venerdì 5 febbraio 2010

If they didn't understand it already, executives and corporate managers have learned one huge lesson over the past couple of years: macroeconomics matters. Interest rates. Exchange rates. Trade deficits. The Gross Domestic Product. Inflation. All of these can affect a company's bottom line by influencing the cost and availability of money, goods, and services.

Macroeconomic forces can conspire to make business more difficult, but they can also present opportunities to executives who know how to, for example, read a country's national income accounts and balance of payments.
For explanations on how the economic system works and what history teaches us, business readers might turn to A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know, by Harvard Business School professor David A. Moss, who holds graduate degrees from Yale in economics and history.
The book, which grew out of background notes Moss wrote for his MBA students, is a nontechnical, accessible explanation of broad concepts such as "output," "money," and "expectations"—as well as more specific ones ranging from real exchange rates to total factor productivity.

Moss also includes numerous tools for interpreting big-picture economic developments. We asked Moss to talk about the book and some of the events now taking place on the macroeconomic horizon.

Read more: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6332.html