Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies - Michael Taillard - Страница 13

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.

This definition guides you in two primary directions regarding what makes corporate finance unique:

 It tells you that corporate finance is a critical aspect of human life as an intermediary that allows people to transfer value among themselves.

 It tells you how groups of people interact as a single unit, a corporation, and how decisions are made on behalf of the corporation by people called managers.

Corporate finance is far more than a study about money. Money is just the unit of measure people use to calculate everything and make sense of it numerically, to compare things in absolute terms rather than relative ones. Corporate finance is a unique study that measures value. Once you accept that, it becomes apparent that everything in the world has value. Therefore, you can use corporate finance to measure everything around you that relates to a corporation, directly or indirectly (which, in the vast majority of the world, is everything).