Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁaŋkfʊɐ̯t am ˈmaɪ̯n]) is the largest city in the German state of Hessen and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2014 population of 717,624 within its administrative boundaries. The urban area called Frankfurt Rhein-Main has a population of 2,221,910. The city is at the centre of the larger Frankfurt Rhine-Main Metropolitan Region which has a population of 5,500,000 and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region. Since the enlargement of the European Union in 2013, the geographic centre of the EU is about 40 km (25 mi) to the east.

Frankfurt is a centre for commerce, culture, education, tourism and web traffic. Messe Frankfurt is one of the world's largest trade fairs at 578,000 square metres and ten exhibition halls. Major trade fairs include the Frankfurt Motor Show, the world's largest motor show, and the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest book fair.

Frankfurt is home to many cultural and educational institutions, including the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University and Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, many museums (e.g. Städel, Naturmuseum Senckenberg, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Goethe House) and two major botanical gardens: the Palmengarten, which is Germany's largest, and the Botanical Garden of Goethe University.

Eugene Fama

Eugene Francis "Gene" Fama (/ˈfɑːmə/; born February 14, 1939) is an American economist and Nobel laureate in Economics, often referred to as "The Father of Finance", best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing and stock market behaviour.

He is currently Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 2013 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Robert Shiller and Lars Peter Hansen. The Research Papers in Economics project ranked him as the seventh-most influential economist of all-time based on his academic contributions.

Early life

Fama was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Angelina (née Sarraceno) and Francis Fama. All of his grandparents were immigrants from Italy. Fama is a Malden Catholic High School Athletic Hall of Fame honoree. He earned his undergraduate degree in Romance Languages magna cum laude in 1960 from Tufts University where he was also selected as the school’s outstanding student-athlete.

Kenneth French

Kenneth Ronald "Ken" French (born March 10, 1954) is the Roth Family Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College. He has previously been a faculty member at MIT, the Yale School of Management, and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is most famous for his work on asset pricing with Eugene Fama. They wrote a series of papers, that cast doubt on the validity of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), which posits that a stock's beta alone should explain its average return. These papers describe two factors above and beyond a stock's market beta which can explain differences in stock returns: market capitalization and "value". They also offer evidence that a variety of patterns in average returns, often labeled as "anomalies" in past work, can be explained with their Fama–French three-factor model.

Along with contributing articles to major journals such as the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Business, French is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an advisory editor at the Journal of Financial Economics, and a former associate editor of the Journal of Finance and the Review of Financial Studies.

Asset management

Asset management, broadly defined, refers to any system that monitors and maintains things of value to an entity or group. It may apply to both tangible assets such as buildings and to intangible assets such as human capital, intellectual property, and goodwill and financial assets. Asset management is a systematic process of deploying, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of assets cost-effectively.

The term is most commonly used in the financial world to describe people and companies that manage investments on behalf of others. These include, for example, investment managers that manage the assets of a pension fund.

Alternative views of asset management in the engineering environment are: the practice of managing assets to achieve the greatest return (particularly useful for productive assets such as plant and equipment), and the process of monitoring and maintaining facilities systems, with the objective of providing the best possible service to users (appropriate for public infrastructure assets).

James Rickards

James G. Rickards is an American lawyer. He is a regular commentator on finance, and is the author of The New York Times bestseller Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis, published in 2011, and The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System, published in 2014.

Biography

Rickards graduated from Lower Cape May Regional High School in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1969. He graduated from The Johns Hopkins University in 1973 with a B.A. degree with honors and in 1974, from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. with an M.A. in international economics. He received his Juris Doctor from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an LL.M in taxation from New York University School of Law.

As general counsel for the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), he was the principal negotiator in the 1998 bailout of LTCM by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Rickards worked on Wall Street for 35 years. Rickards was the senior managing director for market intelligence at Omnis, Inc., a consulting firm. On March 24, 2009, Rickards presented his view at a symposium at Johns Hopkins, that the U.S. dollar was facing imminent hyperinflation and was vulnerable to attack from foreign governments through the accumulation of gold and the establishment of a new global currency.