Business cycles : history, theory and investment reality / Lars Tvede.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Tvede, Lars, 1957-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Business cycles.

Economics--History.

Economics.

History.

Economists.

Physical Description:

xv, 484 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

Third edition.

Place of Publication:

Chichester, England ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, [2006]

Summary:

During our lifetime we all experience any number of economic booms and crisis where people oscillate from boundless optimism to deep despair. So how can we better understand and predict these cycles? To answer these questions Lars Tvede takes us through a story that moves back in time to the Scottish gambler and financial genius, John Law, and then on to the distracted Adam Smith, the stockbroker Ricardo, the investment banker Thornton, the extrovert Schumpeter, the speculator Gould and many others to trace the theory and reality of business cycles, as it has evolved over 300 years. Gradually we reach the computer jugglers of the modern day who, with giant networks of equations, try to solve the same questions that have attracted the attention of classical economists throughout the centuries.

Lars Treve concludes this historical journey with a summary of what the core of the problem is and how modern understanding of business cycles can be used to forecast economic fluctuations. The final sections of the book provide detailed studies and explanations of how stocks, bonds, hedge funds, private equity funds, gold, diamonds, exchange rates, real estate, commodities, art and collectibles, and numerous sub-sectors of some of these markets each behave over different categories of business cycles.

Contents:

Part I The Discovery of Business Cycles 1

1 Gambling Man 3

2 Cash Payment 19

3 The Dream Team of Money 27

4 The Napoleon of Finance 47

5 Jay and the Phantom Gold 57

6 Seven Pioneers 67

Part II The First Business Cycle Theories 81

7 The Golden Era 83

8 The Archeologists 101

9 Fisher and Babson 107

10 Keynes and the Austrians 117

11 The Great Depression 127

12 Lover, Horseman, Economist 141

13 The Problem with Money 153

Part III A Hidden World 165

14 The Simulators 167

15 Brains of Steel 189

16 Fat Tails and All That 199

17 Monkey See, Monkey Do 213

18 Dot Bomb 231

Part IV The Essence 239

19 The State of the Art 241

20 Three Questions 251

21 The Five Main Drivers of Cycles 257

22 The Ten Challenges of Central Banking 271

Part V Business Cycles and Asset Prices 305

23 The Mother of All Cycles: Property 307

24 When Art was In 333

25 All That Glitters 349

26 What Things are Made of: Commodities 367

27 Bonds, Stocks and Funds 379

28 The World's Biggest Market: Foreign Exchange 391

29 Business Cycles and Market Rotation 399

Afterword: The Beat of the Heart 427

Appendix 1 List of Important Events in Business Cycle Theory 423

Appendix 2 List of the Largest Financial Crises in History 429.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [449]-469) and index.

ISBN:

0470018062

OCLC:

64084836

Publisher Number:

9780470018064 (hbk.)