Books about Lending from Amazon.com

It began with a simple $27 loan. After witnessing the cycle of poverty that kept many poor women enslaved to high-interest loan sharks in Bangladesh, Dr. Muhammad Yunus lent money to 42 women so they could purchase bamboo to make and sell stools. In a short time, the women were able to repay the loans while continuing to support themselves and their families. With that initial eye-opening success, the seeds of the Grameen Bank, and the concept of microcredit, were planted.

After earning a Ph.D. in economics at Vanderbilt University, Dr. Yunus returned to Bangladesh to settle into a life as a professor. But a famine in 1974 ravaged the country, leading Dr. Yunus to alter his thinking and his life profoundly: "What good were all my complex theories when people were dying of starvation on the sidewalks and porches across from my lecture hall?.... Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me." Armed with little more than a lofty dream to end the suffering around him, he started an experimental microcredit enterprise in 1977; by 1983 the Grameen Bank was officially formed.

The idea behind the Grameen Bank is ingeniously simple: extend credit to poor people and they will help themselves. This concept strikes at the root of poverty by specifically targeting the poorest of the poor, providing small loans (usually less than $300) to those unable to obtain credit from traditional banks. At Grameen, loans are administered to groups of five people, with only two receiving their money up front. As soon as these two make a few regular payments, loans are gradually extended to the rest of the group. In this way, the program builds a sense of community as well as individual self-reliance. Most of the Grameen Bank's loans are to women, and since its inception, there has been an astonishing loan repayment rate of over 98 percent.

Banker to the Poor is an inspiring memoir of the birth of microcredit, written in a conversational tone that makes it both moving and enjoyable to read. The Grameen Bank is now a $2.5 billion banking enterprise in Bangladesh, while the microcredit model has spread to over 50 countries worldwide, from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea, Norway to Nepal. Ever optimistic, Yunus travels the globe spreading the belief that poverty can be eliminated: "...the poor, once economically empowered, are the most determined fighters in the battle to solve the population problem; end illiteracy; and live healthier, better lives. When policy makers finally realize that the poor are their partners, rather than bystanders or enemies, we will progress much faster that we do today." Dr. Yunus's efforts prove that hope is a global currency. --Shawn Carkonen.
Price: $5.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Filled with creative strategies that work in today's market. A must-read for the real estate investor!"
-Albert Lowry, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of

How You Can Become Financially Independent by Investing in Real Estate

A few years ago, even reckless real estate investors could still make money because the market was booming. But many markets have softened, and making a profit isn't as simple as it used to be. However-with the right strategy and long-term thinking-there is still plenty of money to be made in real estate.

If you're willing to look outside your local market, you'll discover emerging markets that are booming. And there are also smart investing strategies that work especially well in slowing markets. You can do it! You just need the new rules and wise tactics you'll find in this practical, profitable guide:
*

Invest in up-and-coming, high-growth emerging markets
*

Learn the powerful strategy of market-timing
*

Use lease options to get more for your money
*

Learn creative strategies to engineer hands-off investments
*

Find foreclosures and other hidden bargains
*

Invest in bargain-rate new construction projects

There are great deals hiding in every real estate market, and this book makes finding those values easy. Whether you want to locate the next up-and-coming growth markets, or find creative ways to finance your investments, Making Hard Cash in a Soft Real Estate Market is a savvy guide to investing for anyone who wants to play it safe and profitably..
Price: $13.86 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Uncovering the World Bank s loan programs in the developing world in "The Gods of Lending", author Steve Berkman finds nothing but mismanagement and hypocrisy: decades of assistance without any significant improvement in the lives of the poor; billions loaned for improving governance, health care and education with little to show for it; and donor funds given to dysfunctional government institutions or officials with a history of looting national treasuries. With sixteen years as a Bank staff and consultant, Berkman presents compelling evidence of deceptive reporting and lack of due diligence as billions of dollars are wasted every year on corrupt and negligent programs.

Using internal reports and memos, project documents and the Bank s Annual Reports as reference, Berkman demonstrates management s obsession with lending despite the high fiduciary risks involved. Taking the reader inside several project fraud investigations, he exposes the ease with which funds can be stolen from the Bank s portfolio, and the degree to which these thefts are ignored. Painting a picture of an institution that is run by a bloated bureaucracy, "The Gods of Lending" proposes changes that will rouse the Bank from its bureaucratic complacency and restore its central mission of alleviating poverty..
Price: $17.29 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"When I have a little money, I buy books. And if any is left, I buy food and clothing "
--Desiderius Erasmus

Those who share Erasmus's love of those curious bundles of paper bound together between hard or soft covers know exactly how he felt. These are the people who can spend hours browsing through a bookstore, completely oblivious not only to the passage of time but to everything else around them, the people for whom buying books is a necessity, not a luxury. A Passion for Books is a celebration of that love, a collection of sixty classic and contemporary essays, stories, lists, poems, quotations, and cartoons on the joys of reading, appreciating, and collecting books.

This enriching collection leads off with science-fiction great Ray Bradbury's Foreword, in which he remembers his penniless days pecking out Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter, conjuring up a society so frightened of art that it burns its books. This struggle--financial and creative--led to his lifelong love of all books, which he hopes will cosset him in his grave, "Shakespeare as a pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far-travelling."

Booklovers will also find here a selection of writings by a myriad of fellow sufferers from bibliomania. Among these are such contemporary authors as Philip Roth, John Updike, Umberto Eco, Robertson Davies, Nicholas Basbanes, and Anna Quindlen; earlier twentieth-century authors Christopher Morley, A. Edward Newton, Holbrook Jackson, A.S.W. Rosenbach, William Dana Orcutt, Robert Benchley, and William Targ; and classic authors such as Michel de Montaigne, Gustave Flaubert, Petrarch, and Anatole France.

Here also are entertaining and humorous lists such as the "Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty Times or More," the great books included in Clifton Fadiman and John Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan, Jonathan Yardley's "Ten Books That Shaped the American Character," "Ten Memorable Books That Never Existed," "Norman Mailer's Ten Favorite American Novels," and Anna Quindlen's "Ten Big Thick Wonderful Books That Could Take You a Whole Summer to Read (but Aren't Beach Books)."

Rounding out the anthology are selections on bookstores, book clubs, and book care, plus book cartoons, and a specially prepared "Bibliobibliography" of books about books.

Whether you consider yourself a bibliomaniac or just someone who likes to read, A Passion for Books will provide you with a lifetime's worth of entertaining, informative, and pleasurable reading on your favorite subject--the love of books.

A Sampling of the Literary Treasures in A Passion for Books

Umberto Eco's "How to Justify a Private Library," dealing with the question everyone with a sizable library is inevitably asked: "Have you read all these books?"

Anatole Broyard's "Lending Books," in which he notes, "I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock."

Gustave Flaubert's Bibliomania, the classic tale of a book collector so obsessed with owning a book that he is willing to kill to possess it.

A selection from Nicholas Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, on the innovative arrangements Samuel Pepys made to guarantee that his library would survive "intact" after his demise.

Robert Benchley's "Why Does Nobody Collect Me"--in which he wonders why first editions of books by his friend Ernest Hemingway are valuable while his are not, deadpanning "I am older than Hemingway and have written more books than he has."

George Hamlin Fitch's extraordinarily touching "Comfort Found in Good Old Books," on the solace he found in books after the death of his son.

A selection from Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life, in which she shares her optimistic view on the role of reading and the future of books in the computer age.

Robertson Davies's "Book Collecting," on the difference between those who collect rare books because they're valuable and those who collect them because they love books, ultimately making it clear which is "the collector who really matters."
.
Price: $7.65 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Written for consumer banking or similar financial institutions staffs, Risk Management in Consumer Financial Institutions by Jesus Cornejo shares the brass tacks of the consumer finance industry products and services. Surprisingly accessible and written in laymen's terms, this guide is clear, succinct, and practical. Broken into three main sections with a strong focus on risk management, readers will learn essential methodologies and key variables of risk management in consumer financial institutions, such as Portfolio Management techniques and Credit & Collections state-of-art processes..
Price: $36.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

"Managing a Consumer Lending Business" summarizes the lore and the knowledge of the business as the new century begins. It covers many subjects a good manager should know: the importance of how to attract enough good accounts to offset the inevitable bad accounts that every lender will get, controlling line sizes, encouraging use by good customers/discouraging or controlling the bad customers, managing profitability with predictability, if he or she is to effectively run a high-volume consumer business..
Price: $50.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Securities Finance, editors Frank Fabozzi and Steven Mann assemble a group of prominent practitioners in the securities finance industry to provide readers with an enhanced understanding of the various arrangements in the securities finance market. Divided into three comprehensive parts—Securities Lending, Bond Financing via the Repo Market, and Equity Financing Alternatives to Securities Lending—this book covers a wide range of securities finance issues, including alternative routes to the securities lending market, evaluating risks in securities lending transactions, U.S. and European repo markets, dollar rolls and their impact on MBS valuation and strategies, derivatives for financing equity positions and equity repos, and more. Filled with in-depth insight and expert advice, Securities Finance contains the information readers need to succeed in this rapidly expanding market..
Price: $50.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]