Business is the backbone of American society and is one of the keys to making our system work as well as it has for over two hundred years. Yet as a body of knowledge, business is much younger, and in its brief history, there have been few attempts to present the discipline of business in a single place. The major purpose of the Encyclopedia of Business and Finance, Second Edition is to summarize the body of knowledge that we know as business in one place and in language appropriate to the layperson.