Word: creditably
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...that, by and large, was how the biggest players in the financial-services sector acted in the run-up to the crisis. Taking on risk from instruments like credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) was treated as a profit center, often with little oversight of the mathematical models that spit out numbers about what it was all worth. The models proved spectacularly wrong because they precluded the possibility of an outsize event. Once big shocks, like declining home prices, started hitting, the models broke down. According to a report by a group of U.S. and international regulators, while...
There are many lenses through which to view the worldwide financial crisis as it has rippled from soured loans to banks' balance sheets to the credit markets and, finally, into the real economy. Lenders were greedy, people lived beyond their means, government abdicated its responsibility to regulate. Through all those explanations runs the thread of risk--and how it was mismanaged. Financiers, as well as the investors who bought their wares and the ratings agencies that evaluated them, agreed that by applying the proper equations it was possible to, say, bundle a bunch of subprime mortgages, chop them...
...term, an era of risk aversion is sure to continue, as financial outfits, gripped by the fear that something more will go wrong--loans not paid back, a company on the other side of a trade going bust--pull back on everything from the creation of complex securities to credit-card limits...
...when the Canadian bank Toronto-Dominion got out of structured products, including CDOs and interest-rate derivatives, CEO Ed Clark was pilloried for leaving profit on the table. Clark, who has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, made the decision because he couldn't comprehend, to his satisfaction, the credit and equity products that were being traded at the firm. So he decided to quit the business--a move that kept his bank in the black while others suffered. "I'm an old-school banker," he later said. "I don't think you should do something you don't understand...
...different, that the pain has been so severe and ongoing, the lessons will be remembered. Four exchanges, with encouragement from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have volunteered to create a clearinghouse for the hazily understood concentrations of risk known as credit-default swaps. Investors are also taking more responsibility. Over the past month, the analytics firm RiskMetrics has seen a rush of pension funds, hedge funds and asset managers signing up for tools to analyze counterparty risk. "The only folks who used to ask us about those were banks," says risk-management...