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financial crisis

This tag is associated with 5 posts

Proud to be a war quant

I’ve just re-read Douglas W Hubbard’s The Failure of Risk Management.  It’s an odd book in that while I agree with most of what’s in it, I’m not particularly convinced by the overall story suggested by the subtitle: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It. Hubbard’s theme is that we do not do enough, […]

The profession that knows it all

The theme which underpins Clouds of Vagueness is the inherent difficulty of mastering an uncertain future and the inadequacy of our standard risk management techniques to help with this.  So I was delighted to see the paper by Michael Power of the LSE in the journal Accounting, Organisations and Society, with the provocative title The risk management of […]

Complexity, cockroaches and building resilience

The near collapse of the financial system was fairly widely predicted though the political community is somewhat in denial about that. What was less widely foreseen was that it would happen in September 2008: it was a risk waiting to materialise as we risk geeks say. Two authors with a gold-plated prediction record on this, […]

The end of cycles

Here’s something that I’ve taken from a blog I did on how decisions are taken in public life and the role of media in supporting them (or not). Economists have laboured for years to model the behaviour of markets.  The models have become ever more complex and contain ever more parameters to help fitting the results to […]

Where did the BBC go wrong?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that having some kind of ‘best practice’ (enterprise) risk management system will keep you out of trouble.  Well, it is if you read the standard risk management stuff, books on reputational risk management and the like.  But as the BBC’s reputation stands in tatters it’s worth asking what went wrong.  Is it the […]