Where Credit is Due

Where Credit is Due

Author: Gregory Smith

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-12-01

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 019764421X

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Borrowing is a crucial source of financing for governments all over the world. If they get it wrong, then debt crises can bring progress to a halt. But if it's done right, investment happens and conditions improve. African countries are seeking calmer capital, to raise living standards and give their economies a competitive edge. The African debt landscape has changed radically in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Since the clean slate of extensive debt relief, states have sought new borrowing opportunities from international capital markets and emerging global powers like China. The new debt composition has increased risk, exacerbated by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic: richer countries borrowed at rock-bottom interest rates, while Africa faced an expensive jump in indebtedness. The escalating debt burden has provoked calls by the G20 for suspension of debt payments. But Africa's debt today is highly complex, and owed to a wider range of lenders. A new approach is needed, and could turn crisis into opportunity. Urgent action by both lenders and borrowers can reduce risk, while carefully preserving market access; and smart deployment of private finance can provide the scale of investment needed to achieve development goals and tackle the climate emergency.


Credit Where It's Due

Credit Where It's Due

Author: Frederick F. Wherry

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 2019-04-26

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 1610448847

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An estimated 45 million adults in the U.S. lack a credit score at time when credit invisibility can reduce one’s ability to rent a home, find employment, or secure a mortgage or loan. As a result, individuals without credit—who are disproportionately African American and Latino—often lead separate and unequal financial lives. Yet, as sociologists and public policy experts Frederick Wherry, Kristin Seefeldt, and Anthony Alvarez argue, many people who are not recognized within the financial system engage in behaviors that indicate their credit worthiness. How might institutions acknowledge these practices and help these people emerge from the financial shadows? In Credit Where It’s Due, the authors evaluate an innovative model of credit-building and advocate for a new understanding of financial citizenship, or participation in a financial system that fosters social belonging, dignity, and respect. Wherry, Seefeldt, and Alvarez tell the story of the Mission Asset Fund, a San Francisco-based organization that assists mostly low- and moderate-income people of color with building credit. The Mission Asset Fund facilitates zero-interest lending circles, which have been practiced by generations of immigrants, but have gone largely unrecognized by mainstream financial institutions. Participants decide how the circles are run and how they will use their loans, and the organization reports their clients’ lending activity to credit bureaus. As the authors show, this system not only helps clients build credit, but also allows them to manage debt with dignity, have some say in the creation of financial products, and reaffirm their sense of social membership. The authors delve into the history of racial wealth inequality in the U.S. to show that for many black and Latino households, credit invisibility is not simply a matter of individual choices or inadequate financial education. Rather, financial marginalization is the result of historical policies that enabled predatory lending, discriminatory banking and housing practices, and the rollback of regulatory protections for first-time homeowners. To rectify these inequalities, the authors propose common sense regulations to protect consumers from abuse alongside new initiatives that provide seed capital for every child, create affordable short-term loans, and ensure that financial institutions treat low- and moderate-income clients with equal respect. By situating the successes of the Mission Asset Fund in the larger history of credit and debt, Credit Where It’s Due shows how to prioritize financial citizenship for all.


Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Author: Virginia Lee Burton

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2010-06-28

Total Pages: 51

ISBN-13: 0547350570

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A modern classic that no child should miss. Since it was first published in 1939, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel has delighted generations of children. Mike and his trusty steam shovel, Mary Anne, dig deep canals for boats to travel through, cut mountain passes for trains, and hollow out cellars for city skyscrapers -- the very symbol of industrial America. But with progress come new machines, and soon the inseparable duo are out of work. Mike believes that Mary Anne can dig as much in a day as one hundred men can dig in a week, and the two have one last chance to prove it and save Mary Anne from the scrap heap. What happens next in the small town of Popperville is a testament to their friendship, and to old-fashioned hard work and ingenuity.


Credit and Collections

Credit and Collections

Author: Michelle Dunn

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2013-02-14

Total Pages: 99

ISBN-13: 1443846287

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The credit crisis, high fuel costs, job losses, bankruptcies, foreclosures and the failing economy are all contributing to factories closing, job loss and business owners going out of business because they can’t get paid. Learn how to take specific steps and use positive action to streamline and maximize your credit management policies. This book, Credit and Collections: A Business Perspective, is for businesses that have past due customers and need help collecting from them. It is for businesses who want to check their customer’s credit to limit credit risk and avoid bad debt. Things that have worked in the past are no longer working; everybody’s credit has changed, everyone’s job situation has changed, people have lost their homes due to the economy or weather and the flow of our business cash has taken a hit. Credit and Collections: A Business Perspective will help anyone who has customers that owe them money and will give them specific steps and actions they can take to make effective collection calls that work. This book will show you how to check a customer’s credit and determine their credit worthiness before you extend credit to someone who may not be able to pay you. With this book you can protect your business and your bottom line by protecting your most important asset, your cash flow.


Casualties of Credit

Casualties of Credit

Author: Carl Wennerlind

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0674062663

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Modern credit, developed during the financial revolution of 1620–1720, laid the foundation for England’s political, military, and economic dominance in the eighteenth century. Possessed of a generally circulating credit currency, a modern national debt, and sophisticated financial markets, England developed a fiscal–military state that instilled fear in its foes and facilitated the first industrial revolution. Yet a number of casualties followed in the wake of this new system of credit. Not only was it precarious and prone to accidents, but it depended on trust, public opinion, and ultimately violence. Carl Wennerlind reconstructs the intellectual context within which the financial revolution was conceived. He traces how the discourse on credit evolved and responded to the Glorious Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the founding of the Bank of England, the Great Recoinage, armed conflicts with Louis XIV, the Whig–Tory party wars, the formation of the public sphere, and England’s expanded role in the slave trade. Debates about credit engaged some of London’s most prominent turn-of-the-century intellectuals, including Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jonathan Swift and Christopher Wren. Wennerlind guides us through these conversations, toward an understanding of how contemporaries viewed the precariousness of credit and the role of violence—war, enslavement, and executions—in the safeguarding of trust.


Higher Ambition

Higher Ambition

Author: Michael Beer

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2011-08-23

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1422142329

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Meeting the new standard for leadership. Higher Ambition is required reading for every leader who refuses to compromise between people and performance. Choosing one or the other may have worked in the past, but it won’t work now. As global competition stiffens and businesses face increased public scrutiny and renewed government regulation, leaders must win on all fronts—with their people, their customers, their communities, and their shareholders. In short, they must deliver superior economic and social value. Brimming with powerful stories and thoughtful advice from CEOs themselves, Higher Ambition equips leaders with the practical insights they need to meet this new and higher standard. The authors, an international team of experts from leading business schools and consultancies, offer a unique view into the minds of some of the most successful and insightful leaders of our time: CEOs from vanguard companies around the world that have demonstrated the distinctive ability to do good while also doing well. These organizations are as diverse as Standard Chartered Bank, Infosys, Volvo, Cummins, IKEA, the Tata Group, and Campbell’s Soup. Readers will learn the principles and practices these pioneering leaders are using to: • Build enduring enterprises that simultaneously solve for people and profits • Forge winning strategies that leverage their companies’ unique cultural and human capabilities • Dramatically raise the aspirations and ambitions of their people • Energize and align their diverse global firms • Relentlessly upgrade leadership capabilities throughout their organizations Drawing on the author team’s extensive research and in-depth interviews with successful leaders from around the globe, this provocative new book is poised to become a management classic in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Built to Last.


Engineering Research Methodology

Engineering Research Methodology

Author: Dipankar Deb

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-14

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 9811329478

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The book covers all the important aspects of research methodology, and addresses the specific requirements of engineering students, such as methods and tools, in detail. It also discusses effective research in engineering today, which requires the ability to undertake literature reviews utilizing different online databases, to attribute credit for any prior work mentioned, to respect intellectual property rights while simultaneously maintaining ethics in research, and much more. Further, the book also considers soft skills like research management and planning, dealing with criticism in research and presentation skills, which are all equally important and need to include in research methodology education. Lastly, it provides the technical knowhow needed to file patents in academia, an important area that is often ignored in research methodology books. The book is a particularly valuable resource for PhD students in India and South East Asia, as research methodology is a part of their coursework.


Credit Models and the Crisis

Credit Models and the Crisis

Author: Damiano Brigo

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-10-28

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0470971436

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The recent financial crisis has highlighted the need for better valuation models and risk management procedures, better understanding of structured products, and has called into question the actions of many financial institutions. It has become commonplace to blame the inadequacy of credit risk models, claiming that the crisis was due to sophisticated and obscure products being traded, but practitioners have for a long time been aware of the dangers and limitations of credit models. It would seem that a lack of understanding of these models is the root cause of their failures but until now little analysis had been published on the subject and, when published, it had gained very limited attention. Credit Models and the Crisis is a succinct but technical analysis of the key aspects of the credit derivatives modeling problems, tracing the development (and flaws) of new quantitative methods for credit derivatives and CDOs up to and through the credit crisis. Responding to the immediate need for clarity in the market and academic research environments, this book follows the development of credit derivatives and CDOs at a technical level, analyzing the impact, strengths and weaknesses of methods ranging from the introduction of the Gaussian Copula model and the related implied correlations to the introduction of arbitrage-free dynamic loss models capable of calibrating all the tranches for all the maturities at the same time. It also illustrates the implied copula, a method that can consistently account for CDOs with different attachment and detachment points but not for different maturities, and explains why the Gaussian Copula model is still used in its base correlation formulation. The book reports both alarming pre-crisis research and market examples, as well as commentary through history, using data up to the end of 2009, making it an important addition to modern derivatives literature. With banks and regulators struggling to fully analyze at a technical level, many of the flaws in modern financial models, it will be indispensable for quantitative practitioners and academics who want to develop stable and functional models in the future.


The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny

The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny

Author: Daisy Dunn

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2019-12-10

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1631496409

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“A wonderfully rich, witty, insightful, and wide-ranging portrait of the two Plinys and their world.”—Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live When Pliny the Elder perished at Stabiae during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, he left behind an enormous compendium of knowledge, his thirty-seven-volume Natural History, and a teenaged nephew who revered him as a father. Grieving his loss, Pliny the Younger inherited the Elder’s notebooks—filled with pearls of wisdom—and his legacy. At its heart, The Shadow of Vesuvius is a literary biography of the younger man, who would grow up to become a lawyer, senator, poet, collector of villas, and chronicler of the Roman Empire from the dire days of terror under Emperor Domitian to the gentler times of Emperor Trajan. A biography that will appeal to lovers of Mary Beard books, it is also a moving narrative about the profound influence of a father figure on his adopted son. Interweaving the younger Pliny’s Letters with extracts from the Elder’s Natural History, Daisy Dunn paints a vivid, compellingly readable portrait of two of antiquity’s greatest minds.