Author Archive
Establishing an Emergency Savings Fund
Emergency savings accounts are crucial to a successful personal finance plan. Before you ever pay off your debt or look to invest, you should have a sizeable savings account dedicated to be used at a moment’s notice for an emergency. You never know when you will need to put a down payment on a new [...]
Correlation
Correlation can be loosely defined as the mutual relation between two or more variables. This is captured in a quantitative way in statistics by a measure defined as the correlation coefficient, usually represented by the letter “r ”. The linear correlation coefficient is used to examine whether there is any evidence of a linear relationship [...]
Private property
Private owners have an incentive to lower the chance that their property will cause damage to the property of others. Private ownership links responsibility with the right of control. Private owners can be held accountable for damage done to others through the misuse of their property. A car owner has a right to drive his [...]
Private owners
Private owners have an incentive to conserve for the future-particularly if the property is expected to increase in value. People have a much stronger incentive to conserve privately owned property than they do commonly owned property. For example, when Steven was in college, the general rule among his roommates was that any food or drink [...]
Tradable and Non-Tradable Goods
There is a further point, which is that clear differentiation has to be made between tradable and non-tradable goods. PPP may not hold for non-tradable goods such as services. The dry world of economics is frequently best explained through example and anecdote. Thus, a haircut might be cheaper in New York than London (most things [...]
Reasons for “Misalignments”
Exchange rates which do not reflect the PPP value are said to be “misaligned” and it is assumed therefore that they have to revert towards PPP. Such misalignments are seen as being caused by temporary distortions, either to the price of the good or the exchange rate, which should quickly be eliminated by a rational, [...]
DEVELOPMENTS IN THE FINANCE SECTOR
Risk is an everyday hazard that faces banks, funds and insurers. It can usually be mitigated, but it is rarely eliminated completely. There are some cases where a positive “hazard” is a very good thing to have – each business faces a risk or probability of making profits. Millions of people buy lottery tickets each [...]
Forensic accounting
Forensic accounting is a potentially rich source of value-added in financial environments. Part of forensic accountancy is an art, part science and the rest is detective work. There are three ways in which it can provide a valuable service in organisations:
1. Investigate a case post facto to see where a loss has occurred within the [...]
RISK COUNTERMEASURES
Once detecting operational risk conditions is in existence, we can think about deploying risk countermeasures. Could any CEO shark engineer himself some huge pay-off based on undisclosed benchmarks?
Frankly, yes and no. Yes, they could get away with it easily in the old days. General Motors was a classic example where the head of a modern [...]
General Observations
The stock market is likely to be on firmer footing when strength in the daily- and, weekly-based advance-decline lines confirm strength in the various indices that reflect different sectors of the stock market. In other words, new highs in indice such as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index should be confirmed by new highs in [...]