Description: Combinations of risks are an important component of the Survey of Emerging Risks, now in its 15th iteration. Also known as risk clusters or compound risks, the most popular in the survey define threat multipliers, where a risk makes other risks worse. The top risks chosen are trended for the last 10 years, showing interesting cycles and discontinuities.

Description: From a simple mathematical model of the underlying economics, I first predicted this crisis in July of 2004. An economic dynamic relating very low interest rates to the structure of the demand curve in the housing market made this outcome foreseeable, indeed inevitable. The current crisis had a mathematical cause. Essay on the collapse of the housing bubble.

Description: The liquidity crisis and the insufficient depth of the market led to a strong correlation crisis: many risks that could be considered as close to mutually independent in the classical regime suddenly became strongly positively dependent. More correlation crisis may happen in the future. We need to be more careful with black-box tools and to train what I would define as “quanlitative analysts” “Quanls” in the Enterprise Risk Management ERM process, that is risk managers who are able to lead interdisciplinary ERM studies from a jointly qualitative and quantitative point of view, with an emphasis on dynamics.

Description: The five words for ERM are transparency, discipline, alignment, adaptability and resilience. This article focuses on transparency, discipline and resilience.

Description: The ongoing financial meltdown has cast a shadow over the entire economy, and caused some to question whether the much-hyped movement of enterprise risk management ERM has failed. My answer is, yes, an overarching theme of the credit crisis is a failure of risk management.

Description: This article addresses the difficulties of risk modeling in a poor economic environment. The problems include imperfect vendors of data, facing events that have never occurred before, unpredictable consumer behavior, conflicting data sources, and AAA credit doesn't always mean AAA.

Description: This article discusses the risk management skills and aptitudes needed for the future.

Description: This article argues that during boom times, it is virtually impossible to get regulators to oppose politicians who are being lobbied by financial services organizations, thus a bubble expands and a bust is inevitable.

Description: This article reviews the dynamics of surrender risk, briefly discusses current valuations in the Interest Rate option markets and presents some tailored structured hedging instruments that can be used to manage this risk.

Description: This article covers domestic and international developments in the carbon market, offers some reflections on potential opportunities for actuaries in the carbon markets and provides insights into the skills needed to develop a successful carbon market practice.