Finance is often defined simply as the management of money or funds management.
Finance is conceptualized, structured, and regulated by a complex system of power relations within political economies across state and global markets. Finance is both art (e.g. product development) and science (e.g. measurement), although these activities increasingly converge through the intense technical and institutional focus on measuring and hedging risk-return relationships that underlie shareholder value. Networks of financial businesses exist to create, negotiate, market, and trade in evermore-complex financial products and services for their own as well as their clients’ accounts. Financial performance measures assess the efficiency and profitability of investments, the safety of debtors’ claims against assets, and the likelihood that derivative instruments will protect investors against a variety of market risks.
The financial system consists of public and private interests and the markets that serve them. It provides capital from individual and institutional investors who transfer money directly and through intermediaries (e.g. banks, insurance companies, brokerage and fund management firms) to other individuals, firms, and governments that acquire resources and transact business. With the expectation of reaping profits, investors fund credit in the forms of debt capital (e.g. corporate and government notes and bonds, mortgage securities and other credit instruments), equity capital (e.g. listed and unlisted company shares), and the derivative products of a wide variety of capital investments including debt and equity securities, property, commodities, and insurance products. Although closely related, the disciplines of economics and finance are distinctive.
The economy is a social institution that organizes a society’s production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services, all of which must be financed. Economists make a number of abstract assumptions for purposes of their analyses and predictions. They generally regard financial markets that function for the financial system as an efficient mechanism. In practice, however, emerging research is demonstrating that such assumptions are unreliable. Instead, financial markets are subject to human error and emotion. New research discloses the mischaracterization of investment safety and measures of financial products and markets so complex that their effects, especially under conditions of uncertainty, are impossible to predict. The study of finance is subsumed under economics as finance economics, but the scope, speed, power relations and practices of the financial system can uplift or cripple whole economies and the well-being of households, businesses and governing bodies within them—sometimes in a single day.
Loans have become increasingly packaged for resale, meaning that an investor buys the loan (debt) from a bank or directly from a corporation. Bonds are debt instruments sold to investors for organizations such as companies, governments or charities. The investor can then hold the debt and collect the interest or sell the debt on a secondary market. Banks are the main facilitators of funding through the provision of credit, although private equity, mutual funds, hedge funds, and other organizations have become important as they invest in various forms of debt. Financial assets, known as investments, are financially managed with careful attention to financial risk management to control financial risk. Financial instruments allow many forms of securitized assets to be traded on securities exchanges such as stock exchanges, including debt such as bonds as well as equity in publicly traded corporations.
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