Product Description

we have been trying to update pictures on this title and others and are frankly finding it a complete nightmare. this title is in your top 1000 books in the uk and now its picture has disappeared...please can you advise asao what we can do to restire this regards james

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3308 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 242 pages

From the Publisher
The global financial crisis has made what goes on in the City of London's financial markets more important and relevant than ever.

What is the credit crunch and sub-prime lending? What are toxic tranches and SIVs?

If you're working in or are thinking of working in the City, this book gives you the answers.

Designed to be a quick and easy read, it explains what everything is and how it all connects. It gives you the whole picture.

As a city insider says: 'This is all I've ever needed to know in almost 30 years of working in and around the City'.

From the Author
It’s your first day at work. Your clothes are starchy new. Your shoes are stiff and pinch your feet. You don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going. Everyone else seems to be so much more knowledgeable and confident. Everyone must be looking at you.
There goes that City new bug, they must be thinking.
Whatever you do or say, you don’t want to look an idiot.
You don’t want to torpedo your career – which stretches ahead of you, the weeks, the months, the years – on day one.
Relax. Read this book.
If this is you – and, don’t worry, we’ve all been there – this book tells you what you need to know about the City, and gives you the confidence to ask questions to find out more.
Maybe that isn’t you.
Maybe you’re walking round the City’s dark alleyways. You pause, look through an office window and see people at monitors. What are they doing?
This book tells you.
Maybe you’re at Canary Wharf, craning your neck to peer up at the tall towers. What kind of businesses need that much space?
The answers are in the next few pages.
Maybe you’re at a dinner party and the attractive person next to you says they’re ‘an investment banker’ or ‘a fixed-income trader’ or – even worse – ‘a forex trader who does cable’. What can you say that will impress the pants off them?
Read this book. It could change your love life.
Maybe you’re an armchair investor, scanning the personal finance pages of the Sunday papers. You find they’re written in gobbledygook.
This book cracks the code.
Maybe you’re studying. You need to know about the City for your assessment. Maybe you’re wondering what your studies will lead to. Maybe the City.
Read this book. Sorted.
Above all, if you’re working in, or are thinking of working in, or are thinking of having anything to do with, the City, and feel overawed and stupid because you don’t understand it, then this is the book for you.
Who this book is for?
This book is aimed principally at young, front-line, fee-earning professionals in the City – bankers, brokers, fund managers, lawyers, accountants, insurance brokers, surveyors, actuaries, patent attorneys, PRs, recruiters and headhunters, among others, starting out on their careers.
But it’s also for support staff such as secretaries, PAs and business managers as well as people in mid-office and back-office functions such as Accounts, HR, IT, Business Development, PR, compliance, settlement and custody – in other words, professionals who are specialists in their own jobs but need to understand what the fee-earners do in order to support them in their roles. That’s because for City institutions to compete these days, all of their people need to understand the business.
But this book is designed to be simple. So it’s also for students at school, college or university who are thinking of working in the City or need to understand it for their studies. This book isn’t restricted to the young and inexperienced, either. The course on which it’s based has been delivered by me to a roomful of regulators. Nor just to those in the City. Many people based outside London need to know what goes on in the City because it affects their work or their clients or their pensions and savings.

About the Author
Chris Stoakes has spent his career in the City as a lawyer, journalist, partner in a law firm, management consultant, marketing director and, latterly, in charge of technical training at an international law firm. He has written for most of the quality national newspapers and has unique record in making the complex easily understood. He is also author of the best-selling All You Need to Know about Commercial Awareness - also available from Longtail.

Customer Reviews

Invaluable resource for grads and interns
I brought this book when applying for jobs in the City so that I would sound like I was informed. The book is attractively laid out and certainly not dry - the text is a joy to read and doesn't bore you to death like some others. It has everything I needed so that I didn't embarrass myself on my first day, and more importantly, I still use it and refer back to it now that I'm at work. It's not written for business guru's - its for students, grads and interns who don't have any real practical knowledge of how the world works (that doesn't mean that its basic though). A sound investment.

Informative, easy to digest, and, above all, interesting!
I came across this book when I was just starting out in the City and it helped me immensely. The author's conversational tone makes for a great read, and the book really does pack everything you need to know into 224 relaxed pages. I had a muddled understanding of how everything connected in the financial market, but this book completely demystified everything. I can now converse with City types about derivatives, hedge funds and securitisation without breaking a sweat!

I would highly recommend it to anyone working in the City - from newbies who are starting out and need to know what all the unfamiliar jargon means, to those who've been at it for a while but need to brush up or clarify something. This book will answer all the questions you were too embarrassed to ask without being patronising or going all 'boring textbook' on you.

Definitely a must-read.

Whether it's "all" depends on who "you" are - but excellent for most outsiders and debutantes
Chris Stoakes trained as a solicitor at Freshfields ( one of the "magic circle" City law firms), was marketing partners in a medium-sized City firm, and is now Head of Legal Training at Lovells (another very big one). In this the 2008/09 second edition, which seems to have been updated following the event of the "credit crunch" in early 2008 (references to sub-prime mortgages, for example), he provides an overview, a context and an often humorous analogy for just about every financial transaction in "the City", including the insurance market. The book is based on a series of training sessions that he has delivered over the years.

I came at this as a reasonably well informed outsider (I have never worked in the City of London, and probably never will) and found this is an excellent book to improve on my broad understanding of the financial markets. Whether it would be right for you will depend on how sophisticated your current understanding is. Stoakes places his book as follows: he starts by saying "I've had to cut corners, leave things out and tell a few fibs in the interests of getting the message across quickly and simply". At the end, under "Where Next?" he recommends The Economist's books on The City, Wall Street and "The Financial Markets" - written by Richard Roberts and Marc Levinson respectively - as "the next step up". He also gives specific recommendations for particular areas, such as Finance & banking, Investment Banking, Commercial banking, Economics, Risk etc.

If you want to be able to differentiate senior debt from junior or subordinated debt, know the principle of mezzanine debt, understand the difference between a merchant and an investment bank, or understand the difference between LIBOR and the base rate, this is the book for you. For my own purposes I see little need to delve deeper, although I may well read Stoakes' other book, "All you need to know about Commercial Awareness" in due course.