Accounting, Taxation, Economics and Finance Guide

Every day across America, consumers face issues with credit cards, mortgages, car loans, and student loans. When they are cheated or mistreated, all too often they hit a brick wall against the financial companies. People are fed up with being run over by big corporations, and few have the resources or expertise to fight back on their own.It is no wonder consumers feel powerless: they are outgunned every step of the way. Since 1970, the financial industry has doubled in size. It is the biggest source of campaign contributions to federal candidates and parties, spending about $1 billion annually on campaigns and another $500 million on lobbying. The four biggest banks each now has more than $1 trillion in assets. Financial products have become a mass of fine print that consumers can hardly even read, let alone understand.Growing problems in the increasingly one-sided finance markets blew up the economy in 2008. In the aftermath, Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Sharing the stories of individual consumers, Watchdog shows how the Bureau quickly became a powerful force for good, suing big banks for cheating or deceiving consumers, putting limits on predatory lenders, simplifying mortgage paperwork, and stepping in to help solve problems raised by individual consumers. It tells a hopeful story of how our system can be reformed by putting government back on the side of the people, to strengthen our families, safeguard the marketplace, and establish a new baseline of fairness in our democratic society.

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the modelling of operational risk using possibility theory. It provides a set of methods for measuring operational risks under a certain degree of vagueness and impreciseness, as encountered in real-life data. It shows how possibility theory and indeterminate uncertainty-encompassing degrees of belief can be applied in analysing the risk function, and describes the parametric g-and-h distribution associated with extreme value theory as an interesting candidate in this regard. The book offers a complete assessment of fuzzy methods for determining both value at risk (VaR) and subjective value at risk (SVaR), together with a stability estimation of VaR and SVaR. Based on the simulation studies and case studies reported on here, the possibilistic quantification of risk performs consistently better than the probabilistic model. Risk is evaluated by integrating two fuzzy techniques: the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and the fuzzy extension of techniques for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution. Because of its specialized content, it is primarily intended for postgraduates and researchers with a basic knowledge of algebra and calculus, and can be used as reference guide for research-level courses on fuzzy sets, possibility theory and mathematical finance. The book also offers a useful source of information for banking and finance professionals investigating different risk-related aspects.

A modern primer on consumer finance and personal money management intended for readers aged 15 to 30, this guide can also serve as a primary text for high school, college, or adult education courses on personal finance. There is growing awareness that teaching consumers more about finance is an urgent national priority--and that their education should begin early. Combining practical advice with targeted information on virtually every aspect of personal finance and money management, this book is the ideal resource for young people who want to start off their financial lives properly. The guide updates traditional personal finance topics, such as budgeting, credit, debt, savings, and investment, and goes beyond those fundamentals to furnish important life lessons on such concerns as career planning, starting a business, Internet fraud, and avoiding financial scams. It even provides useful background on the tax system, how to avoid bankruptcy, legal issues young adults often face, and the plethora of government benefits they can access. In fact, young readers will come away from this book with basic knowledge of every important area of personal finance. Ideal for teens and young adults, the volume will prove useful to parents who want to educate their children about the wise use of money, preparing them to make independent financial decisions. In addition, this book can be used to meet the standards enacted in every state for developing a curriculum guide for teaching financial literacy to high school students. It can also serve as a primary or supplementary resource in personal finance or consumer economics courses for college students and adults.

Ever since the Great Recession, the global financial regulatory system has undergone significant changes. But have these changes been sufficient? Have they created a new problem of over-regulation? Is the system currently in a better position than in the pre-Recession years, or have we not adequately addressed the basic causes of the financial crisis and resulting Great Recession?These were the questions and issues addressed in the seventeenth annual international banking conference held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in November 2014. In collaboration with the Bank of England, the theme of the conference was to examine the state of the new global financial system as it has evolved in response to significant market changes and regulatory reforms triggered by the global financial crisis. The papers from that conference are collected in this volume, with contributions from an international array of government officials, regulators, industry practitioners and academics.

This edited volume presents the most recent achievements in risk measurement and management, as well as regulation of the financial industry, with contributions from prominent scholars and practitioners such as Robert Engle, 2003 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Viral Acharya, Torben Andersen, Zvi Bodie, Menachem Brenner, Aswath Damodaran, Marti Subrahmanyam, William Ziemba and others. The book provides a comprehensive overview of recent emerging standards in risk management from an interdisciplinary perspective. Individual chapters expound on the theme of standards setting in this era of financial crises where new and unseen global risks have emerged. They are organized in a such a way that allows the reader a broad perspective of the new emerging standards in macro, systemic and sovereign risk before zooming into the micro perspective of how risk is conceived and treated within a corporation. A section is dedicated to credit risk and to the increased importance of liquidity both in financial systems and at the firm's level.