Financial Markets Work

The definitive guide to why different financial markets exist and how they operate. This edition brings the listener right up to speed with the latest developments in financial instruments and provides a clear and incisive guide to this complex world that even those who work in it often find hard to understand. With chapters on the markets that deal with money, foreign exchange, equities, bonds, commodities, financial futures, options and other derivatives.

Life in the Financial Markets - How They Really Work and Why They Matter to You offers the financial services professional, and anyone interested in knowing more about the profession, an entertaining and comprehensive analysis of the financial markets and the financial services industry.

You want to create a great financial future for yourself, but life gets in the way and there’s always some excuse to delay investing. You hear about recessions, bull markets, or wild social media-fueled rallies; get intimidated; and end up avoiding the markets all together.

Like Shakespeare's Shylock, speculators, hedge fund managers, and "junk bond" dealers are criticized as manipulators of money who create no real value. But is this true? Or do financiers perform a valuable function in the economy? In this essay, Stephen Hicks challenges the conventional view of financiers and financial markets -- that those who work in them are zero-sum parasites upon the physical labor and that they make merely "paper profits." In contrast to the conventional view, Hicks explains the great value that financial markets add to an economy and the nature of the intellectual ...