Each and every type of business whether big or small needs insurance protection. Insurance is of equal importance for all business activities, assets and individuals working in it. Insurance capacity of a business firm depends upon its nature and size. There are number of risks all around us and we don’t know their time, date of their happening. So, to cover such events, insurance is needed.
Purchasing business insurance is very important task and such decisions are to be formulated properly. The business insurance should be of such type, which covers each and everything of your business. If the business needs were not properly investigated before taking or applying for business insurance, it would result into wastage of money or death of your company.
There different types of insurance policies available for your business include: Property insurance means protection of your assets or business properties from theft, natural calamities or physical damages. General liability insurance protects business proprietors and its operators from various liability coverages. Workers’ compensation insurance protects a business to wrap different job-related damages or sicknesses. Auto insurance is designed to insure business vehicles. The other type of business insurance includes health insurance, key person life insurance, business interruption insurance, excess liability coverage, employment practices liability coverage and travel insurance.
There are numerous providers of business insurance so, it becomes important to select best insurance company providing all insurance services under one roof and on cheap rates. A business firm has to pay insurance premium, which is based on the degree of risks involved. Firstly the insurance company appraises the situation and then decides the premium rates.
Author presents a website on business insurance. This website provides information about meaning of business insurance, types of business insurance and its importance. You can visit his site for more insurance guide
Spring wedding invitations can be among the most beautiful and most versatile, but it is important to shop carefully.
There are so many different kinds of wedding invitations on the market today, sold at so many different kinds of stores, that it can be difficult to choose the right ones.
In addition, modern technology has provided us with the ability to design, customize and even print our own unique wedding invitations in the convenience of our own home.
Using Off The Shelf Spring Wedding Invitations
Let’s begin by looking at the many choices for off the shelf spring wedding invitations.
These days, it seems like virtually every type of store, from department stores to party planning stores to office supply stores, has a selection of preprinted wedding invitations ready to buy and mail.
In addition, there are many internet retailers with an astounding selection of wedding invitations, so it should not be difficult to find wedding invitations.
Start Shopping Well In Advance
Finding just the right wedding invitations, however, can be quite a bit more difficult. With so many types of invitations to choose from it can be hard to find just the one that suits your own taste and style.
That is why it is so important to start shopping early, well in advance of the big day.
That is because you will not only need time to find the perfect spring wedding invitations but allow plenty of time for addressing and mailing them as well.
A great deal of wedding preparation, from booking the reception hall to hiring a caterer, will depend on how many wedding guests you are expecting, and it is the responses to your wedding invitations that will provide you with this vital information.
Personalize Your Spring Wedding Invitations
For those couples seeking more of a personal touch, there are a number of ways to personalize spring wedding invitations.
For many couples, adding a favorite poem, a favorite line from a song or a favorite scripture verse, can provide that extra special touch and transform a simple wedding invitation into a cherished keepsake.
Printing Your Own Invitations Or Hiring A Printer To Do It For You
Those couples who prefer to use personalized wedding invitations have two choices. The first choice is to hire a printer to have the invitations done, and this can be a good and cost effective choice if you can find a quality printer.
The second choice is to print your own personalized spring wedding invitations on your own home printer. This approach provides a great deal more control, of course, and makes it quite easy to add additional touches as you go.
In many cases, however, printing your own invitations will cost a bit more, so it is important to take the cost into account as well.
Shaunta Pleasant is a professional writer and editor on wedding topics. Visit my site to learn more about planning the perfect wedding at http://www.best-wedding-plan.com/spring_wedding_invitations.html.
Now that your website is up and running, it’s time to add
content. Fresh content will make your site interesting and
keep people (and search engine crawlers) coming back. In
order to achieve optimal web success, your site must be
informative, relevant and written the way that people read
the web. Here’s a few tips to get you started.
Get to the point–FAST. Just ask internet usability
consultant Jakob Nielsen. People don’t read the web, they
scan. It’s not like print, where you can meander your way to
the point. Online, you have but a nanosecond to prove you’re
legit. Nielsen says to use the “inverted pyramid method.”
for web content. Tell the point first, get to the supporting
info afterwards.
Find your inner voice. We want to hear you on your website,
not a text book or someone else. Get in touch with your
real-live human “voice.” Hello? Is anybody there? Show us
your humanity so we can relate to you. Don’t publish
anything that you haven’t completely written researched or
re-worked. Posting text to your website that’s meant for the
printed page is a no-no. People won’t read it, and worse,
they’ll make bad faces at you.
Use the least amount of words for what you have to say.
Listen, you’re not going to impress us by using big
technical words. In fact, when you use words we don’t
understand–I must say–you look stupid. Why? It’s easier to
write a story with 3000 words than it is to write the same
story in 300. It takes more thought, more planning, more
time to extract away the excess. Therefore, the writer who
uses less words to convey to same message is clearly the
winner.
Write to a person, not a group. When you are writing web
content especially, write to a person. Pretend like that
person is sitting right in front of you and write
conversationally. When you write to a person, it draws the
reader in and makes you look more human. It’s good for
connecting and bonding with your reader.
Don’t talk down to your readers. Though it’s true that most
of your readers will be reading at the 9th grade level, and
your content should be written accordingly, resist the urge
to talk down to your audience. Humble yourself. And
certainly don’t try to appear more knowledgeable with shop
talk. If you don’t know what your writing about, research it
more. Otherwise, your lack of knowledge will be transparent
even to a 9th grader.
Use small words with the least amount of syllables. This is
a basic web content premise. The fewer syllables that you
use, the less your web reader has to think to digest your
information. Try not to make your user think. Spoon feed the
information in the cleanest manner possible so they get your
meaning with the least amount of distractions. Don’t say
“successfully” when “well” will do. As with every rule,
there are exceptions.
Do not underline to make a point. Underlined words are It is
a convention on the web that underlined words are links. It
is irritating to click an underlined word when you think it
is a link. Do everything possible to keep your visitors from
being irritated, and to keep yourself from looking–well
let’s just say, from looking like you don’t know. Don’t
underline anything unless it is a link. Use bold to
accentuate your main points instead.
The tips above are by no means exhaustive. There are
gazillions of techniques and writing tricks that foster
online success. Wise is the web marketer who understands
that marketing your business online is a process that can
always improve, just like direct sales. Get these guidelines
under your belt and you’ll be a step closer to winning
clients, customers and respect online.
Jennifer Ryan of The Marketing Shop is a web promotions and
sales expert. Having earned numerous awards, recognition and
financial success in sales, Jennifer now sells online for
businesses worldwide. Using a variety of tools–web design,
copywriting, SEO, pay-per-click and web site conversion
enhancement–she creates Websites that Produce. Visit
http://www.the-marketing-shop.com today to sign up for her
monthly newsletter (generous with free tips and advice!).
In the future battlespace you may deploy hundreds of thousands of tiny micro-mechanical devices in swarms and send them to overwhelm your enemy. These little buggers will basically be mechanical insect size flying suicide bombers; picture an African Killer Bee Swarm taking down a Caribou in the wild? They could do it, but luckily Caribous live in colder climates.
But if these little units are robotic, well let’s just say your enemy does not have a prayer to get away. Remember the book “PREY” by Michael Crieghton? You are not the only ones, so did a lot of researchers from MIT and Berkeley too. And this concept has indeed caught the eye of the US Military now working on it.
Well if such a swarm of little tiny robotic insects is so powerful, then surely you enemy will build them too. Luckily I have designed several methods to defeat organic insect swarms controlled remotely and actual autonomous micro robotic man-made swarms as well. Now then what can we do once we have defeated these micro-mechanical flying swarm devices? Well let’s use them for spare parts. How so you ask?
Well simple really collect them via a vacuum unit, ionic attraction or magnet if possible and then take them to a micro-robotic re-assembly and recycling unit. None exist we must spend R and D money to create this now, because in the next two-decades we will need them to stay efficient.
Additionally they must clean the devices from the enemy and sterilize them incase they might have been carrying biological weapons agents, then very quickly disassemble them and categorically separate parts out. Then re-assembly with the needed parts from our arsenal and new communication re-configuring with the nodes and motes to insure they can complete our new mission. Then we send them back at the enemy. Serves them right to screw with us. Consider all this in 2006.
“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/
Tulipmania - this is the name coined for the first pyramid investment scheme in history.
In 1634, tulip bulbs were traded in a special exchange in Amsterdam. People used these bulbs as means of exchange and value store. They traded them and speculated in them. The rare black tulip bulbs were as valuable as a big mansion house. The craze lasted four years and it seemed that it would last forever. But this was not to be.
The bubble burst in 1637. In a matter of a few days, the price of tulip bulbs was slashed by 96%!
This specific pyramid investment scheme was somewhat different from the ones which were to follow it in human financial history elsewhere in the world. It had no “organizing committee”, no identifiable group of movers and shakers, which controlled and directed it. Also, no explicit promises were ever made concerning the profits which the investors could expect from participating in the scheme - or even that profits were forthcoming to them.
Since then, pyramid schemes have evolved into intricate psychological ploys.
Modern ones have a few characteristics in common:
First, they involve ever growing numbers of people. They mushroom exponentially into proportions that usually threaten the national economy and the very fabric of society. All of them have grave political and social implications.
Hundreds of thousands of investors (in a population of less than 3.5 million souls) were deeply enmeshed in the 1983 banking crisis in Israel.
This was a classic pyramid scheme: the banks offered their own shares for sale, promising investors that the price of the shares will only go up (sometimes by 2% daily). The banks used depositors’ money, their capital, their profits and money that they borrowed abroad to keep this impossible and unhealthy promise. Everyone knew what was going on and everyone was involved.
The Ministers of Finance, the Governors of the Central Bank assisted the banks in these criminal pursuits. This specific pyramid scheme - arguably, the longest in history - lasted 7 years.
On one day in October 1983, ALL the banks in Israel collapsed. The government faced such civil unrest that it was forced to compensate shareholders through an elaborate share buyback plan which lasted 9 years. The total indirect damage is hard to evaluate, but the direct damage amounted to 6 billion USD.
This specific incident highlights another important attribute of pyramid schemes: investors are promised impossibly high yields, either by way of profits or by way of interest paid. Such yields cannot be derived from the proper investment of the funds - so, the organizers resort to dirty tricks.
They use new money, invested by new investors - to pay off the old investors.
The religion of Islam forbids lenders to charge interest on the credits that they provide. This prohibition is problematic in modern day life and could bring modern finance to a complete halt.
It was against this backdrop, that a few entrepreneurs and religious figures in Egypt and in Pakistan established what they called: “Islamic banks”. These banks refrained from either paying interest to depositors - or from charging their clients interest on the loans that they doled out. Instead, they have made their depositors partners in fictitious profits - and have charged their clients for fictitious losses. All would have been well had the Islamic banks stuck to healthier business practices.
But they offer impossibly high “profits” and ended the way every pyramid ends: they collapsed and dragged economies and political establishments with them.
The latest example of the price paid by whole nations due to failed pyramid schemes is, of course, Albania 1997. One third of the population was heavily involved in a series of heavily leveraged investment plans which collapsed almost simultaneously. Inept political and financial crisis management led Albania to the verge of disintegration into civil war.
But why must pyramid schemes fail? Why can’t they continue forever, riding on the back of new money and keeping every investor happy, new and old?
The reason is that the number of new investors - and, therefore, the amount of new money available to the pyramid’s organizers - is limited. There are just so many risk takers. The day of judgement is heralded by an ominous mismatch between overblown obligations and the trickling down of new money. When there is no more money available to pay off the old investors, panic ensues. Everyone wants to draw money at the same time. This, evidently, is never possible - some of the money is usually invested in real estate or was provided as a loan. Even the most stable and healthiest financial institutions never put aside more than 10% of the money deposited with them.
Thus, pyramids are doomed to collapse.
But, then, most of the investors in pyramids know that pyramids are scams, not schemes. They stand warned by the collapse of other pyramid schemes, sometimes in the same place and at the same time. Still, they are attracted again and again as butterflies are to the fire and with the same results.
The reason is as old as human psychology: greed, avarice. The organizers promise the investors two things:
- that they could draw their money anytime that they want to and
- that in the meantime, they will be able to continue to receive high returns on their money.
People know that this is highly improbable and that the likelihood that they will lose all or part of their money grows with time. But they convince themselves that the high profits or interest payments that they will be able to collect before the pyramid collapses - will more than amply compensate them for the loss of their money. Some of them, hope to succeed in drawing the money before the imminent collapse, based on “warning signs”. In other words, the investors believe that they can outwit the organizers of the pyramid. The investors collaborate with the organizers on the psychological level: cheated and deceiver engage in a delicate ballet leading to their mutual downfall.
This is undeniably the most dangerous of all types of financial scandals. It insidiously pervades the very fabric of human interactions. It distorts economic decisions and it ends in misery on a national scale. It is the scourge of societies in transition.
The second type of financial scandals is normally connected to the laundering of capital generated in the “black economy”, namely: the income not reported to the tax authorities. Such money passes through banking channels, changes ownership a few times, so that its track is covered and the identities of the owners of the money are concealed. Money generated by drug dealings, illicit arm trade and the less exotic form of tax evasion is thus “laundered”.
The financial institutions which participate in laundering operations, maintain double accounting books. One book is for the purposes of the official authorities. Those agencies and authorities that deal with taxation, bank supervision, deposit insurance and financial liquidity are given access to this set of “engineered” books. The true record is kept hidden in another set of books. These accounts reflect the real situation of the financial institution: who deposited how much, when and under which conditions - and who borrowed what, when and under which conditions.
This double standard blurs the true situation of the institution to the point of no return. Even the owners of the institution begin to lose track of its activities and misapprehend its real standing.
Is it stable? Is it liquid? Is the asset portfolio diversified enough? No one knows. The fog enshrouds even those who created it in the first place. No proper financial control and audit is possible under such circumstances.
Less scrupulous members of the management and the staff of such financial bodies usually take advantage of the situation. Embezzlements are very widespread, abuse of authority, misuse or misplacement of funds. Where no light shines, a lot of creepy creatures tend to develop.
The most famous - and biggest - financial scandal of this type in human history was the collapse of the Bank for Credit and Commerce International LTD. (BCCI) in London in 1991. For almost a decade, the management and employees of this shady bank engaged in stealing and misappropriating 10 billion (!!!) USD. The supervision department of the Bank of England, under whose scrutinizing eyes this bank was supposed to have been - was proven to be impotent and incompetent. The owners of the bank - some Arab Sheikhs - had to invest billions of dollars in compensating its depositors.
The combination of black money, shoddy financial controls, shady bank accounts and shredded documents proves to be quite elusive. It is impossible to evaluate the total damage in such cases.
The third type is the most elusive, the hardest to discover. It is very common and scandal may erupt - or never occur, depending on chance, cash flows and the intellects of those involved.
Financial institutions are subject to political pressures, forcing them to give credits to the unworthy - or to forgo diversification (to give too much credit to a single borrower). Only lately in South Korea, such politically motivated loans were discovered to have been given to the failing Hanbo conglomerate by virtually every bank in the country. The same may safely be said about banks in Japan and almost everywhere else. Very few banks would dare to refuse the Finance Minister’s cronies, for instance.
Some banks would subject the review of credit applications to social considerations. They would lend to certain sectors of the economy, regardless of their financial viability. They would lend to the needy, to the affluent, to urban renewal programs, to small businesses - and all in the name of social causes which, however justified - cannot justify giving loans.
This is a private case in a more widespread phenomenon: the assets (=loan portfolios) of many a financial institution are not diversified enough. Their loans are concentrated in a single sector of the economy (agriculture, industry, construction), in a given country, or geographical region. Such exposure is detrimental to the financial health of the lending institution. Economic trends tend to develop in unison in the same sector, country, or region. When real estate in the West Coast of the USA plummets - it does so indiscriminately. A bank whose total portfolio is composed of mortgages to West Coast Realtors, would be demolished.
In 1982, Mexico defaulted on the interest payments of its international debts. Its arrears grew enormously and threatened the stability of the entire Western financial system. USA banks - which were the most exposed to the Latin American debt crisis - had to foot the bulk of the bill which amounted to tens of billions of USD. They had almost all their capital tied up in loans to Latin American countries. Financial institutions bow to fads and fashions. They are amenable to “lending trends” and display a herd-like mentality. They tend to concentrate their assets where they believe that they could get the highest yields in the shortest possible periods of time. In this sense, they are not very different from investors in pyramid investment schemes.
Financial mismanagement can also be the result of lax or flawed financial controls. The internal audit department in every financing institution - and the external audit exercised by the appropriate supervision authorities are responsible to counter the natural human propensity for gambling. The must help the financial organization re-orient itself in accordance with objective and objectively analysed data. If they fail to do this - the financial institution would tend to behave like a ship without navigation tools. Financial audit regulations (the most famous of which are the American FASBs) trail way behind the development of the modern financial marketplace. Still, their judicious and careful implementation could be of invaluable assistance in steering away from financial scandals.
Taking human psychology into account - coupled with the complexity of the modern world of finances - it is nothing less than a miracle that financial scandals are as few and far between as they are.
About The Author
Sam Vaknin is the author of “Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited” and “After the Rain - How the West Lost the East”. He is a columnist in “Central Europe Review”, United Press International (UPI) and ebookweb.org and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory, Suite101 and searcheurope.com. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia.
His web site: http://samvak.tripod.com
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