Description: As one highly rated financial firm after another blows up, what is the right conclusion to draw about enterprise risk management ERM? Does the financial crisis of 2008-09 demonstrate its criticality, or does it bring the whole concept into disrepute?

Description: Crises are devastating. They leave behind a high amount of entropy unemployment, poverty, lack of safety. But this is half the truth. The other half says that crises are to some extend good, because they provide a natural crash test to discover current practices’ risks and limitations, and in response, give rise to more efficient regulation, to financial innovations and to the wakening of the vitalizing powers of society, as the old and corrupted die and new ideas emerge and give us the opportunity to reflect upon the future we want to have.

Description: Various ingredients contributed to the current financial crisis, and we can learn many lessons from the crisis. Yet rather than myopically focus on the particular minutiae of the current circumstances, we ought to pay special attention to those central issues that underpin the current crisis, past crises and future crises. Focus is on risk adjusting reported profits.

Description: The upside of the downturn is that these powerful, influential, connected and important, yet incompetent people can be removed from their positions. To quote a great insight of Ayn Rand: “There is no substitute for competence.”

Description: Models are imperfect approximations of reality. Once a bubble has been recognized, that’s the time for mechanisms of caution and prudence to kick in, even in the face of exuberance – especially in the face of exuberance. Liquidity and trust is plentiful until it’s not – it can evaporate with blazing speed and only returns slowly. Risk is contagious, which means every single employee and citizen has a vested interest in taking on the role of chief risk officer.

Description: The crisis has spread due to a systematic failure of the regulatory system. Over the last 20 years, regulations that fostered market stability were eliminated and new financial instruments were allowed to propagate without any real oversight. Instead of bailing out weak financial firms, we should be liquidating them. All doubtful asses need to be written-downs. We need accurate and transparent accounting.

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: 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: The world of the local S&Ls, the partner-owned investment bank and Bretton Woods isn’t coming back. So what does that leave us to do next? Part of me is persuaded by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that existence gets progressively more and more disordered with the passage of time, since any work done to address the current crisis expends more energy and causes more disorder than it fixes.

Description: The current financial crisis underscores the need for companies to take a sobering look at their approach to risk management. Among the many lessons to be learned, one is immediately clear: The subprime debacle represents a failure in risk management, rather than a failure of risk management.