (NYC office, bay area apartments), and investing themes such as ESG, cryptocurrency, and venture capital. Finally, fintech disruption is creating an investing opportunity to play the digital divide between banks that embrace technology successfully and those that get left behind.




The Bank Investor's Handbook


Book Description

Quick! Name an industry that touches people's lives on an everyday or frequent basis. Perhaps you thought of grocery stores or something sexy like internet retailing, but chances are you didn't think of banking. Yet, most likely you interact with a bank every time you're paid and when you pay your bills. Banks facilitate the flow of money through the economy and even if you don't interact with a bank daily, the businesses you deal with on a daily basis do. For all the interaction people have with banks, few understand how they work or why they work. Even fewer understand why they should consider including bank stocks in their investment portfolio. There are a lot of misconceptions about banks, including understanding what they are and what they do. For many people the word "bank" evokes images of receiving a toaster upon opening an account, or thoughts of security related to the storing of precious items in a safety deposit box. Others might go further and tap their inner Michael Moore and talk about how banks are greedy and evil. It's our belief that banks aren't just places to store idle savings (on which you receive virtually nothing in interest) or to cash checks, but that they should be an integral part of an investor's portfolio. The goal of this book is to provide you with a foundation and framework with which you can both begin to understand banks, but also learn the basic tools used to analyze banks as investments.




Contemporary Financial Intermediation


Book Description

Contemporary Financial Intermediation, 4th Edition by Greenbaum, Thakor, and Boot continues to offer a distinctive approach to the study of financial markets and institutions by presenting an integrated portrait that puts information and economic reasoning at the core. Instead of primarily naming and describing markets, regulations, and institutions as is common, Contemporary Financial Intermediation explores the subtlety, plasticity and fragility of financial institutions and credit markets. In this new edition every chapter has been updated and pedagogical supplements have been enhanced. For the financial sector, the best preprofessional training explains the reasons why markets, institutions, and regulators evolve they do, why we suffer recurring financial crises occur and how we typically react to them. Our textbook demands more in terms of quantitative skills and analysis, but its ability to teach about the forces shaping the financial world is unmatched. Updates and expands a legacy title in a valuable field Holds a prominent position in a growing portfolio of finance textbooks Teaches tactics on how to recognize and forecast fluctuations in financial markets




To Life!


Book Description

This title documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farms anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkows 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming.




Smart Sustainable Cities of the Future


Book Description

This book is intended to help explore the field of smart sustainable cities in its complexity, heterogeneity, and breadth, the many faces of a topical subject of major importance for the future that encompasses so much of modern urban life in an increasingly computerized and urbanized world. Indeed, sustainable urban development is currently at the center of debate in light of several ICT visions becoming achievable and deployable computing paradigms, and shaping the way cities will evolve in the future and thus tackle complex challenges. This book integrates computer science, data science, complexity science, sustainability science, system thinking, and urban planning and design. As such, it contains innovative computer–based and data–analytic research on smart sustainable cities as complex and dynamic systems. It provides applied theoretical contributions fostering a better understanding of such systems and the synergistic relationships between the underlying physical and informational landscapes. It offers contributions pertaining to the ongoing development of computer–based and data science technologies for the processing, analysis, management, modeling, and simulation of big and context data and the associated applicability to urban systems that will advance different aspects of sustainability. This book seeks to explicitly bring together the smart city and sustainable city endeavors, and to focus on big data analytics and context-aware computing specifically. In doing so, it amalgamates the design concepts and planning principles of sustainable urban forms with the novel applications of ICT of ubiquitous computing to primarily advance sustainability. Its strength lies in combining big data and context–aware technologies and their novel applications for the sheer purpose of harnessing and leveraging the disruptive and synergetic effects of ICT on forms of city planning that are required for future forms of sustainable development. This is because the effects of such technologies reinforce one another as to their efforts for transforming urban life in a sustainable way by integrating data–centric and context–aware solutions for enhancing urban systems and facilitating coordination among urban domains. This timely and comprehensive book is aimed at a wide audience across science, academia industry, and policymaking. It provides the necessary material to inform relevant research communities of the state–of–the–art research and the latest development in the area of smart sustainable urban development, as well as a valuable reference for planners, designers, strategists, and ICT experts who are working towards the development and implementation of smart sustainable cities based on big data analytics and context–aware computing.




Dancing with Giants


Book Description

China is now the world's fourth largest economy and growing very fast. India's economic salience is also on the rise. Together these two countries will profoundly influence the pace and nature of global economic change. Drawing upon the latest research, this volume analyzes the influences on the rapid future development of these two countries and examines how their growth is likely to impinge upon other countries. It considers international trade, industrialization, foreign investment and capital flows, and the implications of their broadening environmental footprints. It also discusses how the two countries have tackled poverty, inequality and governance issues and whether progress in these areas will be a key to rapid and stable growth.




The Making of Modern Japan


Book Description

Magisterial in vision, sweeping in scope, this monumental work presents a seamless account of Japanese society during the modern era, from 1600 to the present. A distillation of more than fifty years’ engagement with Japan and its history, it is the crowning work of our leading interpreter of the modern Japanese experience. Since 1600 Japan has undergone three periods of wrenching social and institutional change, following the imposition of hegemonic order on feudal society by the Tokugawa shogun; the opening of Japan’s ports by Commodore Perry; and defeat in World War II. The Making of Modern Japan charts these changes: the social engineering begun with the founding of the shogunate in 1600, the emergence of village and castle towns with consumer populations, and the diffusion of samurai values in the culture. Marius Jansen covers the making of the modern state, the adaptation of Western models, growing international trade, the broadening opportunity in Japanese society with industrialization, and the postwar occupation reforms imposed by General MacArthur. Throughout, the book gives voice to the individuals and views that have shaped the actions and beliefs of the Japanese, with writers, artists, and thinkers, as well as political leaders given their due. The story this book tells, though marked by profound changes, is also one of remarkable consistency, in which continuities outweigh upheavals in the development of society, and successive waves of outside influence have only served to strengthen a sense of what is unique and native to Japanese experience. The Making of Modern Japan takes us to the core of this experience as it illuminates one of the contemporary world’s most compelling transformations.