Bryan Burrough, William D. Cohan and Bethany McLean have a piece in this month’s Vanity Fair on Jon Corzine, the man behind the spectacular crash of MF Global. It doesn’t provide much insight into what happened at MF Global or where the missing money went. But is does paint an interesting picture of the captain [...]
Archive | Enterprise Risk Management RSS feed for this section
Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition
The most dangerous parts of managing risk are the risks you don’t expect. Looking back at my old four-box analysis, there are really two types of unexpected risks, the risk that you know that you don’t know and the risk that you don’t know that you don’t know. In the first case you know there [...]
“Free” and the Black Swan
I’ve talked in the past about the Black Swan by Taleb and at other times about Free by Chris Anderson. I think I missed a connection between the two. Taleb points out that the Black Swan event is only a surprise to one side. The turkey thinks life is great living on the farm. Until [...]
Do You Want to be Systemically Important?
The hard work has begun as federal regulators are trying to implement the provisions of Dodd-Frank. The law pushed lots of the detail out to the agencies so there are lots of unanswered questions. One of the hot button issues was what to do with financial institutions that were too big to fail. Dodd-Frank came [...]
Securities Class Actions in Canada
With the winter Olympics going full swing in Canada, I thought I would look to how that country is dealing with securities class actions. NERA Economic Consulting just released their 2009 Update on Trends in Canadian Securities Class Actions. Some tidbits: Eight securities class actions were filed in 2009, compared with the 10 filings in [...]
The Economist: Special Report on Financial Risk
This week’s The Economist has an excellent special report: The Gods Strike Back. The title comes from Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that [...]
The Drunkard’s Walk, The Butterfly Effect and The Black Swan
The “drunkard’s walk” refers to the Brownian motion, the seemingly random movement of particles suspended in a fluid. The original thought was that you might be able to calculate the movement by measuring and calculating the interaction. It proved impossible. There are too many factors and too many interactions. Small changes in a system can [...]
Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management
Nassim N. Taleb, Daniel G. Goldstein, and Mark W. Spitznagel discuss risk management and short comings in approaches in the October 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review (subscription required). They offer up six mistakes in the way we think about risk: 1. We think we can manage risk by predicting extreme events. 2. We [...]
The Four Areas of Risk and Knowledge
When thinking about risk, I break things into four quadrants. There are things we know and there are things we don’t know as individuals. I then slice slice that further again with the things we know and the things we don’t know as part of the larger organization or conscious state. Our sweet spot is [...]
Managing Risk in the Financial Sector
On Sept. 16, 2009, Compliance Week and Navigant Consulting presented an exclusive editorial roundtable about compliance practices at financial services firms at The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston. (Apparently not so exclusive, considering I was able to get in. I even made it into one of the article’s pictures. – That’s me eating my fingers [...]
Social Media
My social media policies database is available to you.
Affilate
This website uses the Canvas Wordpress theme from WooThemes. (affiliate link)
