Talk:Finance

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It's literally ridiculous to be using such abstruse terms as "the economics of contingent claims." If your aim is to educate, then use language that more than one half of one percent of your audience can understand. But your use of this term makes it abundantly clear that your aim is not to educate, but try to show how "smart" you are. And that's not a smart thing to do. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.113.188.66 (talk) 05:16, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


Contents

[edit] Term

There are several links to Finance and Financial and the term probably deserves some kind of separation from the theoritical Financial economics. The former redirection to Finance and investment makes no sense, especially since there is a separate entry for just Investment. There is alot of work that should be done within the finance field, both at writing articles and stubs, but also in tying loose ends togeather and trying to achieve at least some kind of workable structure. -- Mic 10:53 Apr 11, 2003 (UTC)

Mic, its gotten a lot better! :) But the list of finance topics included in this article, should be yanked out and a link should be put in its place to List of finance topics. I will do this after checking for differeences in the lists, unless anyone raises any serious objections. - Taxman 21:21, May 5, 2004 (UTC)
Good idea. I was getting tired of making duplicate entries, one for each list. A single list should do fine. You might also want to get rid of the list at mathematical finance. Its largely a duplicate of the main list. mydogategodshat 18:49, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
The redundant one in Finance is gone. I verified line-by-line that there were no links deleted that weren't in List of finance topics. As for mathematical finance, I think it is correct and standard practice for a subtopic to have a list of topics under that specific subtopic. What needs to be done though is to add any links from the mathematical finance article into List of finance topics that aren't already there. - Taxman 00:17, May 9, 2004 (UTC)

There is a fourth topic beyond commodities, stocks, bonds - currencies. It should be included for completeness. Hannes Tilgner


[edit] Links

Anyone know about these links? Do they belong here? Any comments?

To me they seem not very appropriate for the general finance article, maybe more appropriate for public finance or a separate article on financing education in the US, as they are all US related it appears. - Taxman 23:28, Jun 23, 2004 (UTC)
These links deal with very specific issues. I dont think we have articles on these topics yet. If you know anything about public school financing you could start an article and add the links there. mydogategodshat 02:53, 25 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Lead section

Wow, can you please discuss before making that radical of a change? I do not think it is better, and not very general or accurate. What about risk? Characterizing it as only the diff between income and expense is very oversimplified. - Taxman 14:19, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)

Someone put the page up on Wikipedia:Cleanup, which is what brought me here. I didn't make all of the changes I had in mind; I only got so far as debt before I realized I needed to go to bed. I didn't delete anything; I just added new material at the top.
Well thanks for coming, there was no cleanup tag put here, so we didn't know. We welcome your efforts to improve the article. It is not that great now, but it needs to be done so that it is as general as possible and ecompasses the whole field. - Taxman 20:29, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)
The page as it stands doesn't answer the question of what finance is for. Once you know finance is for, you can talk about how risk enters into pricing financial instruments, but for a general-purpose encyclopedia article, you need to start at a more elementary level. Anyway the previous version of the article was awfully academic. Financial economics is the study of finance; finance is not just the applied form of financial economics. The average person who buys a house doesn't think too much about the time value of money when they get a mortgage, for example. The financial markets existed before financial economics was around to explain them, etc. -- Walt Pohl 16:51, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
You're missing the big picture. It's not all about financial instruments. Risk must be considered as a much more fundamental issue than price of financial instruments. The issue is that finance covers a broad area and a lot of parts: capital decisions, debt and equity financing of corporations, risk management and insurance, personal finance, investment, and a lot of other areas. Now of course the beginning should be as accessable as possible to the lay person, but it should be correct and general too. What do you have in mind? - Taxman 20:29, Dec 14, 2004 (UTC)
Thinking about it some more, I probably should say more about risk than I originally was planning on. Why don't I just do it, and you can judge it then? -- Walt Pohl 05:03, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have removed "The simplest form of financial activity is debt." because it is obviously untrue. There are many forms of financial activity that are simpler than mortgages, bonds, and loans, for example, a cash purchase to name just one. I also doubt the value of the new material. If seems that the article is turning into a meandering description of select finance topics instead of being a concise introduction to finance in general terms. mydogategodshat 18:12, 14 Dec 2004 (UTC)
By your definition, what doesn't count as finance? Barter? -- Walt Pohl 05:03, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I am not defining finance. The removed statement is about "financial activities" which is much broader than finance. Even if we changed the statement to read "In finance, the simplest form of activity is debt.", I still have doubts about it. I think that it can be argued that areas of working capital management are simpler than debt financing. Try floating a bond issue and by time you've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal, accounting, and brokerage fees you will be longing for the simplicity of cash flow budgeting. At any rate, its probably unnecessary to claim that one area of finance is the simplest. mydogategodshat 05:44, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
If we decide to start adding select finance topics to this article, we have to decide which ones. Probably the most general finance topic is the time value of money, discounting, NPV, ect. These concepts are used in all of finance. mydogategodshat 02:49, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Maybe, but this is still a rather academic view of finance. Plenty of individuals or businesses make financial decisions without using anything like NPV (even though they should). -- Walt Pohl 05:03, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
You seem to have an anti-academic predisposition. I see no problem with including these core finance topics. Your statement that plenty of individual or businesses make financial decisions without using these core finance techniques is quite true. But you have to ask, Is it finance. I would argue that making a financial decision is not the same as finance. Buying a chocolate bar is a financial decision: It is not finance. Using your "anti-academic" definition, how do you differentiate finance from management accounting or managerial economics. mydogategodshat 06:37, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)


[edit] The financial economics section

I am not comfortable with the financial economics section as it currently reads. It basicly claims that financial economics consists of asset valuation, financial markets, financial institutions, and financial instruments. The problem is not that these arn't part of financial economics. They are. The problems is that they are also part of finance proper. I have dug up my old notes from financial economics and from finance courses annd there is considerable overlap in topics. However there is a difference in the way they are presented. Financial economics gets to these topics by studying the role of money in the economy, at the micro level (risk, portfolio analysis, etc.) and also at the macro level (financial flows, demand for money, deposit multiplier, etc.). Finance proper gets to them from a more practical angle, from the perspective of the user of the financial assets, and from the decisions that an individual or organization is about to make. Any comments? mydogategodshat 22:10, 12 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Portal

There is a new portal. See Wikipedia:Wikiportal/Business, Economics, Finance. Maurreen 03:45, 18 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Improvement Drive

The article Grameen Bank is currently nominated to be improved on Wikipedia:This week's improvement drive. If you want to support the article, you can vote for it there.--Fenice 09:05, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] error : explanation of share

From the section "Examples of some basic financial concepts" :

<quote> The stock gives whoever owns it part ownership in that company. If you buy one share of XYZ Inc, and they have 100 shares available, you are 1/100 owner of that company. You own 1/100 of anything on the asset side of the balance sheet. <unqoute>

Actually,

share holder's equity = assets - liabilities.

Therefore the last sentence should be :

You own 1/100 of the net difference between assets and liabilities on the balance sheet.

[edit] Interproject cooperation - finance, business, economics

The main article on management links to Financial Management, which links directly here, with no note of it being redirected. This article says that Financial Management is historical accounting, not managing financial resources. How do we solve this? --SueHay 14:59, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Finance Picture

Is it not slightly America-centric to have a Wall Street sign? Is there not some symbol slightly more universal? 89.213.1.85 16:56, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

How about a red shield? That's pervasive globally though they're good at hiding it.

--76.83.249.234 07:07, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup tag

Normally I hesitate to put such tags on articles, but I thought it important to tag this one. This is a very important topic, but much of the content consists of bullet points, almost as if it was taken from a Powerpoint presentation! Could someone knowledgeable in this area please review this material and fill it out with prose? An encyclopedia should have more than a series of short lists. Thanks, Walkerma 02:17, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

I also think that the number of tiny sections is excessive - this is part of the same "pseudo-Powerpoint" problem. If headings like Disadvantages of credit trade need to be there (though I'm unconvinced!) they should be written as ;Disadvantages of credit trade, which will appear as Disadvantages of credit trade. Walkerma 02:26, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Concur that the article is in sorry state at the moment. The middle third of the article does indeed seem to be a simple outline which needs to either be fleshed out or removed. I'll be happy to start a purging this weekend; and I'll try to locate cites for the remaining material. Kuru talk 03:23, 11 October 2007 (UTC)