Contemporary Finance: Money, Risk, and Public Policy is a textbook on finance for finance professionals, undergraduates and graduate students. It covers the basic finance theory required to understand the contemporary financial world and builds on that theory to present finance in a detailed yet comprehensible way. Contemporary Finance introduces readers to markets and institutions as well as to the government policy framework within which these markets operate. Contemporary Finance is designed to be used as a sole or supplementary textbook for introductory and specialized finance courses, as well as for practitioners in several fields in or related to finance. The financial world has been changing rapidly for over half a century, and even faster amid the crises of recent decades. Those changes have put risk and uncertainty in the center of our understanding of finance, and have given regulatory and central bank policies a more central role in shaping the financial system. Contemporary Finance emphasizes risk and uncertainty in its presentation of financial theory and practice.  The book begins with an overview of the markets, institutions and actors in the financial system, and of the questions the study of finance tries to answer. It then covers basic finance theory in a highly applied way, presenting concrete examples and case studies for each concept. The theory covered includes investor behavior, the role of uncertainty, how prices are set in financial markets, and risk models and measurement. Contemporary Finance discusses credit and liquidity risk comprehensively, including discussion of legal aspects, firm capital structure, and leverage. The book treats financial markets, institutions and actors in detail. It presents the basic theory and structure of derivatives markets, and incorporates comprehensively the many crucial changes of the past few decades. Contemporary Finance covers the management of credit portfolios such as banks' loan books or institutional bond portfolios in a simplified way that students can understand without advanced mathematics. The discussion leads to presentation of securitization and structured credit risk. Recent developments in money and short-term lending markets are indispensable for understanding events of the past few decades and are presented clearly. Financial technology developments that are likely to heavily influence the development of payments systems in the years to come. The book also provides an introduction to clearing, settlement and payments systems. It includes case studies of recent episodes in which these systems have played a key role. The financial system is part of the larger global economy, and is shaped more and more by monetary, regulatory and other public policies. Neither finance nor government policy can be understood in isolation. Contemporary Finance incorporates the economic concepts needed to understand these monetary, regulatory and international finance policies. It sets out the international and U.S. regulatory frameworks for financial regulation, including a detailed discussion of capital and liquidity regulation. The textbook is accompanied by a large trove of supplementary materials that instructors can use, and can be made available online. These include lecture slides and problem sets that have proven highly effective in practice, rehearsing the basic theory and practical applications step-by-step with specific examples using market data. The Mathematica code used to compute the examples is also included in the supplementary materials. It also includes case studies such as the London Whale and GameStop trading episodes that will be blended into the text or presented in separate text boxes.