Thursday, April 28, 2005

A French Companion
Author:Helen Caradon

A Handbook for English Speakers Travelling and Living in France [Helen Caradon] Are you planning to move to France, or have you just done so? Would you like some help with understanding what's going on, with finding a place to stay or to buy, with choosing a reliable builder, with changing the gas bottle, with meeting and talking to French people in the language they actually speak? This handbook has been written specially for people who travel to France regularly, and for those who are planning to move here or have recently done so.

It's packed with inside information and tips on lots of practical matters, PLUS vocabulary lists and model conversations in real everyday French for situations you are likely to find yourself in.

Just a few of the topics covered: polite greetings, asking for help and directions; local shopping, using a French bank account; staying safe on the roads, getting your car fixed; inviting and visiting French friends, talking about the family; making the most of the phone and post systems; describing a malaise to the doctor, getting proper health care; choosing and renovating a property, avoiding potential pitfalls; dealing with officialdom and understanding officialese; planning and managing a garden in a warmer climate.

Above all "A French Companion" is designed to add to the pleasures of living in this weird and wonderful country, and to pass on the insights and tips that will help those who come here, either as visitors or for the longer term, to enjoy and to become part of the local scene.
How to Create a Jardin Paysan
Author:Louise Ranck

This is a book about creating a traditional, rural French-style garden which will have a timeless charm. It's an antidote to the garden makeover, to suburban style manicured lawns, or ranch fencing and tarmac driveways, and should help to avoid the costly mistake of a beautifully restored house sitting in an garden that looks more like a business park somewhere off the M25.

It's about organic gardens, it's about creating natural habitats for birds and insects, and making the garden a seamless link between your house and the natural world of the French countryside on the other side of your garden fence. It includes some old techniques that have been passed on from one generation to another, but which work, and which will help you look at gardening in a new way.

It's not so much a manual of gardening, as a guide to help you to tame nature (but only slightly) to create something of abundance and beauty around a home in France – or even in the UK.

The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century
Author:Robert J. Shiller

In his best-selling Irrational Exuberance, Robert Shiller cautioned that society's obsession with the stock market was fueling the volatility that has since made a roller coaster of the financial system. Less noted was Shiller's admonition that our infatuation with the stock market distracts us from more durable economic prospects. These lie in the hidden potential of real assets, such as income from our livelihoods and homes. But these ''ordinary riches,'' so fundamental to our well-being, are increasingly exposed to the pervasive risks of a rapidly changing global economy. This compelling and important new book presents a fresh vision for hedging risk and securing our economic future.

Shiller describes six fundamental ideas for using modern information technology and advanced financial theory to temper basic risks that have been ignored by risk management institutions--risks to the value of our jobs and our homes, to the vitality of our communities, and to the very stability of national economies. Informed by a comprehensive risk information database, this new financial order would include global markets for trading risks and exploiting myriad new financial opportunities, from inequality insurance to intergenerational social security. Just as developments in insuring risks to life, health, and catastrophe have given us a quality of life unimaginable a century ago, so Shiller's plan for securing crucial assets promises to substantially enrich our condition.

Once again providing an enormous service, Shiller gives us a powerful means to convert our ordinary riches into a level of economic security, equity, and growth never before seen. And once again, what Robert Shiller says should be read and heeded by anyone with a stake in the economy.
The World's Clearing Houses
(Single User CD Licence: CD ROM 2-year electronic subscription - includes initial CD plus 3 electronic updates at 6-monthly intervals.)

Along with our sponsor PricewaterhouseCoopers, FOW bring you the new 2004 edition of The World's Clearing Houses. Launched in 1993, The World's Clearing Houses covers vital developments such as: exchange mergers and global alliances, the role of derivatives clearing houses in OTC clearing, and the increasing trend for the same organisation to be responsible for both securities and derivatives clearing operations.

Our focus continues to be on the role and procedures or organisations, which act as the central counterparty for securities, derivatives or OTC transactions.

Irrational Exuberance
Author:Robert J. Shiller

In this timely and prescient update of his celebrated 2000 bestseller Irrational Exuberance, Robert J. Shiller returns to the topic that gained him international fame: market volatility. Shiller breaks new ground in this second edition by laying out in even clearer and starker terms the market excesses that continue to destabilize the economy and disrupt our lives.

Having predicted the stock market collapse that began just one month after the first edition was published, he now expands the book to cover other markets that have become volatile, particularly the recently red-hot housing market. He includes a full chapter on domestic and international housing prices in historical perspective.

Shiller amasses impressive evidence to support his argument that the recent housing market boom bears many similarities to the stock market bubble of the late 1990s, and may eventually be followed by declining home prices for years to come. After stocks plummeted when the bubble burst in 2000, investors moved their money into housing. This precipitated the inflated real estate prices not only in America, but around the world, Shiller maintains. Hence, irrational exuberance did not disappear-it merely reappeared in other settings.

Building on the original edition, Shiller draws out the psychological origins of volatility in financial markets, this time folding real estate into his analysis. He broadens the evidence that investing in capital markets of all kinds in the modern free-market economy is inherently unstable-subject to the profoundly human influences captured in Alan Greenspan's now-famous phrase, "irrational exuberance."

The ultimate solution to this troubling condition, he maintains, would involve better-designed public institutions such as a revamped social security system, new forms of insurance to protect people's incomes and homes, and a broader array of investment options. As was true of its predecessor, the second edition of Irrational Exuberance is destined to be widely read, discussed, and debated.