À quoi sert la finance ? John Kay, avec sa double compétence pratique et académique du monde de la finance, a une approche des opérations du secteur financier plus réaliste que celle de la moyenne des gens. Il est favorable à de bons banquiers et à des gestionnaires d'actifs efficaces, mais il ne voit pas beaucoup des uns et des autres... Le secteur de la finance des économies occidentales est beaucoup trop développé. Au cours des trois dernières décennies, la financiarisation a créé des structures qui ont du mal à résister et qui réalisent des montants excessifs. Ce secteur consacre en outre trop peu d'attention à la recherche de nouvelles opportunités d'investissement et bien trop aux échanges d'actions. La régulation a créé davantage de nouveaux problèmes qu'elle n'a apporté des solutions à ceux déjà en cours.
Pourquoi ? À quoi sert la finance ? John Kay, avec sa double compétence pratique et académique du monde de la finance, a une approche des opérations du secteur financier plus réaliste que celle de la moyenne des gens. Il est favorable à de bons banquiers et à des gestionnaires d'actifs efficaces, mais il ne voit pas beaucoup des uns et des autres...
Grâce à un tour d'horizon stupéfiant et accusateur de la sphère financière qui a émergé des décombres de la crise financière de 2008, Kay ne recule pas dans ses critiques : nous avons besoin de ce que font Citigroup et Goldman Sachs, mais pas de ce que ces banques font pour elles-mêmes. Et beaucoup de choses qu'elles font n'ont pas du tout besoin d'être faites ! Le secteur financier doit se rappeler ses objectifs initiaux : gérer l'argent des individus au bénéfice des entreprises et des ménages. C'est une aberration quand quelques-uns de la fine fleur des esprits mathématiques et scientifiques ont pour tâche de concevoir des algorithmes dans le seul but d'exploiter les faiblesses des autres algorithmes pour réaliser les échanges informatisés de titres. Aller encore plus loin dans cette voie conduirait inexorablement à la ruine de nos sociétés.
In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, wealthy capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That link from personal wealth to tangible capital to hierarchical managerial and political authority continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century.
But products and production have dematerialised. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority.
John Kay''s incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation - and describes how we have come to ''love the product'' as we ''hate the producer.'' This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest working economists.
Whether overcoming geographical obstacles, winning decisive battles or meeting sales targets, history shows that oblique approaches are the most successful, especially in difficult terrain. This title applies the author's universal theory to topics ranging from international business to town planning and from football to managing forest fires.
The follies of finance have threatened the stability of the global economy, and the world of finance has become increasingly complex and sophisticated, but also greedy, cynical and self-interested. The Long and the Short of It provides a guide to the complexities of modern finance and explains how to put your finances in the only hands you can confidently trust - your own. In this new, wholly updated edition of The Long and the Short of It , you will learn everything you need to be your own investment manager. You will recognise your investment options, the institutions that try to sell them, and how to distinguish between fact and fiction in what companies say. You will discover the principles of sound investment and the research that supports these principles. Crucially, you will learn a practical investment strategy and how to implement it. Leading economist and hugely successful investor John Kay uses his academic credentials and practical experience to lay out the key principles of investment with characteristic clarity and dry humour. This is the only book about finance and investment anyone needs, and the one book they must have.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Or next week, next month or next year? Nobody can see into the future but we make our choices on the basis of what fortunes we think will befall us. How much should we pay into our pensions each month? Should we take regular exercise? Expand the business? Change our strategy? Enter a trade agreement? Take an expensive holiday next summer? These are universal questions. Throughout history we have developed a variety of ways of coping with the radical uncertainty that defines our lives. This incisive and eye-opening book draws in biography, history, maths, economics and philosophy to highlight the most successful - and most short-sighted - methods. Ultimately, the authors argue, the method of our age is misleading us, and giving us a false understanding of our power to make predictions, leading to many of the problems we experience today.
This accessible work explains the big questions of contemporary economics: how do markets work? Why do they work? Why are they better than alternative systems of organizing economics? And why, sometimes, do they fail catastrophically?
