Description: This article discusses incentive compensation metrics set to motivate performance, retain people, satisfy legal constraints and Say-on-pay and promote good risk management. Alignment discussion between actual metrics characteristics and the behavior they promote.

Description: This article advocates for a lower variable part in salary and increase focus on other mechanisms (goal setting, simpler product, management, culture and processes). The psychological aspect of belonging to the incentive compensation pool is more important that the financial aspect.

Description: The new ways of calculating capital requirements are relatively untested. We may be witnessing the results of such a test today. As of this writing, the global economy is almost surely entering a serious recession. One of the reasons for this appears to be inadequate capital provisioning. The failure of capital regimes to protect financial entities and, by extension, their customers has had unfortunate effects on the markets and economies of the world.

Description: Three drivers that are often not at the top of lists about the origins of the crisis: a At some level, every entity that handles risks should be assessing what would happen if they ended up owning the risk that they thought they would only have temporarily b The change in the real estate market that was driven by the non-marginal amount of new subprime buyers who came into the market and c Risk managers should always be aware that marginal analysis can produce incorrect results.

Description: Many call this the sub-prime crisis, but risky mortgages were simply symptomatic of the underlying excesses building through the financial system. Investors, government, lenders and borrowers were all at fault. Where did the skeptics go?

Description: Financial crises are nothing new. What is unique and sobering is the far greater speed with which the current situation has evolved from a weakening of the U.S. housing market into a full-blown, global economic meltdown. Also new this time is how quickly the fallout spread beyond the financial sector into all areas of the economy. Advanced communications and information technologies are creating an era of greater risk with more serious and far-reaching consequences when compared with even the recent past.

Description: It is the belief of this author that the subprime mortgage mess was none other than a Ponzi scheme repackaged into 21st century financial engineering clothes. What makes this scheme particularly disastrous is that the 21st century Ponzi mortgages were packaged and sold to investors and then trillions of dollars of derivatives were constructed based on the underlying mortgages, magnifying the problem by orders of magnitude.

Description: This paper considers the question of whether the growth in the size of financial statements witnessed over the last several years has yielded an increase in the quality of disclosure around issues of financial risk and to what extent this disclosure is satisfying the perceived needs of readers of the financial statements, as represented by the investment analyst community.

Description: The present crisis in global financial markets has created an impression that enterprise risk management ERM has failed broadly to protect the safety and soundness of the financial system as well as that of many institutions, including insurance companies.

Description: Arguably, many of the fundamental contributing factors to the 2008 mortgage crisis involved misdirected incentives and misinformation available to key participants in the housing finance process. The incentives discussed here include those of the mortgage holders, mortgage intermediaries, mortgage providers, securitizers, raters and CEOs and other highly paid staff of those involved. Unless similar incentives are recognized, future public policy decisions will again fail to avoid this system-wide risk. Since I am most familiar with the U.S. situation, my comments will be limited accordingly.