This week’s BusinessWeek reports on changes in risk management within financial institutions in the wake of the subprime meltdown and Societe Generale rogue trader fiasco. Merrill’s new CEO, John Thaine, has created two new high-level risk manager positions reporting directly to him—and he is going to meet with them weekly. Morgan Stanley has appointed a [...]
Last week, I took the Wall Street Journal to task for publishing a “Heard on the Street” column that did little more than spread hedge fund industry hype. In that blog posting, I asked Journal staff to look into four questions related to the relevance and validity of the facts asserted in that column. On [...]
Long before Mark Twain stood on Wall Street and saw it was a “street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other,” there has been financial manipulation and scams. During the Punic Wars against Carthage, businessmen offered to ship supplies to Rome’s army on condition the state insured their ships and [...]
Ask a practitioner of the origins of financial risk management, and he might say it emerged in response to financial blow-ups of the early 1990s. Or he might say it emerged out of efforts by the Basel Committee to standardize bank capital requirements globally. Or he might say it emerged from efforts by banks to [...]