Book Description
Intentionally provocative, Alban founder and former president Loren Mead's dynamic work sets out dramatic and compelling challenges for today's churches. Mead chose the word "meltdown"-a strong term, indeed-very carefully and consciously. His clarion call urges congregations to direct attention to their dwindling financial resources and their unreliable fiscal practices, and to take major action now-or face disaster in the future. Mead addresses changing church giving patterns; the inconsistent ways congregations keep financial records; the lack of coordinated short- and long-range planning; the need for knowledge of sound financial techniques such as accounting for inflation; an over-reliance on "restructuring" to fix problems; and lack of defensive planning for operational costs.
Customer Reviews:
A Voice That Must Be Heard.......2002-07-13
"Financial Meltdown in the Mainline?" was written about 10 years ago. Loren Mead, founder of the Alban Institute, applies more than 20 years of working with churches across denominations to this book. He claims that the issue of church finance came up in the writing of each of his previous books, but that he did not directly address the issue in any of them. He directly address church finances in this book. More than that, he says what needs to be said without sugarcoating the truth.
He looks at the financial crisis present in every denomination - churches, denominations, seminaries are all suffering. The cause - Christians are not giving money as they should, nor are Christian leaders speaking accurately about the depth of the crisis. Mead backs these claims up with hard data.
I must admit, the first six chapters were pretty depressing. Mead confirmed many of the suspicions I developed during my first two years serving as a church administrator.
Underlying the financial crisis, Mead claims, is a spiritual crisis. In short, Christians are serving money rather than God. And Christian ministers are serving people rather than God (i.e., they do not speak the truth for fear of the reaction of their congregation).
Mead is a strong advocate of endowments in the face of this financial crisis. He offers practical guidelines for endowment management.
Every Christian minister and lay person should read this book. Perhaps the strength with which Mead paints the picture will bring the truth to light in a way that will draw out godly giving from all Christians.
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Money Meltdown
Judy Shelton
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
 International
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Gold: The Once and Future Money
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The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
ASIN: 0684863944 |
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MONEY MELTDOWN
Judy Shelton
Manufacturer: Free Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OA06XC |
Book Description
Franchises are today's hottest entrepreneurial opportunity - provided you know what you're doing. This issue-by-issue crash course shows franchisees how to ask the right questions, avoid the common pitfalls, and make an optimal purchase - from choosing a location and lining up a loan to navigating the legal mazes.
Customer Reviews:
simply fantastic.............2006-08-17
As prospective franchise purchasers, my wife and I highly recommend this book. It is well balanced, presenting the path from initial consideration, analyzing the data including the daunting UFOC, and a list of resources that are helpful. It is not biased towards the viewpoints of franchisers, which is one of the downfalls of the Dave Thomas book which is otherwise a good companion to this text.
It is simultaneously a good and quick read, but is also full of information. I hope that anyone interested in the franchise route will read this and learn from it.
Much better than the other books on franchising.......2004-11-17
I found this book very informative on the subject of franchising. It gives you a great deal of information to consider and look for. As for the questions it raises I went to the authors website and that helped somewhat but I still had questions that I needed to get answered so I found and expert to help me.
A little investigation, and Google, led me to George Knauf. I wanted to use everything available to me and the book was a good start, but don't dicsount the benefit of some good and experienced advice. The book was worth the investment and the advice was somehow free, how can you beat that?
AMAZING!.......2002-11-13
I started off with no knowledge of the franchising industry..until this book. Tips and Traps takes you through the whole franchise process. After devouring this book ( I am already on my fourth reading!), I have become a franchisee in an expanding food franchise! I would like to find Mary E Tomazack and shake her hand...she changed my life!
Very informative on questions about Franchising.......1999-10-28
Very informative and interesting on the Franchising Business
Tips and Traps When buying a Franchise is a Must Read!.......1999-05-08
The ABC's of franchising are all in Mary Tomzack's book Tips and Traps When Buying a Franchise. Clearly covered and simply explained are everything you want to and need to know about franchising. This book should be a must read for business majors and anyone interested in franchising. This book is worth the price of the book.
Book Description
Publishing the Nonprofit Annual Report offers your nonprofit organization hands-on guidance to help you create an annual report that goes beyond fulfilling your financial reporting responsibilities and instead becomes a valuable communications, marketing, and image-building tool. Written by Caroline Taylor--a consultant who has more than twenty years of experience producing award-winning annual reports--this essential guide takes you through the report-writing cycle from start to finish. Step by step, she shows you how to create a plan, fit the report process into the overall schedule, assign tasks, develop the executive message, work with designers to integrate visual elements, and get the report printed on time and within budget.
Customer Reviews:
One of the most important books of our time.......1999-11-21
In "The Trap," Goldsmith points out the moral bankruptcy of the neo-right's "every man for himself" (particularly men, particularly white and wealthy) world-view, and also provides a vision for the future of compassionate *and* workable politics, economics, and community. Like Robert Theobald's "Reworking Success," or Thom Hartmann's "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" (all highly recommended and available on amazon.com), Goldsmith courageously confronts us with the problems we face and offers realistic solutions. Highly recommended!
Unsupported Silliness.......1999-10-31
It is indeed a sign of divine grace that Goldsmith's book was ever published; of course, had he not been a millionaire, this tract would never have been given a second look. The fatuity of the economic arguments presented on "The Trap" are nothing short of amazing; indeed, any undergraduate economics student could probably expose most of them. One particularly egregious example: Goldsmith's argument that foreign competition is unfair and harmful when beased on low wages, i.e., that companies should not be forced to compete against less efficient foreign economies that pay lower wages. Of course, David Ricardo thoroughly smashed this argument in 1817 when he elaborated the concept of comparative advantage -- but Goldsmith nevertheless resurrects protectionist drivel, 180 years later. This book is nothing but an uninsightful, grossly fallacious, hackneyed polemic by a writer that should know better.
A must read for subcribers to 'conventonal wisdom'.......1997-04-07
An excellent format where conventional wisdom on many of our society's complex problems and their popular solutions are de-bunked by an eloquent criti
Book Description
This encyclopedic guide to the equipment of the trappers and fur traders who opened the Old West is a unique reference work that can be classified either as history or as archaeology. It describes and discusses hundreds of iron artifacts—rifles, shotguns, hatchets, axes, knives, traps, and miscellaneous tools—used by the mountain men from the early 1800s to the mid 1840s.
Thirty years' research went into the writing of this book. In addition to examining the diaries and letters of the trappers themselves, and the business records of fur-trading companies, the author also tracked down the records and catalogs of the gunsmiths, ironmongers, and other manufacturers who supplied the early traders. He observed most of the surviving artifacts, identified their makers, and traced the evolution of the styles and designs of the weapons and tools, usually from European origins.
Illustrated with over 400 drawings, the book begins with a useful background history of the western fur trade. Among the sections that will appeal to special groups of readers are chapters on firearms and blacksmithing and an appendix on the “Historic Objects as Sources of History.”
Customer Reviews:
Buy with confidence!!!!.......2007-05-07
Russell has done exhaustive work on this subject and this book is a must have for anyone interested in the Mountain Men and fur trade era.
Great resource.......2004-12-16
Great resource for study of mountain men, early contact between Indians and whites. Useful in the study of metal artifacts of the fur trade, axes, traps, spearpoints, arrowheads, harpoons, knives and daggers, highly recommended.
Awesome Resource and Read.......2002-12-08
I used this book for my graduate seminar paper on the Fur Trade. I loved all the information it gave about the tools of the Mountain Men. Don't let the fact that I'm in grad school scare off the read though. My father-in-law wants a copy now and he only has an Associates and is a down home kind of guy. It's definitely not just for students. This is an absolutely wonderful book.
Valuable resource.......2000-05-11
This book is chucked full of great fur trade information. It has many, many line drawings and could only be better with a collection of photos of actual artifacts.
If you are a fan of the Rocky Mountain fur trade era of the early 19th century like I am, you will find this book to be a valuable resource.
Good line drawings. Authentic information........1996-11-27
Discussion of manufacture, use and history of the tools
of the mountain man's trade. Many line drawing illustrations
supported by solid text. Reasonably complete and accurate
source of information.
Average customer rating:
- The most important book on Economics since General Theory
- America's Policy Trap
- Not scholarly enuf; too alarmist; conspiracy minded?
- Manufactured Problems
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Japan's Policy Trap: Dollars, Deflation, and the Crisis of Japanese Finance
Akio Mikuni , and
R. Taggart Murphy
Manufacturer: Brookings Institution Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Economic Policy & Development
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ASIN: 0815702221 |
Book Description
Until quite recently, the Japanese inspired a kind of puzzled awe. They had pulled themselves together from the ruin of war, built at breakneck speed a formidable array of export champions, and emerged as the world's number-two economy and largest net creditor nation. And they did it by flouting every rule of economic orthodoxy.
But today only the puzzlement remains—at Japan's inability to arrest its economic decline, at its festering banking crisis, and at the dithering of its policymakers. Why can't the Japanese government find the political will to fix the country's problems? Japan's Policy Trap offers a provocative new analysis of the country's protracted economic stagnation.
Japanese insider Akio Mikuni and long-term Japan resident R. Taggart Murphy contend that the country has landed in a policy trap that defies easy solution. The authors, who have together spent decades at the heart of Japanese finance, expose the deep-rooted political arrangements that have distorted Japan's monetary policy in a deflationary direction.
They link Japan's economic difficulties to the Achilles' heel of the U.S. economy: the U.S. trade and current accounts deficits. For the last twenty years, Japan's dollar-denominated trade surplus has outstripped official reserves and currency in circulation. These huge accumulated surpluses have long exercised a growing and perverse influence on monetary policy, forcing Japan's authorities to support a build-up of deflationary dollars.
Mikuni and Murphy trace the origins of Japan's policy trap far back into history, in the measures taken by Japan's officials to preserve their economic independence in what they saw as a hostile world. Mobilizing every resource to accumulate precious dollars, the authorities eventually found themselves coping with a hoard they could neither use nor exchange. To counteract the deflationary impact, Japanese authorities resorted to the creation of yen liabilities unrelated to production via the largest financial bubble in history. The bursting of that bubble was followed by massive public works spending that has resulted in an explosion in public sector debt.
Japan's Policy Trap points to the likelihood that Japan will run out of ways to support its vast pile of dollar claims. Should the day come when those claims can no longer be supported, the world could see a horrific deflationary spiral in Japan, a crash in the global value of the dollar, or both. The effects would reach far beyond Japan's borders. Mikuni and Murphy suggest that a reduction in Japan's surplus must be accompanied by a reduction in deficits somewhere else—most obviously through far-reaching shifts in the American economy.
Customer Reviews:
The most important book on Economics since General Theory.......2004-05-10
This is a brilliant book on economics. Its contribution to economics is no less significant than Keynsian General Theory.
Keynes demonstrated how investment and savings could balance at suboptimal level of economic activity.
Keynes paid little attention to balance of payments constraint(although he did analyze it thouroughly in Consequences of Peace). Balance of payments situation was not explored in his Generel Theory, since it would have brough the whole theory off track.
Contemporary economic theory is best expressed by IMF officials in that current account surplus is not a grave concern for any given country. Structural account surplus is usually thought of as an additional powerful stimulus for a country to grow quicker than its defecit prone neighbours.
Modern economic thinking takes as given that authorities have fiscal and monetary tools to bring the country to full employment. The only problem is to coincide full employment with balance of payment constraints ie long term current account balance coincing with full employment income.
Akio Mikuni and Taggart Murphy demonstrate how a current account surplus can coincide with suboptimal economic growth. They also demonstrate how a country under certain conditions, may lack fiscal and monetary means to bring about full employement under conditions where current account is positive at full employment.
Before reading this book, I never thought such situation might be possible. I recomend this book to anyone seriously interested in economics.
PS I would be very interested in learning more about economic situaiton of European Union. Suboptimal economic performance of EU is just as contradictory to all that modern economic thinking has to offer.
America's Policy Trap.......2003-06-27
Japan has $400 billion in a New York bank. Whose problem is that? People like me wrote checks for Toyotas etc which never got to Japan. If your checkbook shows $400 oustanding is that good or bad? Brookings - a Washington think-tank hired two banker types to solve the puzzle; their book is a bomb. "The Yen is both too strong and too weak."
Banking is not history. The $400 billion is a diplomatic problem - Japan and America have a joint history that explains the $400 billion, where it came from and what inevitably must be done. America is the one in the trap.
To keep Japan from Indonesian oil we sank their fleet. We incinerated innocent city people to get unconditional surrender. We imposed juvenile law, government and banking systems. We put their businessmen in prison and their politicians on the CIA payroll.
As people, we get along very well. We we all eat raw fish now.
Japan's immediate big problem is China. China and Japan have tons of history; the bottom line is that they are emerging with comfortable global joint hegemony. That leaves America trapped out in the cold. If I were Mr. Bookings that's what I would hire brains to write about. (A chart shows Japanese land is wrorth 2,455 TRILLION Yen! How do you pronounce that? Within memory the US dollar has bought between 14.5 Yen and 360 Yen.)
So what's a few New York bucks?
Not scholarly enuf; too alarmist; conspiracy minded?.......2003-01-08
This book is not up to Brookings Institute standards, perhaps that explains the forward written by the Brookings chief, where he says the books 'conspiracy' theme is interesting, to deflect criticism that the book relies too much on secondary sources.
Basically the premise is old news: Japan runs a current account surplus because it refuses to import and only exports, which creates a weaker than normal yen. The dollar surplus then has to be either invested overseas (hence the Japanese overpay for US investments), or plowed into assets by JP banks to avoid the yen from being strengthened. But that this is part of a 'conspiracy' is not really fleshed out. The book relies too much on secondary sources. And it is not clear to me that the currency imbalance is the root of Japan's ills (this is the central premise of the book). Note that Japan import/exports are only 10% of the GNP, (not unlike the 15% in the US), and thus the lack of demand in JP from the remaining 90% of the GNP is perhaps the real cause of the 10 year recession there. Also other Asian countries do the same thing as JP (namely, keep their currency weaker than it should; ration credit; restrict labor mobility and labor wage rates); how do their economies escape the JP trap of recession? Can it be that other reasons are at fault for JP's demise, such as JP is getting older? These issues are not discussed.
Basically the book is a 20 page white paper made into a several hundred page book, and the tone is too 'alarmist'. The most interesting points are made when discussing politics, and how the Ministry of Trade decides who is going to live or die vis-a-vis the 'walking zombie' companies. Of course the same things happened in the US (credit rationing until the 1970s; bank failures in the late 1980s, where the government decided which banks were to be taken over; and a merchantilist philosophy of keeping the dollar strong, which keeps inflation low in the US but results in the mirror opposite but also dangerous problem as in Japan--current account deficits, or living beyond your means).
Manufactured Problems.......2002-12-05
Akio Mikuni & R. Taggart Murphy have produced an excellent critical piece on the multiple troubles that Japan now finds itself, as well as realistically outlining how the elites are still very much unaware of the full consequences of their actions, and indeed inaction. This book also raises a number of interesting indepth parallels in Japanese history, illustrating that Japan has been in similar waters before and like the past, cannot adapt and change policy before disaster causes havoc. It is furthermore explained that, like all previous merchantile and/or socialist regimes, Japan's production capacity approach to trade is of little use unless profits and risk management are approached seriously. There is some hope for Japan, but the authors wisely find that Japan's war production approach (which is indeed ancient), coupled with its ministerial fiefdoms (whom act like warlords of old.....and control things like banks and until recently the Japanese equity markets), weak liberal democratic structures, non-guilded unions, and lambish populous, coupled with a mountain sized foreign (US$) currency reserve, {which as they argue convincingly, cannot ever really be swapped for Yen....it would destroy Japan (and cause much angst elsewhere)}, all need fundamental revision. Fundamentally, this book highlights the enigma of Japanese power. It should be read along with books like Cartels of the Mind (Ivan Hall); Japan's Big Bang (Declan Hayes); Dogs and Demons (Alex Kerr);The Enigma of Japanese Power (Karel van Wolferan); and Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Herbert P. Bix). Having lived in Japan for four years, I would highly recommend this book.
Product Description
For the busy reader this study provides an understanding of the way in which free trade contributes to two developments of devastating importance to the United States: (1) the transfer of income producing assets from the United States to foreign ownership at the current annual rate of $500 billion, which amounts to approximately one percent of the countrys total wealth per year, and (2) the de-industrialization of the United States through the movement of manufacturing from the United States to low labor cost countries, particularly China. This study breaks new ground in that identifies the destabilization of pricing in the United States domestic market as the cause of the flight of industry from the United States to China, identifies the factors contributing to this destabilization of pricing, and quantifies the contribution of each of these factors, thereby providing a basis for corrective decision making. Recommended necessary congressional action is presented. It I pointed out that if the Congress does not accept fiscal responsibility and take the needed action, de-industrialization of the United States will continue, the standard of living will decline as the United States moves toward becoming a third-world country, and the time will arrive when the United States will not be able to meet its financial obligations.
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The Supermarket Trap
Manufacturer: Indiana University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0253185858 |
Average customer rating:
- Great Case-Histories, Intuitive Feel for Commodity-Markets
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TRADE TRAP 2nd ed
Belinda Coote , and
Caroline Lequesne
Manufacturer: Oxfam Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
Economic Policy & Development
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Exports & Imports
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General
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ASIN: 0855983515 |
Customer Reviews:
Great Case-Histories, Intuitive Feel for Commodity-Markets.......2004-07-25
So you're a proud open-source-software-guy, but you had entertained dim thoughts of making a good living someday. Now SURPRISE poor overseas folks can write software too !
I read through much of this book at a library years ago, and I wondered if it was still in print. It's a sobering read for Americans who remain way overpaid by world standards - welcome to containerships and fiber-optics, globalization spells Doom-for-U. In this book the case histories are about commodities like cotton but techies thought the ancient grim rules didn't apply to them, oh well.
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