Investment Valuation

Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset 
by Aswath Damodaran

Valuation is at the heart of any investment decision, whether that decision is buy, sell or hold. But the pricing of many assets has become a more complex task in modern markets, especially after the recent financial crisis. In order to be successful at this endeavor, you must have a firm understanding of the proper valuation techniques. One valuation book stands out as withstanding the test of time among investors and students of financial markets, Aswath Damodaran'sInvestment Valuation.

 Now completely revised and updated to reflect changing market conditions, this third edition comprehensively introduces investment professionals and students to the range of valuation models available and how to chose the right model for any given asset valuation scenario. This edition includes valuation techniques for a whole host of real options, start-up firms, unconventional assets, distressed companies and private equity, and real estate.

Marketing Management

Marketing Management
by Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller

"Marketing Management" is an excellent textbook on the current marketing trends. It is an enjoyable and useful book. After reading the book, one will really understand that marketing is all about understanding the customer needs and finding solutions that delight the customer. The reader will come to appreciate that marketing is a philosophy of doing business for those organisations that are going to thrive in the current highly competitive global markets.

Entrepreneurial Finance
By J. Chris Leach and Ronald W. Melicher

Learn to master today's most effective corporate finance tools and techniques for successful entrepreneurial ventures with Leach/Melicher's ENTREPRENEURIAL FINANCE, 4E. This reader-friendly edition closely follows a "life cycle of the firm" as it introduces the theories, knowledge, and financial tools any entrepreneur needs to start, build, and eventually harvest a successful business venture. Readers focus on sound financial management practices, such as how and where to obtain financial capital, the stages of financing, business cash flow models, and strategic positioning. Readers even gain important insights into effectively interacting with the financial institutions and regulatory agencies that are central to financing ventures. Trust ENTREPRENEURIAL FINANCE, 4E to provide the knowledge and insights needed for entrepreneurial success.

Financial Institutions Management

Financial Institutions Management: A Risk Management Approach
by Anthony Saunders and Marcia Millon Cornett

Saunders and Cornett's "Financial Institutions Management: A Risk Management Approach," 6th edition focuses on managing return and risk in modern financial institutions. The central theme is that the risks faced by financial institutions managers and the methods and markets through which these risks are managed are becoming increasingly similar whether an institution is chartered as a commercial bank, a savings bank, an investment bank, or an insurance company. Although the traditional nature of each sector's product activity is analyzed, a greater emphasis is placed on new areas of activities such as asset securitization, off-balance-sheet banking, and international banking.

Losing Ground

Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 
by Charles Murray

 "Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980", by Charles Murray proposes that in the 1960s there was a paradigm shift in people's thinking about what caused poverty. It was thought that the underclass, largely inhabited by blacks was the result of white prejudice. This perspective led to a complete change in the way the government dealt with poverty.

President Johnson proposed his "Great Society" and his "war on poverty" which was designed to spend poverty into oblivion. Far from banishing poverty from the face of America it broke out like a bad case of acne into perpetual poverty, rising crime, lower education standards, rising illegitimacy and a glass ceiling beyond which the poor seemed unable to rise.

Charles Murray wrote "Losing Ground" in 1984. His book seemed like a bolt of lightening in the middle of the night revealing what should have been plain as the light of day. The welfare state so carefully built up in the 1960s and 1970s created a system of disincentives for people to better their own lives. By paying welfare mothers to have children out of wedlock into a poor home, more of these births were encouraged. By doling out dollars at a rate that could not be matched by the economy, the system encouraged the poor to stay home. By lowering the value of learning, it was discouraged. By lowering the punishment for criminal activity (which was deemed to be society's fault and not the perpetrator - who was seen as a victim) it encouraged more criminal activity and longer criminal records.

 By pointing all this out in convincing fashion with graphs, statistics and well-reasoned argument Charles Murray spawned a movement that would ultimately result in welfare reform in 1996. The results of the reform were manifest in the economy and in society almost immediately. Charles Murray since then has had the opportunity to bask in the glow of being proven right.

Managerial Accounting

Managerial Accounting

by Ray H. Garrison, Eric W. Noreen, Peter C. Brewer

Managerial accounting is concerned with the provisions and use of accounting information to managers within organizations, to provide them with the basis to make informed business decisions that will allow them to be better equipped in their management and control functions. In contrast to financial accountancy information, management accounting information is:

• primarily forward-looking, instead of historical
• model based with a degree of abstraction to support decision making generically, instead of case based
• designed and intended for use by managers within the organization, instead of being intended for use by shareholders, creditors, and public regulators
• usually confidential and used by management, instead of publicly reported
• computed by reference to the needs of managers, often using management information systems, instead of by reference to general financial accounting standards.

Regulating the Poor

Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare
by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward

The main premise of this book is that government provides aid for the poor to control political unrest and to control labor. The book starts off by tracing the history and development of welfare in western civilization. Prior to the early 16th century, caring for the poor was considered to be primarily the responsibility of the church or of those of the more prosperous who tried to purchase their salvation through almsgiving. Leaving charity to the church meant that few received aid and those not necessarily according to their need.

This increased social unrest so governments began to be involved in providing for the poor. This was done for two primary reasons: 1.) To control social order and 2.) To extol the virtue of labor even at the lowest wages by making the treatment of the destitute so punitive and degrading that the no one wants to descend into beggary and pauperism. The book details such early government programs as workhouses, labor yards, and poor law subsidies whereby parish churches were required to care for the poor in their area.

 In the united States, welfare was addressed somewhat differently. Poverty in the U.S. was regarded as the obvious consequence of sloth and sinfulness. Relief was scattered and fragmentary-each township or county provided for its hungry in whatever manner it saw fit-giving of food, incarceration in almshouses, or indentured service. Poor relief was a local, not a state or national responsibility.

 During the great Depression, unemployment became so widespread that the government was forced to develop programs to assist the poor and the unemployed. At first the government focused on direct relief, but as imm4ediate needs were satisfied, the government moved on to work relief which, interestingly, was opposed by business leaders because it was felt that government was encroaching on areas that had been primarily reserved for private enterprise. As conditions stabilized, US policies changed to conform with the earlier view of poverty as being the rsult of sloth and sinfulness.

Relief programs excluded able-bodied men. Man-in-the-house rules excluded aid to a mother who was in any way associated with a man, particularly if the man lived in her house. Women and/or children were given aid but at the same time assigned to private entrepreneurs who were told to use them in any way possible. With the growing mechanization of southern agriculture, blacks migrated into the cities, particularly the northern cities where relief rules were not as restrictive.

Four million blacks came to cities in less than three decades-congregated in largest cities in the north-New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington. Industry required an increasingly skilled labor force just as unskilled blacks reached cities in large numbers from the fields of the south, consequently, unemployment rose. Unrest mounted among poor blacks, culminating in the Civil Rights demonstrations of the early 60's. Then was born the Great society as Democrats realized that blacks were located in states of the most strategic importance in presidential contests.

Democrats were losing traditional support in the South, so they needed the support of the northern cities. Service programs were developed for inner city as part of LBJ's "War on Poverty". According to the book, the true objective of the "War on Poverty" was to reach blacks and integrate them into urban political system. Method was to offer federal funds for the ghettoes and to use federal funds to create pressure for reallocation of municipal services.

The Great Depression and The New Deal

The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Great Depression and The New Deal
by Robert P. Murphy

In this timely new P.I. Guide, Murphy reveals the stark truth: free market failure didn't cause the Great Depression and the New Deal didn't cure it. Shattering myths and politically correct lies, he tells why World War II didn t help the economy or get us out of the Great Depression; why it took FDR to make the Depression Great; and why Herbert Hoover was more like Obama and less like Bush than the liberal media would have you believe. Free-market believers and capitalists everywhere should have this on their bookshelf and in their briefcase.

We all learned in school that the 1920s were a time of unregulated capitalism that led to the stock market Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Herbert Hoover was a laissez-faire ideologue who did nothing to alleviate the crisis--even as citizens starved and were forced to live in "Hoovervilles." And the interventionist policies and massive spending programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal gradually lifted us out of the Depression, until World War II brought it to a definitive end.
The only trouble with this official narrative--taught in most history textbooks, and proclaimed as gospel by the media--is that every element of it is false. Worse, this unsubstantiated myth is now being used to justify a "new New Deal" in response to today's economic crisis that could lead to a Greater Depression even deeper and longer than the first. But in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, economist Robert Murphy fact-checks the myths, shows why they're wrong, and delves deep into history to set the record straight. His "politically incorrect" conclusion? It was government, not free markets, that caused the Great Depression--and the New Deal only made it worse. The real "lessons of the Great Depression" are not what you've been taught.

* The Crash of `29 was caused not by capitalism, but by the boom brought on by the newly created Federal Reserve's easy money policy (sound familiar?)
* Hoover made the Depression "Great" precisely by abandoning the laissez-faire approach that previous presidents had followed and that kept depressions short
* The bank runs of the 1930s were caused by government intervention in the banking system
* Government efforts to prop up wages and prices led to a full decade of double-digit unemployment
* FDR's arbitrary policies toward businessmen resulted in net investment of less than zero for much of the Depression

Investments

Investments
by Zvi Bodie, Alex Kane, Alan Marcus

Bodie, Kane, and Marcus' INVESTMENTS is the leading textbook for the graduate/MBA investments market. It is recognized as the best blend of practical and theoretical coverage, while maintaining an appropriate rigor and clear writing style. Its unifying theme is that security markets are nearly efficient, meaning that most securities are usually priced appropriately given their risk and return attributes. The text places greater emphasis on asset allocation, and offers a much broader and deeper treatment of futures, options, and other derivative security markets than most investment texts.

Architects of Ruin

Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy--and How They Will Do It Again If No One Stops Them
by Peter Schweizer

Was the financial collapse caused by free-market capitalism and deregulation run amok, as liberals claim?

Not on your life, says Peter Schweizer. In Architects of Ruin, Schweizer describes how a coalition of left-wing activists, liberal politicians, and "do-good capitalists" on Wall Street leveraged government power to achieve their goal of broadening homeownership among minorities and the poor. The results were not only devastating to the economy, but hurt the very people they were supposedly trying to help.

This tale of liberal "Robin Hood capitalism run wild" has never been told. But more than just a story about the past, Architects of Ruin is also an urgent warning about the future. The very same people who planted the seeds of the collapse are back in Washington, determined to use the crisis they caused as cover for a massive overhaul of the American economic system. These people have learned nothing from their past mistakes and are busy applying the same methods to other sectors of the economy—health care, the auto industry, real estate (again!), and above all the promotion of "green" technologies—inflating bubbles that are sure to bring about another crisis. Ordinary Americans who foot the bill for the last state-capitalist bubble have reason to be afraid—very afraid—of the inevitable result.

Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior: Essentials
by Steven L. McShane and Mary Ann Von Glinow
Organizational Behavior [Essentials] 2e offers the same quality of contemporary knowledge, excellent readability, and classroom support that has made the hardback book by the same author team one of the best-selling OB books around the world - but in a smaller package. It applies four fundamental principles: linking theory with reality, organizational behavior for everyone, contemporary theory foundation, and active learning support. McShane and Von Glinow have sliced out the extended or secondary topics so students can drill down to what is really essential. Although this book is less than two-thirds the length of their comprehensive hardback textbook, it doesn’t skimp on classroom support. In this era of active learning, critical thinking, and outcomes-based teaching, these supplements are becoming more “essential” than ever.

Crash Proof 2.0

Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse
by Peter D. Schiff and John Downes

A fully updated follow-up to Peter Schiff's bestselling financial survival guide-Crash Proof, which described the economy as a house of cards on the verge of collapse, with over 80 pages of new material

The economic and monetary disaster which seasoned prognosticator Peter Schiff predicted is no longer hypothetical-it is here today. And nobody understands what to do in this situation better than the man who saw it coming. For more than a decade, Schiff has not only observed the economy, but also helped his clients restructure their portfolios to reflect his outlook. What he sees today is a nation facing an economic storm brought on by growing federal, personal, and corporate debt; too little savings; and a declining dollar. Crash Proof 2.0 picks up right where the first edition-a bestselling book that predicted the current market mayhem-left off. This timely guide takes into account the dramatic economic shifts that are reshaping the world and provides you with the insights and information to navigate the dangerous terrain. Throughout the book, Schiff explains the factors that will affect your future financial stability and offers a specific three step plan to battle the current economic downturn.

• Discusses the measures you can take to protect yourself-as well as profit-during these difficult times
• Offers an insightful examination of the structural weaknesses underlying the economic meltdown
• Outlines a plan that will allow you to preserve wealth and protect the purchasing power of your savings
• Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, Crash Proof 2.0 will help you survive and thrive during the coming years of economic uncertainty.

The Modern Middle East: A Reader

The Modern Middle East: A Reader
Edited by Albert Habib Hourani, Philip Shukry Khoury, Mary Christina Wilson

This valuable collection of essays brings leading Middle Eastern scholars together in one volume and provides an unparalleled view of the modern Middle East. Covering two centuries of change, from 1789 to the present, the selection is carefully designed for students and is the only available text of its kind. It will also appeal to anyone with a general interest in the Middle East.
The book is divided into four sections: Reforming Elites and Changing Relations with Europe, 1789-1918; Transformations in Society and Economy, 1789-1918; The Construction of Nationalist Ideologies and Politics up to the 1950s; and The Middle East since the Second World War.


Includes Roger Owen's case study that argues that much of what happened in Egypt in the 19th century is well accounted for in the theories of Marx, Hobson, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Baran. But there are three areas where the theories do not provide and adequate framework: the role of the metropolitan states in relation to their capitalists, the nature of the Egyptian state and the changes in the Egyptian social structure with imperial penetration produced.

"The Business Case for Managing People Right"

"The Business Case for Managing People Right"
from The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First
by Jeffrey Pfeffer

The lure of new and profitable markets has lead many companies to formulate strategies to capture these markets. This focus on strategy often leads to downsizing and the shedding of old businesses in favor of a "lean" economic model that stresses outsourcing. The strategy that leads to downsizing has its short-term rewards--a fatter bottom line and happy shareholders.
Jeffrey Pfeffer argues that much of this downsizing is nothing more than a throwback to 100-year-old employment practices. Instead of cutting costs as a means to increase profits, companies should focus more on building revenue by relying on solid people-management skills. Through dozens of examples, Pfeffer demonstrates that successful companies worry more about people and the competence in their organizations than they do about having the right strategy. Pfeffer contends that the strategy part is relatively easy--it's the day-to-day execution that's hard. Companies that understand the relationship between people and profits are the ones that usually win in the long run.

Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France

Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc
by William Beik

Why was Louis XIV successful in pacifying the same aristocrats who had been troublesome for Richelieu and Mazarin? What role did absolutism play in reinforcing or changing the traditional social system in seventeenth-century France? This analysis of the provincial reality of absolutism argues that the answers to these questions lie in the relationship between the regional aristocracy and the crown. Starting with a critical examination of current approaches to state and society by institutional, social "Annales," and Marxist historians, the author calls for a new class analysis based on the findings of all these schools.

William Beik is professor emeritus at Emory University, and he is currently working on a synthesis entitled The Social and Cultural History of Early Modern France. Beik’s objectives in Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France were to explore the practice of absolutism using Languedoc as an example, while examining the role of individual elites within a comprehensive governmental system. The author chose Languedoc because he wanted a province “which was far enough away from Paris to have an independent existence and which offered good sources on the activities of all the major authorities,” and he found that Languedoc adequately fit these needs. Beik argued that historians should opt for a “change of emphasis in discussions of absolutism,” and that researchers of absolutist political systems should not overemphasize their modernity. Louis XIII and Louis XIV, argued the author, should be seen as monarchs who reinforced traditional social structures as a means of heightening their power as opposed to progressive rulers with forward-looking policies.

Corporate Information Strategy and Management

Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases
by Lynda Applegate, Robert Austin, Deborah Soule

Corporate Information Strategy and Management: Text and Cases 8/e by Applegate, Austin, and Soule is written for students and managers who desire an overview of contemporary information systems technology management. This new edition examines how information technology (IT) enables organizations to conduct business in radically different and more effective ways. The author’s objective is to provide readers with a better understanding of the influence of twenty-first century technologies on business decisions. The 8th edition discusses today’s challenges from the point of view of the executives who are grappling with them. This text is comprised of an extensive collection of Harvard Business cases devoted to Information Technology.

The Theory of Capitalist Development

The Theory of Capitalist Development
by Paul M. Sweezy

Since its first publication in 1942, this book has become the classic analytical study of Marxist economics. Written by an economist who was a master of modern academic theory as well as Marxist literature, it has been recognized as the ideal textbook in its subject. Comprehensive, lucid, authoritative, it has not been challenged or even approached by any later study.

Capital

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
by Karl Marx
edited by Frederick Engels

In Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), Karl Marx proposes that the motivating force of capitalism is in the exploitation of labour, whose unpaid work is the ultimate source of profit and surplus value. The employer can claim right to the profits (new output value), because he or she owns the productive capital assets (means of production), which are legally protected by the State through property rights. In producing capital (money) rather than commodities (goods and services), the workers continually reproduce the economic conditions by which they labour. Capital proposes an explanation of the “laws of motion” of the capitalist economic system, from its origins to its future, by describing the dynamics of the accumulation of capital, the growth of wage labour, the transformation of the workplace, the concentration of capital, commercial competition, the banking system, the decline of the profit rate, land-rents, et cetera.

The critique of the political economy of capitalism proposes that The commodity is the foundational “cell-form” (trade unit) of a capitalist society, which has commercial value for the owner of the means of production. Moreover, because commerce, as a human activity, implied no morality beyond that required to buy and sell goods and services, the growth of the market system made discrete entities of the economic, the moral, and the legal spheres of human activity in society; hence, subjective moral value is separate from objective economic value. Subsequently, political economy — the just distribution of wealth and “political arithmetick” about taxes — became three discrete fields of human activity: Economics, Law, and Ethics, politics and economics divorced.

“The economic formation of society [is] a process of natural history", thus it is possible for a political econmist to objectively study the scientific laws of capitalism, given that its expansion of the market system of commerce had objectified human economic relations; the use of money (cash nexus) voided religious and political illusions about its economic value, and replaced them with commodity fetishism, the belief that an object (commodity) has inherent economic value. Because societal economic formation is an historical process, no one person could control or direct it, thereby creating a global complex of social connections among capitalists; thus, the economic formation (individual commerce) of a society precedes the human administration of an economy (organised commerce).

The structural contradictions of a capitalist economy, the gegensätzliche Bewegung, describe the contradictory movement originating from the two-fold character of labour; not the class struggle between labour and capital, the wage labourer and the owner of the means of production. These capitalist economy contradictions operate “behind the backs” of the capitalists and the workers, as a result of their activities, and yet remain beyond their perceptions as men and women and as social classes.

The economic crises (recession, depression, etc.) that are rooted in the contradictory character of the economic value of the commodity (cell-unit) of a capitalist society, are the conditions that propitiate proletarian revolution; which the Communist Manifesto (1848) collectively identified as a weapon, forged by the capitalists, which the working class “turned against the bourgeoisie, itself”.

In a capitalist economy, technological improvement and its consequent increased production augment the amount of material wealth (use value) in society, whilst simultaneously diminishing the economic value of the same wealth, thereby diminishing the rate of profit — a paradox characteristic of economic crisis in a capitalist economy; “poverty in the midst of plenty” consequent to over-production and under-consumption.

Marxist Economics for Socialists

Marxist Economics for Socialists: A Critique of Reformism
by John Harrison

Marx's ideas on capitalism and its crisis are sometimes obscure. Here, John Harrison introduces the basic concepts of Marx's economics in simple language - as political ideas, part of a constant battle against reformism: fro Proudhon in France of the 1840s, through Bernstein in Germany of the 1890s, to Crosland and Holland in Britain of the 1950s and 70s.

"The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism"

"The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism"
by Robert Brenner
from The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Preindustrial Europe

"In what follows, I will take up each of the foregoing objections in
the course of presenting a more fully developed interpretation of
the problems of European feudal evolution and of the transition to
capitalism. In Section I, I will attempt, once again, to lay bare what
I believe to be the faulty foundations upon which the demographic
interpretation has been constructed. In Section II, I will try to
sketch a general approach to long-term feudal socio-economic evolution,
and then to demonstrate that this approach can better grasp
the actual course of medieval economic development, income distribution
and feudal crisis in the different European regions than
can either the demographic interpretation or Bois's "falling rate of
feudal levy" approach. Finally, in Section III, I will, in direct
response to the criticisms that have been raised, lay out what I take
to be the origins of the different property systems which emerged in different regions of Europe during the early modern period, and
explain why these property systems were in fact central in determining
the subsequent paths of economic development."

from Introduction