Foundations of Finance [antikvár]

PREFACE This book was born in the classroom to provide students with a conceptual understanding of the financial decision-making process, rather than just an introduction to the tools and techniques of finance. It is all too easy for students to lose sight of the logic that drives finance and focus instead on memorizing formulas and procedures. As a result, students have trouble understanding the interrelationships among the topics covered. Moreover, later in life when problems encountered do not match the textbook presentation, students may find themselves unprepared to abstract from what they learned. To overcome this problem, the opening chapter presents nine principles or axioms of finance, which serve as a springboard for the chapters and topics that follow. In essence, the student is presented with a cohesive, interrelated perspective from which future problems can be approached. Teaching a one-semester introductory finance class while facing an ever-expanding discipline puts added pressures on the instructor. What to cover, what to omit, and how to do this while maintaining a cohesive presentation are inescapable questions. In dealing with these questions and tightening the focus of the text, we found it helpful to trim the content so that most of the material can be covered in one semester. The reduced content helps to maintain a focus on the underlying principles that drive finance rather than attempt to cover concepts and techniques that are better presented in an intermediate finance course. Again, our goal is to provide an enduring understanding of the basic tools and principles on which finance is based. With a focus on the big picture, we provide an introduction to financial decision making rooted in current financial theory and in the current state of world economic conditions. This focus is perhaps most apparent in the attention given to the capital markets and their influence on corporate financial decisions. What results is an introductory treatment of a discipline rather than the treatment of a series of isolated problems that face the financial manager. The goal of this text is not