Financial Markets (ECON 252) Behavioral Finance is a relatively recent revolution in finance that applies insights from all of the social sciences to finance. New decision-making models incorporate psychology and sociology, among other disciplines, to explain economic and financial phenomenon, such as erratic stock price variations. Psychological patterns such as overconfidence and perceived kinks in the value function seem to impact financial decision-making, but are not included in classical theories such as the Expected Utility Theory. Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory addresses such issues and sheds light on irrational deviations from traditional decision-making models. Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: open.yale.edu This course was recorded in Spring 2008.
“George Lee presents a documentary about how the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic phenomenon came to such an abrupt end, and asks whether Ireland can successfully reshape its fragile economy.” For the time being, RTE are still making this program available at www.rte.ie
Is Debt Guaranteed? This video shows reasons to why it is, and how on the consumer sector we are climbing the debt chair at greater lengths. LINK to the data used in the Consumer debt to GDP www.economagic.com
European and US authorities are making noise that a bunch of hedge funds were strategizing, over “a dinner,” to destroy the Euro by exploiting the Greek financial crisis. So here we are again the victims of phony finance based capitalism, phony financial instruments of mass destruction “derivatives,” and a race to the bottom on the part of national-sovereign entities. Nothing is being done that could be considered constructive to the long term prospects of society. People wanting to build for a future don’t have the stability needed to do so, they don’t have the credit, they don’t have access to money or capital. As small-investors, we have huge risk in supposedly risk-less assets; and risk of total loss in speculative yield producing assets. People are chasing yield a very dangerous thing to do. Governments are either going to have to peg currencies near parity, negotiate down debt, and concurrently move to a settlement system or we will face total chaos.
Murray Sabrin explains for On The Record in his bid for US Senator of New Jersey that the expansion of money and credit to finance the US occupation of Iraq has caused the inflationary crisis the USA now has. He goes on to explain how hmos and Universal Healthcare will balloon costs and reduce care resulting in a similar economic crisis as the failed occupation of Iraq. www.murraysabrin.com
The trouble that began on Wall Street is beginning to trickle down to Main Street, as small businesses find credit tightening up. Many banks are wary about lending until it’s clear who will take responsibility for the bad debt they are carrying. Many small business owners are finding it hard to borrow to finance their operations, and they worry about whether their customers will be able to buy their products. Leta Hong Fincher has more.
Ronald Sverdlove, PhD, is an assistant professor of finance at New Jersey Institute of Technologys School of Management. His teaching and research focuses on fixed income securities, theoretical and empirical corporate finance, and credit risk modeling. He has written more than a dozen individual and joint publications on various aspects of pure and applied mathematics and finance. Major current fields of research include debt seniority and the pricing of credit default swaps. In 2006 …
Mike Gasior explains what happened with AIG and the advent of credit default swaps. There is also discussion about how the US Congress was complicit in this whole mess by passing legislation that exempted credit default swaps from any sort of regulatory oversight during the final day of the lame-duck Congress back in the year 2000..
Todd Boehly, Managing Parter at Guggenheim Partners LLC, on the “next wave of credit investing”
, philanthropy, government, health care, education and news media to discuss, debate and deliberate the most difficult challenges facing the world today. Among them were hundreds of CEOs from the worlds top-tier companies, senior elected and appointed foreign and US government officials, high-level executives in the American and foreign capital markets, global academic experts and leaders in education, health care and philanthropy. … “Milken Institute” “Global Conference” credit finance …
The Federal Trade Commission warns consumers about the dangers of credit report scams and is accepting suggestions for how to make it easier to obtain a free credit report.