Management-accounting

The content of the Bank Credit Analysis Handbook is actually quite good. However, it is glaringly apparent that NO ONE proofread the manuscript. There are errors on almost every other page: missing punctuation (incuding periods), the same phrase back-to-back, incorrect formulas, formulas described one way, and then shown in a way nowhere close to the description. I have an MBA, and have read my share of textbooks and manuals, and I have NEVER come across one as sloppily edited as this one.

The content of the book is good, but at $105 one would think someone would have proofread the manuscript before it was published.

This is an important book given the amount of risk banks have taken with exposure to Worldcom, Enron, Global Crossing and others. It is difficult to assess off balance sheet risk taken as structural risk or as total return swaps or credit derivatives.

For more on off-balance sheet risk, one should also read "Credit Derivatives and Synthetic Structures".

Mr. Golin has written an easily readable and comprehensive guide to an obscure subject. He assumes only a general knowledge of finance and takes the user step-by-step through the analysis of a bank's financial statements, an approach that probably makes this book as useful to equity analysts as it should be to credit analysts of financial institutions. He has a rare perspective, that of an american lawyer (from Harvard Law School) who has grappled with investment analysis of corporations in south east Asia. As a result, many of the examples in the long section on distressed banks are drawn from the Asian economic crisis. Nevertheless the scope of the work is global. He deals with the continuing development of world-wide bank regulation and the role and function of rating agencies. Last, but not least, the appendices contain useful definitions and a good bibliography. For analysts of finanical institutions his book should be a 'strong buy'.

As I find with all of the Fabozzi books, this is a very comprehensive overview of a complex subject. Fabozzi has gathered together an impressive list of experts who each write on what they know best. I found the chapter on Latin American loans to be particularly useful.