Financial consultant and professor Dr. Anthony M. Criniti IV has some bold objectives for THE NECESSITY OF FINANCE. His book, he writes, “highlights the need to give full respect to finance as a separate science and clears up many of the confusions with related subjects such as economics.” Dr. Criniti also asserts that “If its message reaches the right places, I conjecture, there may be a major restructuring of how finance is taught.” His intention is to define finance as so important that, eventually, there will be a Nobel Prize awarded for its study, alongside the one for Economics (which is actually not a Nobel, but a special award of the Nobel Committee, since the five original prizes created by Alfred Nobel in 1895 didn’t include Economics). This, he writes, is because “finance today is about life and death” and because “Increasing wealth excites people of all ages”.
Criniti starts by defining or, as he puts it, re-defining finance as “the science of management of wealth for an individual, a group, or an organization”. His target audience are students of finance at the beginner and intermediate levels, as well as anybody interested in the subject. Some of the key questions addressed in the book are: What is the difference between money and wealth? What is the difference between investing and saving? What is risk and return? What is the time value of money? For the next 200-plus pages, Criniti then addresses such issues as the purpose and goals of finance, what a financial manager is (he coins the term “financialist” for anyone who works in any part of discipline), and investing (where, although “The most intelligent minds in economics and finance have wrestled with this term”, only he has come up with a definition that “may be as comprehensive as possible”).
Unfortunately, the book falls short of its lofty promises. Rather than rigorously arguing why finance should be considered one of the world’s most important disciplines, Criniti devotes most of his book to explaining the basic concepts of finance. And while he does so in a clear, if somewhat pedantic, manner, at no point does he go beyond what can be found in any undergraduate textbook.
Dr. Anthony M. Criniti ‘s argument about the importance of Finance boils down to semantics rather than new financial concepts, but, for understanding the fundamentals, THE NECESSITY OF FINANCE is useful.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader