Corporate Finance
Chapter One
What is corporate finance?
To whet your appetite ...
The primary role of the financial manager is to ensure that his company has a
sufficient supply of capital.
The financial manager is at the crossroads of the real economy, with its
industries and services, and the world of finance, with its various financial markets
and structures.
There are two ways of looking at the financial manager's role:
a buyer of capital who seeks to minimise its cost, i.e., the traditional view;
a seller of financial securities who tries to maximise their value. This is the view
we will develop throughout this book. It corresponds, to a greater or lesser
extent, to the situation that exists in a capital market economy, as opposed to a
credit-based economy.
At the risk of oversimplifying, we will use the following terminology in this book:
The financial manager or Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is responsible for financing
the enterprise and acts as an intermediary between the financial system's
institutions and markets, on the one hand, and the enterprise, on t ... read full excerpt from Corporate Finance: Theory & Practice ebook
