Explain the scope of finance?

Micah Schwarcz: Finance is often defined as management of money or “funds” management. Modern finance, however, is a family of business activity that includes the origination, marketing, and management of cash and money surrogates through a variety of capital accounts, instruments, and markets created for transacting and trading assets, liabilities, and risks. Finance is conceptualized, structured, and regulated by a complex system of power relations within political economies across state and global markets. Three overarching divisions exist within the academic discipline of finance and its related practices: 1) personal finance: the finances of individuals and families concerning household income and expenses, credit and debt management, saving and investing, and income security in later life, 2) corporate finance: the finances of for-profit organizations including corporations, trusts, partnerships and other entities, and 3) public finance: the financial affairs ! of domestic and international governments and other public entities.[4] [5] Areas of study within (and the interactions among) these three levels affect all dimensions of social life: politics, taxes, art, religion, housing, health care, poverty and wealth, consumption, sports, transportation, labor force participation, media, and education. While each has a vast accumulated literature of its own, the effects of macro and micro level financing that mold and impact these and other domains of human and societal life typically have been treated by researchers as “policy,” “welfare,” “work,” “stratification,” and so forth, or have been largely unexplored. Recent research in "behavioral finance" is promising, albeit a relative newcomer, to the existing body of financial research that focuses primarily on measurement. Loans have become increasingly packaged for resale, meaning that an investor buys the loan (debt) from a bank or directly from a corporation. Bonds ! are debt instruments sold to investors for organizations such ! as companies, governments or charities.[6] The investor can then hold the debt and collect the interest or sell the debt on a secondary market. Banks are the main facilitators of funding through the provision of credit, although private equity, mutual funds, hedge funds, and other organizations have become important as they invest in various forms of debt. Financial assets, known as investments, are financially managed with careful attention to financial risk management to control financial risk. Financial instruments allow many forms of securitized assets to be traded on securities exchanges such as stock exchanges, including debt such as bonds as well as equity in publicly traded corporations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finance...Show more