Become independent from your debt issues

106Many companies throughout the world have established independent corporate cultures. In the past, independent organizations could succeed simply because the work done and the products produced did not require teamwork. In fact, organizational experts boldly reduced work to its simplest component in the never-ending quest for efficiency.

As a result, organizations became more independent and more self-sufficient. When Henry Ford developed his concept of mass production of automobiles, he built many related industries to provide the components for them. To manufacture the steel, he shipped taconite and iron ore to Michigan; to make the fabric for the upholstery, he built mills; to make the windows, he built glass plants. Each worker made or attached a part on the assembly line as the chassis flowed through the system. Today, however, robotic systems have replaced hundreds of thousands of these workers because they do the job better and faster and they don’t need health insurance.

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Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 personal finances, pricing policy, revenue, shareholders, shares Comments Off

Which part of a credit can you control

Using another example, about four years into the Northwest Airlines–KLM partnership, Northwest CEO John Dasburg characterized the relationship as “schizophrenic.” He was referring to different perceptions of how much each partner controlled the partnership (a relationship issue). Although the partnership had been financially rewarding for both airlines (a task issue), the alliance was in trouble.

Regardless of the attractive financial outputs, this question of control threatened to create a divorce case. In time, the two airlines discovered the issues preventing them from moving deeper into the relationship. One issue was the number of shares KLM owned in Northwest, which gave KLM a seat on Northwest’s board of directors—Northwest, however, didn’t have a representative on KLM’s board.

KLM and Northwest revisited this issue in the interest of improving their partnership. KLM agreed to sell its share in Northwest (while making a significant return on its investment, since the shares had appreciated). In exchange, KLM’s president resigned from Northwest’s board of directors to equalize the power of each partner. As a result, each airline gained more independence—yet a stronger partnership— based on their mutual benefits. Their relationship now creates synergy and is a model of how interdependent entities can create more business for each other.

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Monday, April 26th, 2010 making money, merger, money guide, money issues, money management Comments Off

Various aspects of a payday loan

In the case studies discussed earlier, the partnerships Bank of America/Exult, NASA/GSFC, and JHU/APL all understood the importance of balancing task and relationship. Even before Bank of America and Exult began their tasks, their executives met to discuss and agree on a strategic framework for the partnership. This enabled them to agree to fundamental operating principles even before they began to transfer employees and process transactions. While both parties initially did not understand the value of the time up front, I believe that relationship-building sessions solidified the trust that enabled them to proceed with the task with few back-steps. Special credit must be given to Mary Lou Cagle from Bank of America and Michael Salvino of Exult, Inc., for their insights into the importance of relationship building. Each understood the impact the change their partnership would have on their respective organizations.

During the Form Stage of Relationship Development, they spent several hours a week talking about their needs—both personally and organizationally—at various levels. They talked about their vision, mission, and strategic implications. They discussed trust, problem solving, conflict resolution, and decision making. They provided each other with  important information on how their internal organizations operated. They coached each other on how to position and express ideas and concepts in a way that they would be accepted in the other’s organization. They kept each other abreast of current or future events that would impact their business or partnership. They collaborated in ways that created success for their alliance and took the relationship aspect of the business as seriously as the operational aspects.

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Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 credit score, economy, finances, get out of debt, income Comments Off

Overall needs of a credit taker

33Overall the partnership needs to split its time about 50/50 between the task and relationship aspects of development. This ratio will change, however, as the partnership matures and progresses through the Stages of Relationship Development. Depending on which stage they’re at, partners shift their energies back and forth between task and relationship. Eventually they’ll need to work equally in both areas.

When a partnership first forms, for example, partners may spend 80 percent of their time on the relationship and only 20 percent on the task. As they develop more trust, they move toward more tasks together. With maturity, the partnership may be spending 80 percent of its energy on tasks and 20 percent on relationship issues.

Knowing where you and your partner stand along this continuum— and knowing in which direction it would be most helpful to move— is critical information to help increase your Partnering Intelligence.

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Thursday, February 25th, 2010 bonds, business, business competition, business tips, cash reserves Comments Off

What is credit market and how it affects you

23The second criterion that you should consider when determining whether to pursue a particular idea is the market size for the potential product. Obviously, if there is a huge market for your invention, if millions and millions of people will want to buy your product, that is best. You may feel “in your gut” that the product will have a huge market but that is not good enough. Do the necessary research to find out exactly how large the potential
market may or may not be. You may need to get U.S. Census Bureau figures or check the circulation figures for magazines or trade journals for the area of your invention. Your local reference librarian can help you to locate sales figures for similar or competing products in business directories. Or, a good, professional evaluation should help you to determine the potential market for your invention.

Don’t assume just because you would like to have your invention that there is a large market for it. You may belong to the “Under 5’ tall pastry chefs club” and have invented a short baster that is easier for a diminutive person to use. In other words, the product is helpful to you and a few of your fellow club members but there would not be a large market for it.

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Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 personal finances, pricing policy, revenue, shareholders, shares Comments Off

Benefits of a payday loan

56All of the examined asset classes exhibit significant positive autocorrelation. There are two main reasons that should be noted. As mentioned earlier, one reason is the illiquidity of certain segments of the international bond markets. The high-yield sector is a typical example for a rather illiquid market segment. Broad high-yield indices represent the investment universe of institutional investors with regard to speculative grade corporate bonds. There are several qualitative criteria that benchmark indices generally have to satisfy. Among the most important are transparency, stability and representativeness. With respect to the adequate mapping of short- and medium-term fluctuations of high-yield bond prices, the last point is critical.

The low liquidity of many high-yield bonds causes irregular and nonsynchronous trading. Rajan (2000) points out that about threequarters of the index constituents are traded less than once per month. Information that is relevant for the valuation is comprised in the prices of those bonds with a significant time lag. Thus, price changes of individual bonds may seem uncorrelated even if they were caused by a common factor.

This nonsynchronicity induces positive serial correlation in index returns and biases the traditional estimates of index volatility such as the annualized standard deviation of returns.

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Saturday, December 19th, 2009 making money, merger, money guide, money issues, money management Comments Off

Main differences between credit types

119For a comparison previous post contains the risk/return characteristics of a US government portfolio. By definition, all of the optimized portfolios offer a more attractive risk/reward profile than treasury bonds. In addition to the mean and the risk measures we also provide risk-adjusted performance numbers. They are defined as the ratio of excess return over the risk-free rate to portfolio risk. When risk is measured by the standard deviation of returns we get the Sharpe (1966) ratio. Ang and Chua (1979) provide an overview of composite measures of investment performance when alternative concepts of risk measurement are used.

Levy (1992) points out that lower partial moments of first order are consistent with second-order stochastic dominance. The concept of stochastic dominance has several important advantages. It requires no distributional assumptions, takes all the moments of the return distributions into account and requires only very mild assumptions about investor behavior. With respect to the comparison of the performance of several investment choices, it allows to create two different groups. The efficient set contains the desirable alternatives, the inefficient set those investments that are found to be stochastically dominated by at least one other investment. The preference criteria are that the investor prefers more to less, is risk averse and prefers positive skewness. For all utility functions, investment G dominates F stochastically

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Saturday, December 5th, 2009 finances, get out of debt, income, international markets, loans guide Comments Off

What credit rate is best for your needs

126Our experience displays the composition of the optimized portfolios. As a comparison the market capitalization weights should be kept in mind. Roughly speaking, the market weights of government bonds, agencies and mortgage-backed securities with respect to the US bond market are 26, 12, and 32 percent. Investment grade and high-yield corporate bonds areresponsible for 23 and 7 percent of the market value of outstanding US bonds. In this context, municipal bonds are excluded because they do not play a significant role in the portfolios of international investors.

Across all of our optimization approaches, the MRPs and TPs are mainly made up of agencies and mortgage-backed securities, whereas government bonds are not represented in any of the portfolios. Despite its high volatilitythe high-yield sector seems to provide significant diversification benefits.

However, it should be noted that the high-yield weight decreases when skewness and kurtosis are considered during the process of portfolio construction.

In the sample period investors willing to accept the risk of a pure government portfolio would have been best off to invest a large part of their

assets in a broadly diversified portfolio of investment grade and high-yield corporate bonds. Thus, they would have earned an excess return of 6–8 bp per month over government bonds.

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Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 bonds, business, business competition, business tips, cash reserves Comments Off

Economy-wide credit indicators

42Since 1970, the credit spread for Baa rated US corporate bonds versus treasuries varied in an extremely broad range. The tightest spread levels were reached at the end of the 1970s, but the double-dip recession in 1980 and 1981/82 led to a massive spread widening. Corporate bond spreads peaked at 400 bps, a level that was reached again after the equity bubble burst and the US economy went through a recession in 2000/2001.

In general the corporate bond spread simply reflects the risk premium that investors demand in order to invest in corporate bonds. In this respect it is similar to the equity risk premium. The corporate bond spread has to compensate investors for different kinds of risk:

  • default risk,
  • migration risk, and
  • liquidity risk.

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The inclusion of callable credit bonds

The second problem is caused by the inclusion of callable bonds in the corporate bond index. Prior to the mid-1980s, most corporations issued only callable bonds. Part of the variation in spreads, therefore is caused by a change in the price of the underlying option that the issuer holds. Declining yields imply a rise in the value of the call option that the issuer holds and hence induce a slightly negative correlation between credit spreads and treasury yields.

The last problem stems from the fact that corporate bonds and treasury bonds are taxed differently. In several parts of the United States, corporate bonds are taxed at the federal, state and local levels, while treasury bonds are only subject to taxation at the federal level. An increase in risk free rates increases the tax advantage of treasuries over corporate bonds, thus motivating investors to require a higher spread for credits. The taxation bias induces a slightly positive correlation between treasury yields and corporate bond spreads. However, the magnitude of the distortion is hard to quantify because it depends, among others, on the state income tax rate faced by the marginal investor.

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