金融英语课件李丽 马跃ISBN 9787810788175 PPTchapter_1.pptVIP

Chapter 1 An Overview of the Financial System Chapter 1 An Overview of the Financial System Five Parts of the Financial System We use money to pay for our purchases and to store wealth. We use financial instruments to transfer resources from savers to investors and to transfer risk to those who are best equipped to bear it. Financial markets allows us to buy and sell financial instruments quickly and cheaply. Financial institutions provide a number of services, including access to the financial markets and collection of information about prospective borrowers to ensure they are creditworthy. Central banks monitor and stabilize the economy. Evolution of Money Money once consisted of gold and silver coins, which were eventually replaced by paper currency, which today is being eclipsed by electronic funds transfers. Methods of accessing means of payment have changed dramatically as well. Customarily, people obtained currency from bank tellers when they cashed their paychecks or withdrew their savings from the local bank. Today, they can get cash from practically any ATM anywhere in the world. To pay their bills, people once wrote checks and put them in the mail, then waited for their monthly bank statements to make sure the transactions had been processed correctly. Today, payments can be made automatically, and account holders can check the transactions at any time on their bank’s web site. Evolution of Financial Instruments In the last few centuries, investors could buy individual stocks through stockbrokers, but the transactions were costly. Furthermore, putting together a portfolio of even a small number of stocks and bonds was extremely time-consuming; just collecting the information necessary to evaluate a potential investment was a daunting task. As a result, investing was an activity reserved for the wealthy. Today, financial institutions offer people with as little as $1,000 to purchase shares in mutual funds