Investment Banking [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION When the authors began their careers in finance, they prepared in a far simpler era of lower volatility, fewer options for investors and borrowers, and far less international activity. The post-World War II financial world was born out of a stable but highly compartmentalized framework created by the governments of a dozen countries in the aftermath of depression and war. Financial intermediaries with designations such as investment banks, merchant banks, clearing banks, commercial banks, city banks, stockbrokers, securities dealers, long-term credit banks, universal banks, discount houses, and private banks went about their appointed functions, generally competing within the confines of a single national capital market. However, two powerful forces, the offspring of post-World War II politics and the technology of a shrinking world, breached these relatively closed financial systems: Internationalization, which was seen as linking a plurality of friendly nations through free trade and cultural exchange, both as a substitute for old imperial rivalries and Soviet state socialism. This new economic order drew on the principle of comparative advantage for logic and saw trade rather than aid as an objective. One of its further manifestations was the European Economic Community, which, although a trading block, was relatively liberal, outward looking, and open to regular additions to its membership. Deregulation, a trend that began gradually in a spirit of regulatory relaxation and later accelerated out of a rebirth of free enterprise economics. Deregulation had its roots in politics as well as economics and particularly in the perception that an unfettered private sector could improve upon rigorous systems of governmental control. Although gradual and regularly redirected, the cumulative effect of these changes on the financing industry has been dramatic. For purposes of this volume, we have defined the financing industry to include managing public securities issues, corporate financial advisory and mergers-and-acquisitions services, and brokerage and market making in bonds and shares. We often refer to these activities collectively as investment banking and to the firms as vendors of investment banking services. Within roughly the past two decades.