Author: Jeffrey Williams
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521389341
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
This book offers an explanation of why commodity processors and dealers use futures markets. It argues that they use futures contracts as part of an implicit method of borrowing and lending commodities, contrary to the accepted view of dealers averse to the fluctuating value of their inventories wanting insurance against price risk. Employing models developed to explain the demand for money, this book demonstrates that risk-neutral dealers have sufficient reason to use futures markets. Moreover, the book exposes major internal inconsistencies in the accepted explanation. Rather than insurance markets, the appropriate analogy is the money market, which is the point the book establishes through discussing actual loan markets in commodities. This insight into the function of futures markets is then used to explain how futures prices for different delivery dates express a term structure of commodity-specific interest rates and why futures markets flourish for some types of commodities and not for others.
The Economic Function of Futures Markets
Author: Jeffrey Williams
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521389341
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
This book offers an explanation of why commodity processors and dealers use futures markets. It argues that they use futures contracts as part of an implicit method of borrowing and lending commodities, contrary to the accepted view of dealers averse to the fluctuating value of their inventories wanting insurance against price risk. Employing models developed to explain the demand for money, this book demonstrates that risk-neutral dealers have sufficient reason to use futures markets. Moreover, the book exposes major internal inconsistencies in the accepted explanation. Rather than insurance markets, the appropriate analogy is the money market, which is the point the book establishes through discussing actual loan markets in commodities. This insight into the function of futures markets is then used to explain how futures prices for different delivery dates express a term structure of commodity-specific interest rates and why futures markets flourish for some types of commodities and not for others.
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521389341
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
This book offers an explanation of why commodity processors and dealers use futures markets. It argues that they use futures contracts as part of an implicit method of borrowing and lending commodities, contrary to the accepted view of dealers averse to the fluctuating value of their inventories wanting insurance against price risk. Employing models developed to explain the demand for money, this book demonstrates that risk-neutral dealers have sufficient reason to use futures markets. Moreover, the book exposes major internal inconsistencies in the accepted explanation. Rather than insurance markets, the appropriate analogy is the money market, which is the point the book establishes through discussing actual loan markets in commodities. This insight into the function of futures markets is then used to explain how futures prices for different delivery dates express a term structure of commodity-specific interest rates and why futures markets flourish for some types of commodities and not for others.
The Economics of Derivatives
Author: T. V. Somanathan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316338851
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
While most books on derivatives discuss how they work, this book looks at the contributions of derivatives to overall economic well-being. It examines both the beneficial and adverse effects of derivatives trading from the perspectives of economic theory, empirical evidence and recent economic history. Aiming to present the concepts in a fair, non-ideological, non-mathematical and simple manner, and with the authors' own synthesis, it draws on economic insights from relevant work in other disciplines, particularly sociology and law. The book also presents some new theoretical ideas and recommendations towards a pragmatic and practical approach for policy-makers. The ultimate objective is to provide a basic conceptual framework which will help its readers form a judgement on whether, when and how derivatives are beneficial or harmful to the economy.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316338851
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
While most books on derivatives discuss how they work, this book looks at the contributions of derivatives to overall economic well-being. It examines both the beneficial and adverse effects of derivatives trading from the perspectives of economic theory, empirical evidence and recent economic history. Aiming to present the concepts in a fair, non-ideological, non-mathematical and simple manner, and with the authors' own synthesis, it draws on economic insights from relevant work in other disciplines, particularly sociology and law. The book also presents some new theoretical ideas and recommendations towards a pragmatic and practical approach for policy-makers. The ultimate objective is to provide a basic conceptual framework which will help its readers form a judgement on whether, when and how derivatives are beneficial or harmful to the economy.
The Futures
Author: Emily Lambert
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465022979
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
In The Futures, Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which together comprised the original, most bustling futures market in the world. She details the emergence of the futures business as a kind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequent transformation into a sophisticated electronic market where contracts are traded at lightning-fast speeds. Lambert also details the disastrous effects of Wall Street's adoption of the futures contract without the rules and close-knit social bonds that had made trading it in Chicago work so well. Ultimately Lambert argues that the futures markets are the real "free" markets and that speculators, far from being mere parasites, can serve a vital economic and social function given the right architecture. The traditional futures market, she explains, because of its written and cultural limits, can serve as a useful example for how markets ought to work and become a tonic for our current financial ills.
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465022979
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Book Description
In The Futures, Emily Lambert, senior writer at Forbes magazine, tells us the rich and dramatic history of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade, which together comprised the original, most bustling futures market in the world. She details the emergence of the futures business as a kind of meeting place for gamblers and farmers and its subsequent transformation into a sophisticated electronic market where contracts are traded at lightning-fast speeds. Lambert also details the disastrous effects of Wall Street's adoption of the futures contract without the rules and close-knit social bonds that had made trading it in Chicago work so well. Ultimately Lambert argues that the futures markets are the real "free" markets and that speculators, far from being mere parasites, can serve a vital economic and social function given the right architecture. The traditional futures market, she explains, because of its written and cultural limits, can serve as a useful example for how markets ought to work and become a tonic for our current financial ills.
Inside the Financial Futures Markets
Author: Mark J. Powers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780471536741
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
Co-authored by Mark Powers who has been called one of the ``founding fathers of financial futures,'' this revised text contains more material than the previous edition. Along with expanded coverage of fixed income securities and foreign currency markets, it includes new chapters on portfolio insurance; interest rate and foreign currency swaps; options on fixed income securities and other topics of current interest.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 9780471536741
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 408
Book Description
Co-authored by Mark Powers who has been called one of the ``founding fathers of financial futures,'' this revised text contains more material than the previous edition. Along with expanded coverage of fixed income securities and foreign currency markets, it includes new chapters on portfolio insurance; interest rate and foreign currency swaps; options on fixed income securities and other topics of current interest.
Behavioral Finance
Author: Lucy F. Ackert
Publisher: South Western Educational Publishing
ISBN: 9780538752862
Category : Investments
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The book begins by building upon the established, conventional principles of finance that you've have already learned in your principles course. The authors then move into psychological principles of behavioral finance, including heuristics and biases, overconfidence, emotion and social forces. You immediately see how human behavior influences the decisions of individual investors and professional finance practitioners, managers, and markets. You also gain a strong understanding of how social forces impact individuals' choices. The book clearly explains what behavioral finance indicates about observed market outcomes as well as how psychological biases potentially impact the behavior of managers. The book's solid academic approach provides opportunities for you to utilize theory and complete applications in every chapter as you learn the implications of behavioral finance on retirement, pensions, education, debiasing, and client management. The book spends a significant amount of time examining how today's practitioners can use behavioral finance to further their professional success.
Publisher: South Western Educational Publishing
ISBN: 9780538752862
Category : Investments
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
The book begins by building upon the established, conventional principles of finance that you've have already learned in your principles course. The authors then move into psychological principles of behavioral finance, including heuristics and biases, overconfidence, emotion and social forces. You immediately see how human behavior influences the decisions of individual investors and professional finance practitioners, managers, and markets. You also gain a strong understanding of how social forces impact individuals' choices. The book clearly explains what behavioral finance indicates about observed market outcomes as well as how psychological biases potentially impact the behavior of managers. The book's solid academic approach provides opportunities for you to utilize theory and complete applications in every chapter as you learn the implications of behavioral finance on retirement, pensions, education, debiasing, and client management. The book spends a significant amount of time examining how today's practitioners can use behavioral finance to further their professional success.
Imagined Futures
Author: Jens Beckert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674545893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 683
Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 683
Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.
Grain Futures Contracts: An Economic Appraisal
Author: S. Craig Pirrong
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461532388
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This study is an independent scholarly analysis of the economics of the grain futures contracts of the Chicago Board of Trade. The study was made possible by a research grant to the MidAmerica Institute from the Chicago Board of Trade, and we gratefully acknowledge this financial support, as well as the information and vast body of experience made available to us by the Division of Economic Analysis and members of the Exchange. Several other organizations also provided invaluable help from the inception of this study through the full process, either in the form of information, or through discussion: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Grain and Feed Association, the American Soybean Association, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, the House Committee on Agriculture, the General Accounting Office, and the Center for the Study of Futures and Options Markets at Virginia Polytechnic and State University. We express our thanks. The primary authors wish to extend a special word of apprecia tion to Michael Brennan, Merton Miller, Richard Roll, Hans Stoll and Lester Telser, who served as members of the Resource Panel for the study. While key strengths of the study reflect their input, ultimate responsibility for the analysis rests with the primary authors.
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461532388
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Book Description
This study is an independent scholarly analysis of the economics of the grain futures contracts of the Chicago Board of Trade. The study was made possible by a research grant to the MidAmerica Institute from the Chicago Board of Trade, and we gratefully acknowledge this financial support, as well as the information and vast body of experience made available to us by the Division of Economic Analysis and members of the Exchange. Several other organizations also provided invaluable help from the inception of this study through the full process, either in the form of information, or through discussion: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Grain and Feed Association, the American Soybean Association, the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, the House Committee on Agriculture, the General Accounting Office, and the Center for the Study of Futures and Options Markets at Virginia Polytechnic and State University. We express our thanks. The primary authors wish to extend a special word of apprecia tion to Michael Brennan, Merton Miller, Richard Roll, Hans Stoll and Lester Telser, who served as members of the Resource Panel for the study. While key strengths of the study reflect their input, ultimate responsibility for the analysis rests with the primary authors.
Commodity Prices and Markets
Author: Takatoshi Ito
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226386899
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Book Description
Fluctuations of commodity prices, most notably of oil, capture considerable attention and have been tied to important economic effects. This book advances our understanding of the consequences of these fluctuations, providing both general analysis and a particular focus on the countries of the Pacific Rim.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226386899
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 346
Book Description
Fluctuations of commodity prices, most notably of oil, capture considerable attention and have been tied to important economic effects. This book advances our understanding of the consequences of these fluctuations, providing both general analysis and a particular focus on the countries of the Pacific Rim.
Introduction to the Economics of Financial Markets
Author: James Bradfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198042442
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
There are many textbooks for business students that provide a systematic, introductory development of the economics of financial markets. However, there are as yet no introductory textbooks aimed at more easily daunted undergraduate liberal arts students. Introduction to the Economics of Financial Markets fills this gap by providing an extremely accessible introductory exposition of how economists analyze both how, and how well, financial markets organize the intertemporal allocation of scarce resources. The central theme is that the function of a system of financial markets is to enable consumers, investors, and managers of firms to effect mutually beneficial intertemporal exchanges. James Bradfield uses the standard concept of economic efficiency (Pareto Optimality) to assess the efficacy of the financial markets. He presents an intuitive, and introductory, understanding of the primary theoretical and empirical models that economists use to analyze financial markets, and then uses these models to discuss implications for public policy. Students who use this text will acquire an understanding of the economics of financial markets that will enable them to read, with some sophistication, articles in the public press about financial markets and about public policy toward those markets. The book is addressed to undergraduate students in the liberal arts, but will also be useful for undergraduate and beginning graduate students in programs of business administration who want an understanding of how economists assess financial markets against the criteria of allocative and informational efficiency.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198042442
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
There are many textbooks for business students that provide a systematic, introductory development of the economics of financial markets. However, there are as yet no introductory textbooks aimed at more easily daunted undergraduate liberal arts students. Introduction to the Economics of Financial Markets fills this gap by providing an extremely accessible introductory exposition of how economists analyze both how, and how well, financial markets organize the intertemporal allocation of scarce resources. The central theme is that the function of a system of financial markets is to enable consumers, investors, and managers of firms to effect mutually beneficial intertemporal exchanges. James Bradfield uses the standard concept of economic efficiency (Pareto Optimality) to assess the efficacy of the financial markets. He presents an intuitive, and introductory, understanding of the primary theoretical and empirical models that economists use to analyze financial markets, and then uses these models to discuss implications for public policy. Students who use this text will acquire an understanding of the economics of financial markets that will enable them to read, with some sophistication, articles in the public press about financial markets and about public policy toward those markets. The book is addressed to undergraduate students in the liberal arts, but will also be useful for undergraduate and beginning graduate students in programs of business administration who want an understanding of how economists assess financial markets against the criteria of allocative and informational efficiency.