The eyes of the world are on Fukushima, Japan, where heroic technicians and military personnel struggle to prevent a nuclear armageddon. A massive earthquake spawned a devastating tsunami that knocked out a nuclear power plant’s cooling system. And here we are. This reminds us how low-probability high-impact events tend to be correlated. If a country experiences prolonged draught, [...]
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 [...]
Richard Bookstaber knows his way around Wall Street. Thirty years ago, he transitioned from academia to practice. He has worked in trading and risk management since. Along the way, he wrote one of the best introductions to options trading ever published. In this new book, he takes on multiple tasks. First and foremost, he offers [...]
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 [...]