Foreign-market Books

Verdun aims to discover why, given that EMU greatly reduced national sovereignty, there was so little public discussion of its costs and benefits. As she noted of EMU, "This transfer of national sovereignty can arguably be considered to be one of the most far-reaching formal transfers of sovereignty to the European level that the European Community (EC) members have witnessed to date." She studied the ways that central bankers, Ministries of Finance, employers' organisations and trade union leaderships in Britain, France and Germany all perceived EMU. The bankers, Ministries and employers' organisations agreed that EMU would strengthen the market mechanism in Europe. They also agreed that it would assist their efforts to create a single European state. As Verdun observed, "EMU will eventually necessitate more integration of economic, fiscal, social and labour policies." Some quarters of the TUC hoped that associating themselves with the EU's decision-making process would increase their power. But the more the TUC claimed to set the EU agenda on social and employment issues, the more it linked itself to the EU's disastrous impact on Britain's industry and welfare. Some trade union leaders thought that the EU would restore the influence over economic policy-making that they had lost at national level. But cosying up to the employer, whether European or British, weakens our unions, not strengthens us. Some thought that possible gains from the Social Charter would justify the certain losses from labour market flexibility. But who talks about the Social Charter today? Did it save any of the 96,000 manufacturing jobs destroyed in Britain last year? So why was there so little public discussion of EMU's costs and benefits? Verdun does not finally explain, but one suspects that it was because its benefits would accrue only to the ruling classes of Britain, France and Germany, while the public, the vast majority of us who have to work for a living, would suffer all the costs.

Ike has developed a great read, complete with adventure, heartbreak, travel, and a luxury lifestyle I may never know. Fun book.

From the publisher: "Foreign Exchange and Money Market" is a comprehensive handbook for those seeking insight into the dynamic world of international currency dealing. It provides a structured illustration of the complexities of foreign exchange, money market and the interplay of market forces through real world examples and case studies.

In addition to the fundamentals and history of these markets and rounding off this extensive manual, it delves into the conventions and practicalities of sales and trading observed in the manual today.

Is a very good introduction for a Foreign Exchange Market. Specially in futures markets

It's a very interesting guide for people who already know the city because it?s completely different from traditional guides. It gives you the kind of tips and advises only smart people who live in NY can give you. The language is Spanish and for Argentinan people it would act as a "friend?s advice". It contains infromation, of many types (prices, gossips,etc), about almost every restaurant,bar,club, museum in de city, divided in areas, so it's really easy to find what you are looking for. It also makes you save money because the author, who is a journalist, "really" knows NY, gives you the dates where the museums are free, where you can find special bargains, what to shop in each place, how to know the most fashionable places for $15, etc. For hollywood fans he also shows you the places where the famous people eat and live or used to. In few words, after visiting the city with this guide you will know the city more than people who have bee there many, many times...

Hidden Markov Models have come into vogue in recent years in various fields. Notably automatic speech recognition. An HMM is useful in a Bayesian context, where you have to work back from some observations to discern an underlying probability model that is supposedly generating those observations. Often in the presence of noise. Well, it turns out that this general description can also be applied to financial models, which is the book's subject.

Various specific models are tackled. Including the seminal Black-Scholes, where the security market is modelled as a Markov modulated Brownian. Typically, the maths in the book uses sophisticated probabilistic analysis and often assuming Markov processes. As an aside, if your field is electrical engineering or information theory, where you might have used Markov processes, then your background should suffice if you want to migrate to finance. It's not that different, at a certain conceptual level.

The book could be improved by the addition of an index.

I am a PhD economist who wanted a refresher course in the basic of international macro. This book is extremely well-written. There is some math (calculus is in appendixes), but only that which meshes well with the text. This is some, but not a great deal, of reference to materials from the last one or two decades. It is not designed to help anyone identify research topics or conduct empirical work. On the other hand, it efficiently conveys the key concepts in the field.

This is an awesome book. I had to read it for a French class, but I would definately recommend it to anyone. The author approaches this very sad story with a lot of humour. I loved it! The amount of understanding and compassion the two sons have for their mother is so heartwarming.

Mark Twain mentioned this book in a collection of shorts and random musings. He characterized it as a work that would not stand translation into english with out the extensive use of blanks. That interested me.

When the author was awarded with the Nobel Prize, I decided to see what his prose was like and read this novel in the original. Overall although I had some problem with the novel at some point (because the plot isn't clearly defined and you may lose interest somewhere on the way), I appreciate it more now, when it's over. I enjoyed the language but I did not like the main character from the very beginning. But that's it - I don't want to re-tell the whole story. At least I have not lost interest in the author and am planning to read some more of his books.