Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies онлайн

17 страница из 96

 Sentiment indices: These are measures of how people feel about the economy. They aren’t entirely accurate nor always helpful, but they do help give us an idea about how people feel about the economy, which does tend to be tied to other hard data. Consumer sentiment, for example, tends to be down when employment is down or when people don’t feel confident in their own employment. These factors tend to influence stocks nearly as significantly as other, more solid, indicators.

Corporate finance plays a very interesting role in all societies. Finance is the study of relationships between people: how they distribute themselves and their resources, place value on things, and exchange that value among each other. Because that’s the case, finance (all finance) is the science of decision-making. This is the process of studying human behavior and determining how people make decisions regarding what they do with their lives and the things they own. Corporate finance, as a result, studies decision-making in terms of what is done by groups of people working together in a professional manner.