Finance (Coursework Sample)

Finance
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Finance
Discuss four major issues from the real world that occurred over the semester or academic year that relate to your financial management course?
During this semester, there are a lot of events that took place and relate to the financial management course. In most cases, the occurrences have a direct relationship to the field of finance whereas in the others, they have an indirect relationship. Such occurrences thus require the sound knowledge of finance so that they can be interpreted clearly. They include IPOs, takeovers and mergers, rise and falls in the share prices of companies, dividend announcements, large bond issues, expansion and fund-raising among others.
First, the UK government sold off its Royal Mail, which operates as a post office at a very low price. The price was less than the required to attract investors. However, its share price rose dramatically. Additionally, Twitter was listed for its first time during the first term, and also its share price rose. However, the share price of Facebook also recovered from the bad times of the previous year, when the US was recovering from the recession.
Furthermore, the Irish Stock Market Index (ISEQ) also recovered as the Irish forecasts of GDP improved. However, the shares of banks and Independent Newspapers remained without worth. During the period, the European Central Bank kept its key interest rate at 0.25%. This rate is historical and is taunted as being able to benefit the cost of capital of businesses, and hence some projects will be able to have a positive NPV. In addition, the Irish Government and Irish Banks remained with paying a significant risk premium. Therefore, this means that the Irish Banks charged its customers a higher interest rate on loans that what German lenders had to pay. On this note, Irish Government had a yield to redemption (IRR) of about 3.5% for bonds of 10 years, higher than that of German. Towards the end of December, Fiat of Italy took over the remaining shares of America’s Chrysler. This ended the saga where Germany’s Daimler and America’s Chrysler had merged unsuccessfully. Still during first semester, the Nobel prize for economics was shared between an advocate for Efficient Market Hypothesis (Fama) and an academic who highlighted its shortfalls (Shiller) /economic-current-events.php
In the second semester, the share price of UK’s Royal Mail. The UK government was criticized for its decision to sell the company cheaply. Twitter was listed, and its share price rose but towards the end of the semester it fell. The Chinese giant Alibaba had an issue regarding its listing in N.Y after it did not meet the H.K ownership regulations. Also, the Irish accounting package company Big Red Cloud announced its listing in London and Dublin.
About the Debt chapter, the Irish Government bond yields fell below 3% as unemployment rate also fell. Additionally, the GDP/GNP forecasts improved. Additionally, the ECB made its interest rate to be at 0.25% as there might be some thought that the EU might suffer deflation. However, the credit rating of the Bank of Ireland was downgraded. Also, there was an announcement by Apple on the pl...