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Financial English | |
Publisher: Thomson Heinle
Authors: Ian Mackenzie
€25.20
ISBN 9783191229245
With the banks of the world in crisis, this month seems an appropriate time to review a book that can help readers keep track of the drama as it happens. Financial English will help you to understand what things like debt derivitives are, and how the 'carry trade' can lead to individuals or even entire countries going bankrupt. Finance is now on the front page of every newspaper, so this book has come at an excellent time for the general reader, as well as anyone who is considering a career in finance, or who already works there, but needs to know the English and US terms for financial products and activities. (This book also comes with a 1000 word mini-dictionary of financial expressions.)
The book has 159 pages, and is subdivided into seven sections – the seventh is the dictionary we have already referred to. The sections deal with finance both at the business level and at the banking level. So we have, for example sections on Accounting, Money and banking and Company finance. Each section is sub-divided into up to 18 mini-sections which usually take up a double page or so. For example, the section on company finance has mini-sections on bonds, on securities and on takeovers among others. Illustrations are mainly black and white cartoons, many featuring 'Alex', a cynical cartoon banker who appears daily in the Telegraph newspaper. The text uses the standard methods of introducing and testing vocabulary, and at times it feels like a financial FCE (First Certificate of English) with long reading exercises, gap fills, and 'true or false' sentences. There are also some more fun exercises, such as arranging vocabulary into columns and word search games. The dictionary has an appendix telling the different terms used by UK and US financial dealers. So a 'barometer stock' in England (a stock that shows how the rest of the market is behaving) is a 'bellwether stock' in the USA. Likewise it helps to know that English 'mutual funds' become 'unit trusts' as they cross the Atlantic.
Who is this book for? Anyone who has ever wondered what a 'bearer share' might be (a share that is the property of whoever has it in his possession at the time) or what a base/prime lending rate is will find the answers in this book. Teachers with an interest in bringing their students up to date on the world financial crisis might ask for this to go into the school library. And of course, anyone working in the financial sector, whether as a banker, financial reporter or even an accountant will find the necessary definitions and explanations of financial English in this book. It is not cheap, but after financiers have lost an estimated 18 trillion dollars - and counting - what difference will another 26 Euros make?
Verdict: Learn what the bankers didn't about finance.
Assessment 8/10