Financial Risk Management: Models, History, and Institutions

Preface

Financial Risk Management started as one thing and has ended as another. I took up this project with the primary aim of making risk measurement and management techniques accessible, by working through simple examples, and explaining some of the real-life detail of financing positions. I had gotten fairly far along with it when the subprime crisis began and the world changed.

I had already begun to appreciate the importance of liquidity and leverage risks, which are even harder to measure quantitatively than market and credit risks, and therefore all the more important in practice. In the subprime crisis, liquidity and leverage risks were dominant. Had the subprime crisis never occurred, they would have had an honorable place in this text. After the crisis erupted, it became hard to think about anything else. To understand why liquidity and leverage are so important, one needs to understand the basic market and credit risk models. But one also needs to understand the institutional structure of the financial system.

One aim of Financial Risk Management is therefore to bring together the model-oriented approach of the risk management discipline, as it has evolved over the past two decades, with economists’ approaches to the same issues. There is much that quants and economists can learn from one another. One needs to understand how financial markets work to apply risk management techniques effectively.

A basic aim of the book is to provide some institutional and historical ...