"Interviews with experienced financiers in global financial centers reveal their strategic network behavior which they employ to access social capital. This enhances their performance. Referrals were used to acquire Interviewees. This methodology provided access to top financiers in the financial centers of London, Zurich, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, and Mumbai. Digitally recorded interviews focused on financiers' network behavior in corporate and investment banking, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, fund management, real estate investment, insurance, and private banking. Extensive quotes are mechanisms to explain how financiers behave. Social network theory supplies the lens to interpret that behavior. Financiers face a dilemma. They need sophisticated knowledge to perform their jobs but accessing that knowledge demands extensive time. This detracts from their performance. Their networks help resolve that dilemma. Financiers use face-to-face interactions in formal and informal meetings to acquire knowledge resources and build relationships. Alumni ties and organizational memberships constitute components of current networks, but financiers disagree about their usefulness. They devise sophisticated network strategies to initiate a contact. Non-face-to-face and face-to-face mechanisms help build and maintain relationships. In every financial center and sector, trust is the foundation of relationships. Financiers incorporate advances in telecommunications, changes in the workplace, and reconsideration of approaches to long-distance travel into their network behavior. Fintech is an adjunct to financiers' practice. The interviewees play important roles in their respective sectors; therefore, the results reveal the 'best practices' of financiers"--

Farms that were on poor soil and distant from markets declined, whereas other farms successfully adjusted production as rural and urban markets expanded and as Midwestern agricultural products flowed eastward after 1840. Rural and urban demand for manufactures in the East supported diverse industrial development and prosperous rural areas and burgeoning cities supplied increasing amounts of capital for investment.

Publisher description

Hong Kong has remained the global metropolis for Asia since its founding in the 1840s following the Opium Wars between Britain and China. David Meyer traces its vibrant history from the arrival of the foreign trading firms, when it was established as one of the leading Asian business centres, to its celebrated handover to China in 1997. Throughout this period, Hong Kong has been prominent as a pivotal meeting place of the Chinese and foreign social networks of capital and as such has been China's window on to the world economy, dominating other financial centers such as Singapore and Tokyo. Looking into the future, the author presents an optimistic view of Hong Kong in the twenty-first century, challenging those who predict its decline under Chinese rule. This accessible and broad-ranging look at the story of Hong Kong's success will interest anyone concerned with its past, present and future.

This classic text retains the superb scholarship of the first edition in a thoroughly revised and accessibly written new edition. With both new and updated essays by distinguished American and Canadian authors, the book provides a comprehensive historical overview of the formation and growth of North American regions from European exploration and colonization to the second half of the twentieth century. Collectively the contributors explore the key themes of acquisition of geographical knowledge, cultural transfer and acculturation, frontier expansion, spatial organization of society, resource exploitation, regional and national integration, and landscape change. With six new chapters, redrawn maps, a new introduction that explores scholarly trends in historical geography since publication of the first edition, and a new final chapter guiding students to the basic sources for historical geographic enquiry, North America will be an indispensable text in historical geography courses.