Reviews for The Ambulatory Patient Group Operations Manual

The average rating for The Ambulatory Patient Group Operations Manual based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-24 00:00:00 Andrew Rogers The essays in here are of varying quality, and are certainly only for dedicated financial types, but on the whole they present a fascinating look at the nature of different types of financial systems. I will discuss just a few of the most interesting articles here. The first article is from economic heavyweights Michael Bordo, Hugh Rockoff, and Angela Redish, who, using a few simple metrics, show that the Canadian banking system has worked more efficiently than the American system over the past hundred-odd years. They demonstrate that Canadian depositors have on the whole received significantly higher interest rates than Americans, that their loans have been slightly cheaper, and that there have been significantly fewer bank failures (only one major one, the Home Bank in 1923, compared to hundreds in America). They also show, however, that this divergence has narrowed, due partially to regulatory changes in both countries approximating the other: while Canada only got deposit insurance in 1967, America only started imitating Canada's branch banking rules in the 1980s. Two papers, one by Charles Calomiris and Daniel M.G. Raff, and another by Brad DeLong and Carlos Ramierez, both explain how the securities market reforms of 1933 and 1934 may not have accomplished what they intended. The first shows that investment bankers "spreads" on new public offerings of stocks and bonds did not decline much from Brandeis's 1912 screed against the "money trust" through the early 1940s, but that after that better technology started to gradually lower rates that regulation could not. The later paper suggests that after those reforms eliminated the ability of investment bankers to influence corporations, the placing of a banker on a corporate board no longer was a signal of trust and therefore stock purchasers had less information from bankers which companies they trusted and which they didn't. Perhaps the best paper in the bunch is John A. James's description of the fall of the commercial paper market. The commercial paper market, where companies issued short-term paper (usually about 6 months) based only on their own good name, was a peculiar relic of the United States banking system after the Civil War. This system did not allow banks to loan more than 10% of their capital to any one company. Combined with the American system of "unit banking" that created thousands of tiny banks across the country, this meant many of the biggest companies could not finance with direct loans from local banks. In the monetary-instability of the Civil War era, companies began emitting thousands of short-term bills that banks purchased in tiny bits across the country. The Federal Reserve was basically created in 1913 to make this massive commercial paper market more liquid. James shows, however, how rapidly that market dried up after the Reserve was created. He attributes that to a wave of post-World War I bank mergers, especially in 1924, which allowed companies to start funding their operations without emitting paper, but by engaging in long-term relationships with these new, larger banks. This combined with higher rates on loaning to stocks during the stock market boom, meant the market the Fed was created for disappeared soon after it started, and it had to expand mainly into what it does today, government bond selling and buying. Though this is for specialists, and some of the math frankly flew above my head, its a great book for exploring how finance effects the nature of economies and vice versa.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-14 00:00:00 Jeremy Corcer Excellent coverage of almost all common fixed income instruments. The chapters are logically organized and contain a good mix of theoretical and practical knowledge. Although it might have been useful to include more mathematics. I actually have the 8th edition of this book.