Guide to Financial Markets (The Economist) - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

Marc Levinson is a former finance and economics editor of The Economist. He was previously a senior writer at Newsweek and more recently spent ten years as an economist at JPMorgan Chase. He has published widely on economic subjects in such journals as Harvard Business Review and Foreign Affairs, and is currently senior fellow in international business at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

De la contraportada

The credit crunch and ensuing financial crisis showed just how volatile the financial markets can be. Even slight movements in market prices can have substantial effects on national economies, businesses and institutional investors such as pension funds. Individual investors, meanwhile, face choices among highly complex financial products that are increasingly difficult to get to grips with. Astute use of the financial markets can make all the difference to the bottom line. But in order to act astutely you must understand what you are doing.

The Guide to Financial Markets provides a clear explanation of the different markets. It goes well beyond stocks and bonds to explain the purposes and uses of equity futures and options, securitised instruments, and innovations such as the credit derivatives that can help manage risk but can also prove toxic when not used carefully. And so for anyone who wants a good understanding of:

• why markets matter

• international fixed-income markets

• foreign-exchange markets

• equity markets

• money markets

• futures and options markets

• bond markets

• derivatives markets

• securitisation

there is no better reference source than this fully revised and updated fifth edition of the Guide to Financial Markets.

De la solapa interior

Financial markets have been around ever since people settled down to growing crops and trading them with each other. They take many different forms and operate in many different ways. But all of them, whether highly organised, like the New York Stock Exchange, or highly informal, like money-changers in Africa, serve the same basic functions, which range from providing a way of setting prices and valuing assets, through raising capital or investing it, to managing exposure to risk.

The credit crunch and ensuing financial crisis brought home to everyone the enormous influence that financial markets exercise and highlighted the pace of innovation in them and the instruments they trade. This book explains why the different financial markets exist, how they work and who trades in them, and gives a run-down of the factors that affect prices and rates.