This paper investigates the relationship between the liquidity roles of banks, financial fragility and economic growth. It integrates the analysis of liquidity crises into the analysis of the long run growth effects of financial intermediation.
By virtue of their inherent parallel redundancy, heat pipes (HP) are logical elemental building blocks for the construction of spacecraft radiators. In pumped loop space radiators, a micrometeoroid puncture of a cooling-fluid carrying tube would cause eventual loss of cooling fluid, thus leading to failure of the radiator. In contrast, space radiators composed of a large number of heat pipes would be relatively immune to puncture from micrometeoroids or small space debris because loss of an individual heat pipe, whose function is completely independent of that of its neighbors, would result only in the loss of that small fraction of total radiating area represented by the punctured heat pipe’s radiating surface. Thus, overall radiator reliability can be significantly enhanced, even with lower wall thickness of its heat pipe elements, which also would reduce radiator mass.
Increased survivability coupled with reduced mass is of strategic importance in spacecraft power system radiators, since past studies of power systems with either solar or nuclear heat sources have shown (Juhasz and Jones, 1986, Brandhorst et al., 1991) that radiator weight accounts for a significant portion of overall spacecraft launch mass. This is especially true for dynamic energy conversion systems utilizing the Brayton or Stirling thermodynamic cycles, since these systems have relatively low mean effective heat rejection temperatures. Thus, application of graphite-carbon composite technology to space radiator heat pipes will lead to even greater savings in the total Earth-to-orbit mass that needs to be launched for a given mission, and thereby contribute to the “low-cost access to space” initiative, which is a goal to be implemented during the early decades of the 21st century.
An important premise in financial investing is that there must be a reasonable amount of validated information before a security is considered from an investment standpoint. Given the requirements of having various expertise and the difficulties in locating and evaluating information sources, financial portfolio management has to date carried out by investment firms that employ teams of specialists for finding, filtering and evaluating relevant information. It has primarily focused on the portfolio selection process (i.e., asset allocation) as opposed to portfolio monitoring the ongoing, continuous, daily provision of an up-to-date financial picture of an existing portfolio.
In portfolio management, it is important for an investor to monitor his or her portfolio regularly in addition to asset allocation, because it must be determined whether or not the return results of the portfolio meet the expectations of the investor, or whether there is a need to change the strategic asset allocation. The monitoring process also provides comprehensive, detailed information on the investment positions of the investor. The result of the controlling monitoring might require changes in the asset allocation in order to realign the long-term asset allocation strategy. It is important to note that portfolio management, as an investment process, is not a static, but a dynamic one, where you should regularly adapt your decisions to changes in the market and in your own circumstances.
