Corporate Bond Quotes

It’s easy for the body to be open to desiring different people because desire wells up and demands to be satisfied. It’s easy to categorize corporeal desire as sexuality, but if it has no means of merging with spiritual desire, then a rupture will occur between spirit and flesh. For ultimately passion and sex aren’t only expressed physically but through a true union between two spirits.

Only people have incomes and they derive them through the market from the resources they own, whether these be in the form of corporate stock, or of bonds, or of land, or of their personal capacity.

Lenders often consider a company's industry, market conditions, and competitive landscape in their risk assessment. Everything matters.

A credit default swap was confusing mainly because it wasn’t really a swap at all. It was an insurance policy, typically on a corporate bond, with semiannual premium payments and a fixed term. For instance, you might pay $200,000 a year to buy a ten-year credit default swap on $100 million in General Electric bonds. The most you could lose was $2 million: $200,000 a year for ten years. The most you could make was $100 million, if General Electric defaulted on its debt any time in the next ten years and bondholders recovered nothing. It was a zero-sum bet: If you made $100 million, the guy who had sold you the credit default swap lost $100 million. It was also an asymmetric bet, like laying down money on a number in roulette. The most you could lose were the chips you put on the table; but if your number came up you made thirty, forty, even fifty times your money.

Origins Of Cptsd How do traumatically abused and/or abandoned children develop Cptsd? While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it. Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Collateral, such as assets or property, may be required to secure the loan. So as an entrepreneur, it’s something to consider – it’s going to be a good idea to consider what part of your business’s assets can be collateralized, to what extent, and with how much ease.

Commercial bankers have a responsibility to holistically evaluate the creditworthiness of businesses seeking loans to ensure responsible lending practices.

Working capital loans help businesses manage day-to-day operational expenses. But it’s really important that cash flow optimization is prioritized in this.

Interest rate risk management tools, like derivatives, may be utilized to mitigate the impact of fluctuating interest rates on commercial loans.

There will always be opportunities at the intersection of risk and predictability.

Bond proceeds contribute to community improvements, enhancing residents' quality of life. Theres a public good aspect there.

A Thriving Society Is Partly Dependent on Each Individual and Corporate Citizen Paying Their Fair Share in Taxes.

good quality corporate bonds yielding 10% or better with great call protection.

Understanding the unique needs of each business is crucial in tailoring financial solutions that align with their objectives. It’s never a one size fits all when it comes to financing.

Loan amortization schedules outline how loan payments are allocated between principal and interest. These can make the difference between pays as agreed or default at some future point in time.

Loan restructuring may be explored as a collaborative solution between commercial bankers and businesses facing financial challenges. In the event of crises, it may be the best option for everyone.

Regulatory compliance is crucial in corporate lending, with financial institutions having to adhere to various laws and guidelines. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider.

Municipal bonds finance local government projects, such as schools, roads, and utilities. So there’s a public good aspect to investing in municipalities that isn’t antithetical to equity investing but it’s different.

Loan covenants are agreements outlining specific conditions the borrower must meet during the loan term. If you’re an entrepreneur obtaining a business loan, you really need to think methodically about the loan covenant.

Interest rates on corporate loans can be fixed or variable, depending on the agreement. And depending on the length of the loan, whether it’s fixed or variable can have a significant impact on the risk profile of the loan.

In particular, the virtues and ambitions called forth by war are unlikely to find expression in liberal democracies. There will be plenty of metaphorical wars—corporate lawyers specializing in hostile takeovers who will think of themselves as sharks or gunslingers, and bond traders who imagine, as in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, that they are “masters of the universe.” (They will believe this, however, only in bull markets.) But as they sink into the soft leather of their BMWs, they will know somewhere in the back of their minds that there have been real gunslingers and masters in the world, who would feel contempt for the petty virtues required to become rich or famous in modern America. How long megalothymia will be satisfied with metaphorical wars and symbolic victories is an open question. One suspects that some people will not be satisfied until they prove themselves by that very act that constituted their humanness at the beginning of history: they will want to risk their lives in a violent battle, and thereby prove beyond any shadow of a doubt to themselves and to their fellows that they are free. They will deliberately seek discomfort and sacrifice, because the pain will be the only way they have of proving definitively that they can think well of themselves, that they remain human beings.

Interest coverage ratio measures a company's ability to pay interest on its outstanding debt. If a company can’t effectively pay interest on its outstanding debt, the likelihood that it can afford new debt is extremely low.

Refinancing options are considered to optimize a business's financial structure, potentially lowering interest costs and improving overall financial health. But it has to be to the advantage of both the borrower and the lender.

Corporate loans can be used for various purposes like expansion, working capital, or equipment purchases. Sometimes these loans fuel the next level of growth, and sometimes it help keep afloat a company that might otherwise die.

Syndicated loans involve multiple lenders sharing the risk and funding a single loan. Sometimes these are good plays for both lenders and borrowers. If you’re a borrower experiencing difficulty getting approvals, maybe consider the syndication route.

Commercial lending is a vital component of the financial industry, supporting businesses in achieving their growth and operational goals. Without corporate lenders, the ability and rate at which businesses are able to grow would likely be considerably less.

Mezzanine financing combines debt and equity, providing lenders with additional security. If your lender is interested in doing this, just know that’s it’s a way for them to mitigate risk. On the flip side, it may sometimes be smart to come out the gate with this as your offering.

Lenders assess a company's creditworthiness before approving a loan, considering factors like financial health and repayment ability. So if you’re leading a business, it’s really important for you and your team to be proactive about establishing good credit health for the business.

Banks, credit unions, and non-bank private lenders are common corporate lenders. But when you’re leading a company, it’s important to think carefully about which of these will be the right partner for your lending needs. Having the right lender may be as important as obtaining the right amount of money.

Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie’s corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton; and by working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive. And so it went, in industry after industry—shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the “welfare state.

The primary characteristics of the Shakespearean soul present themselves in Macbeth: the soul has free will, reason, conscience, and corporeality. The effect of these beliefs is holistic: they work together, whether a character be virtuous or sinful. More, no character stands alone morally, because Shakespeare assumes, theologically, that the bonds of family and society are sacred. With respect to the individual, however, there is one overarching principle at work. The fall of an individual’s soul—the loss of his freedom, the ruin of his reason, the confusion of his conscience, the seduction of his flesh by lies and imagination—is a negation of his soul.

Bridge loans provide short-term financing until long-term financing is secured. If you’re having trouble getting full financing, try seeking a bridge loan for the time being.

Defaulting on a corporate loan can result in financial penalties and damage the business’s credit. You wanna avoid default by any moral means necessary.

Interest rate risk arises when there's potential for interest rates to change, impacting loan costs. It’s a serious consideration for lenders.

Restructuring may occur if a business faces financial challenges, involving changes to loan terms. It can be a tedious process, but often times, better than the alternatives.

Municipal bonds finance local government projects, such as schools, roads, and utilities.

Corporate lending involves financial institutions providing loans to businesses – and since businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, corporate lending is really important.

The motivation for taking on debt is to buy assets or claims rising in price. Over the past half-century the aim of financial investment has been less to earn profits on tangible capital investment than to generate “capital” gains (most of which take the form of debt-leveraged land prices, not industrial capital). Annual price gains for property, stocks and bonds far outstrip the reported real estate rents, corporate profits and disposable personal income after paying for essential non-discretionary spending, headed by FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate]-sector charges.

Revolving credit lines allow businesses to borrow, repay, and re-borrow within a specified limit. In terms of managing a business’s cash flow, utilizing revolving credit lines may be a great way to go.

They became the directing power in the life insurance companies, and other corporate reservoirs of the people’s savings-the buyers of bonds and stocks. They became the directing power also in banks and trust companies-the depositaries of the quick capital of the country-the life blood of business, with which they and others carried on their operations. Thus four distinct functions, each essential to business, and each exercised, originally, by a distinct set of men, became united in the investment banker. It is to this union of business functions that the existence of the Money Trust is mainly due.[1]

The investment banker is naturally on the lookout for good bargains in bonds and stocks. Like other merchants he wants to buy his merchandise cheap. But when he becomes director of a corporation, he occupies a position which prevents the transaction by which he acquires its corporate securities from being properly called a bargain. Can there be real bargaining where the same man is on both sides of a trade?

Currency risk is a consideration in international corporate lending, given fluctuating exchange rates. It represents another set of costs and risks that lenders have to consider when lending internationally.

Corporate loans can be short-term or long-term, depending on the business's needs. Each business’s leaders should think very methodically about future revenue projections and macro conditions, among other things.

Credit risk is a major concern in business lending, and lenders use credit scoring models specific to businesses. As an entrepreneur, you need to have a clear credit and distinct strategy for your business’s credit.

Cash flow analysis helps lenders assess a business's ability to generate sufficient cash to meet debt obligations. In terms of managing your business’s money, free cash flow is a good metric to keep front and center.

When the Goldman Sachs saleswoman called Mike Burry and told him that her firm would be happy to sell him credit default swaps in $100 million chunks, Burry guessed, rightly, that Goldman wasn’t ultimately on the other side of his bets. Goldman would never be so stupid as to make huge naked bets that millions of insolvent Americans would repay their home loans. He didn’t know who, or why, or how much, but he knew that some giant corporate entity with a triple-A rating was out there selling credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc.

Secured loans have collateral, while unsecured loans rely solely on a borrower's creditworthiness. As an entrepreneur, you’re in a stronger position if you have both the creditworthiness piece and the collateral piece.

Refinancing involves replacing an existing loan with a new one, often to secure better terms. But it’s a bit of a paradox because to benefit from what may be much needed refinancing, you need to qualify for refinancing.

Corporate lenders play a vital role in supporting economic growth by providing capital to businesses. Without corporate lenders, the ability and rate at which businesses are able to grow would likely be considerably less.

Commercial loans serve various purposes, from financing expansion and working capital to equipment acquisition and real estate investment – They’re a very important part of the capital ecosystem of the world, and of its individual nations.

Pride isn’t just for a parade one day a year. It is not a miniature rainbow flag or rubber bracelet with a corporate logo on it given freely on that day, like beads tossed during Mardi Gras. Pride is foremost our gay self-esteem, but it is also our bond with everyone in the LGBTQ community, everywhere. Pride is our unique way of letting everyone know that we are here, that we belong in this world. If we can say we are gay, we must not do so just to make our own lives better, easier, more transparent, and authentic. We do so to clear a path for those who can’t come out—for all the people who live in places where their freedom is not a given or who don’t feel safe in their own families—to make inroads in the straight world for them. Each time we come out, we send up a flare of hope and direction, showing the way.

Nominal assets are subject to a substantial inflation risk: if you invest 10,000 euros in a checking or savings account or a nonindexed government or corporate bond, that investment is still worth 10,000 euros ten years later, even if consumer prices have doubled in the meantime. In that case, we say that the real value of the investment has fallen by half: you can buy only half as much in goods and services as you could have bought with the initial investment, so that your return after ten years is −50 percent, which may or may not have been compensated by the interest you earned in the interim.

For example, trading in S&P 500-linked futures totaled more than $60 trillion(!) in 2011, five times the S&P 500 Index total market capitalization of $12.5 trillion. We also have credit default swaps, which are essentially bets on whether a corporation can meet the interest payments on its bonds. These credit default swaps alone had a notional value of $33 trillion. Add to this total a slew of other derivatives, whose notional value as 2012 began totaled a cool $708 trillion. By contrast, for what it’s worth, the aggregate capitalization of the world’s stock and bond markets is about $150 trillion, less than one-fourth as much. Is this a great financial system . . . or what!

Apple raised $17 billion in a bond offering in 2013. Not to invest in new products or business lines, but to pay a dividend to stockholders. The company is awash with cash, but much of that money is overseas, and there would be a tax charge if it were repatriated to the USA. For many other companies, the tax-favoured status of debt relative to equity encourages financial engineering. Most large multinational companies have corporate and financial structures of mind-blowing complexity. The mechanics of these arrangements, which are mainly directed at tax avoidance or regulatory arbitrage, are understood by only a handful of specialists. Much of the securities issuance undertaken by Goldman Sachs was not ‘helping companies to grow’ but represented financial engineering of the kind undertaken at Apple. What

default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds. Only a triple-A-rated corporation could assume such risk, no money down, and no questions asked. Burry was right about this, too, but it would be three years before he knew it. The party on the other side of his bet against subprime mortgage bonds was the triple-A-rated insurance company AIG—American International Group, Inc. Or, rather, a unit of AIG called AIG FP. AIG Financial Products was created

Prisoners are ideal employees. They do not receive benefits or pensions. They earn under a dollar an hour. Some are forced to work for free. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot alter working conditions or complain about safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages and working conditions, they lose their jobs and are often segregated in isolation cells. The roughly one million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are a blueprint for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms to reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society.

The case for bitcoin as a cash item on a balance sheet is very compelling for anyone with a time horizon extending beyond four years. Whether or not fiat authorities like it, bitcoin is now in free-market competition with many other assets for the world’s cash balances. It is a competition bitcoin will win or lose in the market, not by the edicts of economists, politicians, or bureaucrats. If it continues to capture a growing share of the world’s cash balances, it continues to succeed. As it stands, bitcoin’s role as cash has a very large total addressable market. The world has around $90 trillion of broad fiat money supply, $90 trillion of sovereign bonds, $40 trillion of corporate bonds, and $10 trillion of gold. Bitcoin could replace all of these assets on balance sheets, which would be a total addressable market cap of $230 trillion. At the time of writing, bitcoin’s market capitalization is around $700 billion, or around 0.3% of its total addressable market. Bitcoin could also take a share of the market capitalization of other semihard assets which people have resorted to using as a form of saving for the future. These include stocks, which are valued at around $90 trillion; global real estate, valued at $280 trillion; and the art market, valued at several trillion dollars. Investors will continue to demand stocks, houses, and works of art, but the current valuations of these assets are likely highly inflated by the need of their holders to use them as stores of value on top of their value as capital or consumer goods. In other words, the flight from inflationary fiat has distorted the U.S. dollar valuations of these assets beyond any sane level. As more and more investors in search of a store of value discover bitcoin’s superior intertemporal salability, it will continue to acquire an increasing share of global cash balances.

The overwhelming majority of women will be happier in the long run by marrying an ordinary man and having children than by seeking sexual thrills, ascending the corporate heights or grinding out turgid tracts on gender theory. A woman develops an emotional bond with her mate through the sexual act itself; this is why arranged marriages (contrary to Western prejudice) are often reasonably happy. Romantic courtship has its charms, but is finally dispensable; marriage is not dispensable.

One common thread ran through the comments: everybody loathes Ticketmaster, for assorted reasons, with the wonderful diversity that makes our country so vibrant. If James Bond movies and other international thrillers weary of their casts of modern stock villains—drug dealers, terrorists, polluting corporations—Ticketmaster is waiting in the wings, universally despised. And if such a movie proved incredibly popular and were then transmuted into a hit Broadway musical, Ticketmaster itself could scalp—sorry, resell—tickets to it.

used to produce more robots, and so on. These corporations can grow and expand to the far reaches of the galaxy, and all they need are robots and computers – they don’t need humans even to buy their products. Indeed, already today computers and algorithms are beginning to function as clients in addition to producers. In the stock exchange, for example, algorithms are becoming the most important buyers of bonds, shares and commodities. Similarly in the advertisement business, the most important customer of all is an algorithm: the Google search algorithm.

...it reveals the legacy of an environmental catastrophe, its human tolls and triumphs, its corporate greed and indifference, its governmental lapses and neglect. In its historic sweep, it stands as a cautionary tale -- timeless and time-bound -- in a country divided by class and religion, buffeted by corporate misconduct, and dismantling its environmental protection laws. This is the story of a dying coal town ensnared in the Reagan Revolution's afterbirth, of a small community rent by one of the mining industry's worst disasters, and of the irreplaceable bond of home.

Good Morning. This is Mr. Gold of Paramount Pictures Corporation. We are carrying out an authorized survey of the territory for a forthcoming "A" picture of the famous Confederate raid of 1861 which resulted in the capture of General Sherman at Muldraugh Hill. Yes, that's right. Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead. What's that? Clearance? Sure we've got clearance. Let me see now...yes, here it is. Signed by Chief of Special Services at the Pentagon. Sure, the Commanding officer at the Armored Center will have a copy. Okay and thanks. Hope you'll enjoy the picture. 'Bye.

Speculators, meanwhile, have seized control of the global economy and the levers of political power. They have weakened and emasculated governments to serve their lust for profit. They have turned the press into courtiers, corrupted the courts, and hollowed out public institutions, including universities. They peddle spurious ideologies—neoliberal economics and globalization—to justify their rapacious looting and greed. They create grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge citizens into crippling forms of debt peonage. And they have been stealing staggering sums of public funds, such as the $65 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that have been unloaded each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash.21 They feed like parasites off of the state and the resources of the planet. Speculators at megabanks and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law—ostensibly put in place to protect the weak from the powerful—to steal from everyone, including their own shareholders. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They only manipulate money. They are no different from the detested speculators who were hanged in the seventeenth century, when speculation was a capital offense. The obscenity of their wealth is matched by their utter lack of concern for the growing numbers of the destitute. In early 2014, the world’s 200 richest people made $13.9 billion, in one day, according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index.22 This hoarding of money by the elites, according to the ruling economic model, is supposed to make us all better off, but in fact the opposite happens when wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations, as economist Thomas Piketty documents in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.23 The rest of us have little or no influence over how we are governed, and our wages stagnate or decline. Underemployment and unemployment become chronic. Social services, from welfare to Social Security, are slashed in the name of austerity. Government, in the hands of speculators, is a protection racket for corporations and a small group of oligarchs. And the longer we play by their rules the more impoverished and oppressed we become. Yet, like

Sex is too important a matter to be left to the independent judgment of young women, because young women rarely possess good judgment. The overwhelming majority of women will be happier in the long run by marrying an ordinary man and having children than by seeking sexual thrills, ascending the corporate heights or grinding out turgid tracts on gender theory. A woman develops an emotional bond with her mate through the sexual act itself; this is why arranged marriages (contrary to Western prejudice) are often reasonably happy. Romantic courtship has its harms, but is finally dispensable; marriage is not dispensable.

The problem, then, is not East versus West. The problem is that the elites in nearly every country have become rotten and socialist. As Bukovsky wrote in his book, “Even the ageless James Bond does not fight the KGB, but is most frequently in an alliance with the KGB, against some mythical super-corporation headed, as a rule, by a lunatic capitalist.” Bukovsky’s book, “Judgment in Moscow,” will be released in English in May. What does he say happened toward the supposed end of the Cold War? Bukovsky wrote, “This was a full debacle, a total surrender of its positions by the West at the most critical moment of our history.

Financial deregulation, easy credit and regulatory neglect combined with the degradation of our value system to create a religion of money and of power. The achievement of infinite wealth and fame became the ultimate standard, to be achieved at any price. The junk-bond peddlers and the raiders, the speculators and the savings-and-loan hustlers with their legions of consultants, their lobbyists and their friendly politicians, turned this country into a vast casino. Crimes were committed, crimes against the entire nation. These crimes will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. They have also undermined confidence in a system that was built up over generations. The nation will need a lengthy recovery from this madness.

Modern armies no longer line up in neat rows and charge each other from opposite sides of a battlefield. Strangely, however, they still train that way, for example, during marching drills. This practice is useful, it turns out, not to prep for actual battle conditions, but to build trust and solidarity among soldiers in a unit. Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other.48 This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes. In the early decades of the 20th century, IBM used corporate songs to instill a sense of unity among their workers.49 Some companies in Japan still use these practices today.

First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is, for the sad reason that most investors are scared of looking foolish. Investors do not fear losing money as much as they fear solitude, by which I mean taking risks that others avoid. When they are caught losing money alone, they have no excuse for their mistake, and most investors, like most people, need excuses. They are, strangely enough, happy to stand on the edge of a precipice as long as they are joined by a few thousand others. But when a market is widely regarded to be in a bad way, even if the problems are illusory, many investors get out. A good example of this was the crisis at the U.S. Farm Credit Corporation. It looked for a moment as if Farm Credit might go bankrupt. Investors stampeded out of Farm Credit bonds because having been warned of the possibility of accident, they couldn’t be seen in the vicinity without endangering their reputations. In an age when failure isn’t allowed, when the U.S. government had rescued firms as remote from the national interest as Chrysler and the Continental Illinois Bank, there was no chance the government would allow the Farm Credit bank to default. The thought of not bailing out an eighty-billion-dollar institution that lent money to America’s distressed farmers was absurd. Institutional investors knew this. That is the point. The people selling Farm Credit bonds for less than they were worth weren’t necessarily stupid. They simply could not be seen holding them. Since Alexander wasn’t constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were.

Sometimes adoptive parents will go through a virtual pregnancy, using “birth clinics” or accessories called “tummy talkers,” package kits that supply a due date and body modifications, including the choice to make the growing fetus visible or not; as well as play-by-play announcements (“Your baby is doing flips!”) and the simulation of a “realistic delivery,” along with a newborn-baby accessory. For Second Life parents who go through pregnancy after adopting in-world, it’s usually with the understanding that the baby they are having is the child they have already adopted. The process is meant to give both parent and child the bond of a live birth. “Really get morning sickness,” one product promises. “Get aches.” Which means being informed that a body-that-is-not-your-corporeal-body is getting sick. “You have full control over your pregnancy, have it EXACTLY how you want,” this product advertises, which does seem to miss something central to the experience: that it subjects you to a process largely beyond your control.

THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.

We have traded our intimacy for social media, our romantic bonds for dating matches on apps, our societal truth for the propaganda of corporate interests, our spiritual questioning for dogmatism, our intellectual curiosity for standardized tests and grading, our inner voices for the opinions of celebrities and hustler gurus and politicians, our mindfulness for algorithmic distractions and outrage, our inborn need to belong to communities for ideological bubbles, our trust in scientific evidence for the attractive lies of false leaders, our solitude for public exhibitionism. We have ignored the hunter-gatherer wisdom of our past, obedient now to the myth of progress. But we must remember who we are and where we came from. We are animals born into mystery, looking up at the stars. Uncertain in ourselves, not knowing where we are heading. We exist with the same bodies, the same brains, as Homo sapiens from thousands of years past, roaming on the plains, hunting in forests and by the sea, foraging together in small bands. Except now, our technology is exponentially increasing at a scale that we cannot predict. We are overwhelmed with information; lost in a matrix that we do not understand. Our civilizational “progress” is built on the bones of the indigenous and the poor and the powerless. Our “progress” comes at the expense of our land, and oceans, and air. We are reaching beyond what we can globally sustain. Former empires have perished from their unrestrained greed for more resources. They were limited in past ages by geography and capacity, collapsing in regions, and not over the entire planet. What will be the cost of our progress? We have grown arrogant in our comfort, hardened away from our compassion, believing that our reality is the only reality. Yet even at our most uncertain, there are still those saints who are unknown and nameless, who help even when they do not need to help. They often are not rich, don’t have their profiles written up in magazines, and will never win any prestigious awards. They may have shared their last bit of food while already surviving on so little. They may have cherished the disheartened, shown warmth to the neglected, tended to the diseased and dying, spoken kindly to the hopeless. They do not tremble in silence while the wheels of prejudice crush over their land. Withering what was once fertile into pale death and smoke. They tend to what they love, to what they serve. They help, even when they could fall back into ignorance, even when they could prosper through easy greed, even when they could compromise their values, conforming into groupthink for the illusion of security. They help.

In order to refashion the world, it is necessary for people themselves to adopt a different mental attitude. Until man becomes brother unto man, there shall be no brotherhood of men. No kind of science or material advantage will ever induce people to share their property or their rights equitably. No one will ever have enough, people will always grumble, they will always envy and destroy one another. You ask when will all this come about. It will come about, but first there must be an end to the habit of self-imposed isolation of man.’ ‘What isolation?’ I asked him. ‘The kind that is prevalent everywhere now, especially in our age, and which has not yet come to an end, has not yet run its course. For everyone nowadays strives to dissociate himself as much as possible from others, everyone wants to savour the fullness of life for himself, but all his best efforts lead not to fullness of life but to total self-destruction, and instead of ending with a comprehensive evaluation of his being, he rushes headlong into complete isolation. For everyone has dissociated himself from everyone else in our age, everyone has disappeared into his own burrow, distanced himself from the next man, hidden himself and his possessions, the result being that he has abandoned people and has, in his turn, been abandoned. He piles up riches in solitude and thinks: ‘How powerful I am now, and how secure,’ and it never occurs to the poor devil that the more he accumulates, the further he sinks into suicidal impotence. For man has become used to relying on himself alone, and has dissociated himself from the whole; he has accustomed his soul to believe neither in human aid, nor in people, nor in humanity; he trembles only at the thought of losing his money* and the privileges he has acquired. Everywhere the human mind is beginning arrogantly to ignore the fact that man’s true security is to be attained not through the isolated efforts of the individual, but in a corporate human identity. But it is certain that this terrible isolation will come to an end, and everyone will realize at a stroke how unnatural it is for one man to cut himself off from another. This will indeed be the spirit of the times, and people will be surprised how long they have remained in darkness and not seen the light. It is then that the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven…* But, nevertheless, until then man should hold the banner aloft and should from time to time, quite alone if necessary, set an example and rescue his soul from isolation in order to champion the bond of fraternal love, though he be taken for a holy fool. And he should do this in order that the great Idea should not die…

The most interesting aspects of the story lie between the two extremes of coercion and popularity. It might be instructive to consider fascist regimes’ management of workers, who were surely the most recalcitrant part of the population. It is clear that both Fascism and Nazism enjoyed some success in this domain. According to Tim Mason, the ultimate authority on German workers under Nazism, the Third Reich “contained” German workers by four means: terror, division, some concessions, and integration devices such as the famous Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude) leisure-time organization. Let there be no doubt that terror awaited workers who resisted directly. It was the cadres of the German Socialist and Communist parties who filled the first concentration camps in 1933, before the Jews. Since socialists and communists were already divided, it was not hard for the Nazis to create another division between those workers who continued to resist and those who decided to try to live normal lives. The suppression of autonomous worker organizations allowed fascist regimes to address workers individually rather than collectively. Soon, demoralized by the defeat of their unions and parties, workers were atomized, deprived of their usual places of sociability, and afraid to confide in anyone. Both regimes made some concessions to workers—Mason’s third device for worker “containment.” They did not simply silence them, as in traditional dictatorships. After power, official unions enjoyed a monopoly of labor representation. The Nazi Labor Front had to preserve its credibility by actually paying some attention to working conditions. Mindful of the 1918 revolution, the Third Reich was willing to do absolutely anything to avoid unemployment or food shortages. As the German economy heated up in rearmament, there was even some wage creep. Later in the war, the arrival of slave labor, which promoted many German workers to the status of masters, provided additional satisfactions. Mussolini was particularly proud of how workers would fare under his corporatist constitution. The Labor Charter (1927) promised that workers and employers would sit down together in a “corporation” for each branch of the economy, and submerge class struggle in the discovery of their common interests. It looked very imposing by 1939 when a Chamber of Corporations replaced parliament. In practice, however, the corporative bodies were run by businessmen, while the workers’ sections were set apart and excluded from the factory floor. Mason’s fourth form of “containment”—integrative devices—was a specialty of fascist regimes. Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis, were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill. To resist seemed pointless, certain to lead nowhere but to prison and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute. These various techniques of social control were successful.

It nevertheless remains true that, in most countries for which long-run data are available, stocks have out-performed bonds – by a factor of roughly five over the twentieth century.9 This can scarcely surprise us. Bonds, as we saw in Chapter 2, are no more than promises by governments to pay interest and ultimately repay principal over a specified period of time. Either through default or through currency depreciation, many governments have failed to honour those promises. By contrast, a share is a portion of the capital of a profit-making corporation. If the company succeeds in its undertakings, there will not only be dividends, but also a significant probability of capital appreciation. There are of course risks, too. The returns on stocks are less predictable and more volatile than the returns on bonds and bills. There is a significantly higher probability that the average corporation will go bankrupt and cease to exist than that the average sovereign state will disappear. In the event of a corporate bankruptcy, the holders of bonds and other forms of debt will be satisfied first; the equity holders may end up with nothing. For these reasons, economists see the superior returns on stocks as capturing an ‘equity risk premium’ – though clearly in some cases this has been a risk well worth taking.

Corporations could raise funds through the sale of stock and bonds, and many states offered charters that gave stockholders limited liability: they would not be held responsible for the corporation’s debts beyond their own investment. In exchange for all this, Americans believed that corporations had a greater obligation than other enterprises to serve a public good.

Credit” is the third-person singular conjugation of the present tense of the Latin verb credere, “to believe.” It’s the most exceptional and interesting thing in the financial world. Similar leaps of belief underlie every human transaction in life: Your wife might cheat on you, but you hope otherwise. The online store you paid may not ship you your goods, but you trust otherwise. Credit derivatives are just the explicit encapsulations of such beliefs, in financial and contractual form, for corporate entities. Unlike other financial securities, such as shares of IBM stock or oil futures, a credit derivative is not even some theoretical value of a tangible good. It’s the perceived value of a complete intangible, the perception of the probability of meeting some future obligation. People often asked me in the early days of my tech career how I had gone from Wall Street to ads technology. Such a person almost certainly knew nothing about either industry, or the answer would have been obvious. I did the same thing the whole time: putting a price on a human’s perception, be it of a General Motors bond or a pair of shoes coveted on Zappos. It’s the same difference either way; only the scale of the money pile changes.

While people are avoiding handshakes, hugging seems to be increasing in popularity. Some say the increase came after the tragedy of 9/11 as the need for comfort and bonding increased. Others say the switch to casual dress in corporate America in the first decade of the twenty-first century brought a desire for a more casual greeting ritual. I feel it is a response in some parts of the country to the positive influence of Latin cultures that hug, and a response to the negative influence of a high-tech culture, in which we have so little touch and few physical connections with others.

An investor can reduce the LTCG by investing up to Rs. 5,000,000 per financial year in certain bonds. Currently, investment in two bonds – Rural Electrification Corporation Limited (RECL) and National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) are eligible for claiming an exemption.

Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

Page 7: (H)e (Darwin) supposed that man, before he even emerged from apedom, was already a social being, living in small scattered communities. Evolution in his eyes was carried out mainly as a struggle between communities - team against team, tribe against tribe. Inside each team or tribe, the 'ethical cosmos' [the dual code of Amity and Enmity] was at work, forging and strengthening the social bonds which made the members of such a team a co-operative whole. … Thus, in the early stages of human evolution we find competition and co-operation as constituent elements of the evolutionary process … Co-operation and unity give strength to a team or tribe; but why did neighboring tribes refuse so stubbornly to amalgamate? If united, they would have got rid of competition and struggle. Why do human tribes instinctively repel every thought of amalgamation, and prize above all things independence, the control of their destiny, their sovereignty? Here we have to look beneath the surface of things and formulate a theory to explain tribal behavior. How does a tribe fulfill an evolutionary purpose? A tribe is a 'corporate body,' which Nature has entrusted with an assortment of human seed or genes, the assortment differing in some degree from that entrusted to every other tribe. If the genes are to work out their evolutionary effects, then it is necessary that the tribe or corporation should maintain its integrity through an infinity of generations. If a tribe loses its integrity by a slackening of social bonds, or by disintegration of the parental instincts, or by lack of courage or of skill to defend itself from the aggression of neighboring tribes, or by free interbreeding with neighbors and thus scattering its genes, then that tribe as an evolutionary venture has come to an untimely end. For evolutionary purposes it has proved a failure. Page 25: Tribalism was Nature's method in bringing about the evolution of man. I have already explained what a tribe really is - a corporation of human beings entrusted with a certain capital of genes. The business of such a corporation is to nurse and develop its stock of genes - to bring them to an evolutionary fruition. To reach such an end a tribal corporation had to comply with two conditions: (1) it had to endure for a long age; (2) it had to remain intact and separate from all neighboring and competing tribes. Human nature was fashioned or evolved just to secure these two conditions - continuity through time and separation in space. Hence the duality of man's nature - the good, social, or virtuous traits serving intratribal economy; the evil, vicious, or antisocial qualities serving the intertribal economy and the policy of keeping its genes apart. Human nature is the basal part of the machinery used for the evolution of man. When you know the history of our basal mentality - one fitted for tribal life - do you wonder at the disorder and turmoil which now afflict the detribalized part of the world?

he Dow Jones Industrial Average is the sum of the largest 30 corporations, although they represent the bulk of the trading on that exchange. This average dominates everybody’s thinking about the market being up or down or whatever. Try to make individual stock picks and forget about the market. A good market could pull your stock up and, a bad one could pull it down, but the real investment factor is how well the company is managed and performs within the stock market.

​Met a strange, svelte, gray man at the grocery store. We bonded over our hatred of sugar in everything and how the government is a corporation driving up our for-profit healthcare costs on purpose selling us unhealthy drinks and processed food. We’re paying for our own deaths!

She let him into the house secretly, saw him privately, and kept him out of his father’s sight.53 And yet, even Corneil, this creature of deceit, could not deny the truth about himself. He alternated his bombast with references to “my shame & mortification & sorrow.” He was literally fatalistic about his hope of reform. He wrote to Greeley of his “determination to humbly forfeit my life as the penalty of further vice.” It was the one prediction about himself that would come true.54 ON FEBRUARY 15, 1866, the locomotive Augustus Schell chuffed onto the Albany bridge and rolled westward along its 2,020-foot span, over a total of nineteen piers, across an iron turntable above the center of the river below, and rattled down into Albany itself. Following this symbolic inauguration, the first passenger train crossed one week later. After four years of construction (and many more of litigation), the bridge gave the New York Central a continuous, direct connection to the Hudson River Railroad, and thus to Manhattan. But its completed track became a lighted fuse.55 The Commodore’s cold response to Corneil’s backsliding revealed the icy judge who had always lurked behind the encouraging father. So, too, did the implacable warrior remain within the diplomat who had negotiated with Corning and Richmond. In December 1865, for example, the New York Court of Appeals handed down final judgment in the long-running court battle between Vanderbilt and the New York & New Haven Railroad over the shares that Schuyler had fraudulently issued in 1854. Over the years, weary shareholders had settled with the company—but the Commodore refused. He had waged his battle until the court ruled that the company owed $900,000 to Schuyler’s victims. “The great principle is now settled by the highest court in this State,” wrote the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, “that railroad and other corporations are bound by the fraudulent acts of their own agents.”56 It was, indeed, a great principle—but businessmen also saw a more personal lesson in the Schuyler fraud case. “The Commodore’s word is as good as his bond when it is fairly

To measure the yield curve I use Moody’s Aaa Corporate Bond Yields as the long-term rate, and six-month commercial paper rates as the short-term rate. You can find these figures in government publications, Barron’s, and other financial periodicals.

As interest rates began to rise in the post-war period, leaving your cash at a bank that paid near zero percent interest was not such a good investment. Corporations and municipalities had millions of dollars to invest, but could not get a decent return on the short-term cash. They wanted a rate, because any rate was better than nothing. At the same time, securities dealers on Wall Street began holding trading positions. Previously the role of the broker-dealer was as a pure middleman. That’s the broker part of broker-dealer. When a client wanted to sell a bond, the firm’s salesmen scoured the market to find a buyer. If they could find a buyer, the trade was done: end-user seller to end-user buyer, and the Wall Street firm just stood in the middle. That changed in the 1950s. Some broker-dealers, like Bear Stearns and Salomon Brothers, realized they could make money buying bonds for their own trading account. And, they could even make money betting on the direction of interest rates.

In 2020, 68.1% of U.S. mortgage loans were originated by non-banks; they were instead initiated by mortgage loan companies. What do you need a bank for? Remember in the movie,[4] “If I write a loan on a Friday afternoon, it’s sold to a big [investment] bank by Monday lunch.” The financial system changed very little from 1914 to 1980, but think about how much it changed from 1980 to today. The Federal Reserve was originally designed to provide liquidity to banks. That’s it. Back then, a financial institution could be a bank, trust company, credit union, or Savings and Loan. I can’t even list all of the different types of financial institutions there are today. Back then, the financial instruments were mortgage loans, corporate loans, stocks, bonds, and commercial paper. Did I miss anything? Once again, I can’t even list all of the different types of financial instruments today.

It’s importance, however, is bigger than that. Treasury securities are the risk-free yield curve for all of the financial markets. That’s right, the yields of Treasury Bills, Notes, and Bonds from overnight to 30 years make up a yield curve that is used to price all other fixed-income securities. The Treasury market is the reference rate for interest rates. Treasurys are a tool for pricing corporate bonds, municipal bonds, emerging market bonds, federal agencies, mortgage-backed securities, and other dollar assets. On top of that, they’re also a tool for speculation and hedging risk.

The book doesn't have to be all about U.S. Treasurys, but that's mostly what it’s about. U.S. Treasuries are the foundation of the Repo market. However, these days there are Repo transactions in just about any financial instrument: federal agencies, municipal bonds, corporate bonds, foreign government bonds, emerging markets bonds, mortgage loans, etc.

The securities lending business boils down to one concept: exchanging a security that someone needs for a different security or cash. The business is driven by the need of the dealer community to cover short positions, be it in stocks, Treasurys, agencies, corporate bonds, ADRs, or even ETFs. When a dealer is looking to cover a short position, they first check what are colloquially known as the “sec lenders.” The securities lending group will pull the security out of the end-user portfolio and lend it into the Repo market. When a securities lending group loans a security, they either receive cash or bonds in return. If they receive cash, they reinvest the cash. If they receive a bond, they earn a fee on the spread between where they loan the bond and borrow the other. In the case of cash, they need to invest it. They need an investment that generates a sufficient return to make the business viable, yet, at the same time, without taking too much risk. The safest and easiest way to invest is in overnight Treasury repo. The problem is that there’s very little profit lending a Treasury and reinvesting in a Treasury. In order to enhance returns, the securities lending groups take some risk. It’s not necessarily a lot of risk, but increasing returns involves increasing risk. It can be either interest rate risk, credit risk, or liquidity risk. Technically a combination of all three is possible, too, but that’s pretty dangerous. The yield curve is upward sloping most of the time, so investing for a longer period of time generally generates a higher yield. Let’s say the overnight rate is 2.00%, the one-month rate is 2.05%, and the three-month rate is at 2.15%. Instead of reinvesting cash overnight, there’s an extra 15 basis points for investing for three months. Since the end-investor clients usually hold their bonds to maturity, there’s only a small chance they will sell a bond during that three-month period. On top of that, the securities lending groups run multi-billion dollar portfolios, so they can ladder their investments.

credit spread. This is a measurement between the yield of U.S. Treasury bonds, which carry the smallest possible risk, and the yield of a publicly traded corporate bond.

The credit spread refers to the difference between Treasuries, which were paying around 4.5 percent, and the yields of corporate bonds and the mortgage-backed securities, which were probably around 7 to 8 percent.

Here are some ETFs that track this segment of the market: Name Country Ticker Vanguard Total Corporate Bond USA VTC iShares Canadian Corporate Bond Canada XCB Full disclosure: The fund I owned was XCB.

Corporate bonds, Treasury bonds, and municipal bonds all represent nothing more than a loan—or, if you wish, debt—for which the lender will be paid an interest rate,

Following the 4 Percent Rule still gives you a 5 percent chance of running out of money, due to a phenomenon known as sequence-of-return risk. Your backup plan is to use the Cash Cushion and the Yield Shield. Cash Cushion: A reserve fund held in a savings account that you can use to avoid doing a full portfolio withdrawal during down years. Yield Shield: A combination of dividends and interest being paid by your ETFs that is delivered as cash without selling any assets. The Yield Shield can be raised by pivoting some of your assets into higher-yielding assets, such as . . . Preferred shares Real estate investment trusts (REITs) Corporate bonds Dividend stocks The size of the Cash Cushion is determined using the following formula: Cash Cushion = (Annual Spending − Annual Yield) × Number of Years

During the recent depression many companies have been able to offset their operating losses by including in income profits arising from repurchases of their own bonds at a substantial discount from par. Unfortunately the credit of U. S. Steel Corporation has always stood so high that this lucrative source of revenue has not hitherto been available to it. The Modernization Scheme will remedy this condition.

Building computer models based on years of historical data on corporate bonds, they concluded that this new device—a credit default swap—seemed foolproof. The odds of a wave of defaults occurring simultaneously were remote, short of another Great Depression. So, absent a catastrophe of that magnitude, the holders of the swap could expect to receive millions of dollars in premiums a year. It was like free money.

The reporting of the size is tiered up to $10m for investment grade debt, and $5m for junk bonds. But if an asset manager sells a $100m chunk of bonds to an investment bank at a discount due to the big size, that becomes the new market price, making it difficult for the bank to gradually sell down the position at a profit — discouraging it from playing the traditional market-making role. The industry is keen to help unclog corporate bond trading by introducing a one-day delay to publishing bigger trades on Trace.

for the stock market, corporate earnings and dividends; for the bond market, interest payments. Market returns, however, are calculated before the deduction of the costs of investing, and are most assuredly not based on speculation and rapid trading, which do nothing but shift returns from one investor to another. For the long-term investor, returns have everything to do with the underlying economics of corporate America and very little to do with the mechanical process of buying and selling pieces of paper. The art of investing in mutual funds, I would argue, rests on simplicity and common sense.

The resulting financial overhead consists of claims on the economy’s actual means of production. Yet most people think of these bonds, bank loans and stocks and creditor claims as wealth, not its antithesis on the debit side of the balance sheet. This inside-out doublethink is a precondition for the bubble economy to be applauded by the mass media, keeping its corrosive momentum expanding. From the corporate sphere and real estate to personal budgets, the distinguishing feature over the past half-century has been the rise in debt/equity and debt/income ratios. Just as debt leveraging has hiked corporate break-even costs of doing business, so the cost of living has been increased as homes and office buildings have been bid up on mortgage credit. “Creating wealth” in a debt-financed way makes economies high-cost, exacerbated by the tax shift onto labor and consumers instead of capital gains and “free lunch” rent. These financial and fiscal policies have enabled financial managers to siphon off the industrial profits that were expected to fund capital formation to increase productivity and living standards. The

Governments (and large corporations) issue bonds as a way of borrowing money from a broader range of people and institutions than just banks.