Since the Global Financial Crisis, the structure of financial markets has undergone a dramatic shift. Modern markets have been “zombified” by a combination of Central Bank policy, disintermediation of commercial banks through regulation, and the growth of passive products such as ETFs. Increasingly, risk builds up beneath the surface, through a combination of excessive leverage and crowded exposure to specific asset classes and strategies. In many cases, historical volatility understates prospective risk. This book provides a practical and wide ranging framework for dealing with the credit, positioning and liquidity risk that investors face in the modern age. The authors introduce concrete techniques for adjusting traditional risk measures such as volatility during this era of unprecedented balance sheet expansion. When certain agents in the financial network behave differently or in larger scale than they have in the past, traditional portfolio theory breaks down. It can no longer account for toxic feedback effects within the network. Our feedback-based risk adjustments allow investors to size their positions sensibly in dangerous set ups, where volatility is not providing an accurate barometer of true risk. The authors have drawn from the fields of statistical physics and game theory to simplify and quantify the impact of very large agents on the distribution of forward returns, and to offer techniques for dealing with situations where markets are structurally risky yet realized volatility is low. The concepts discussed here should be of practical interest to portfolio managers, asset allocators, and risk professionals, as well as of academic interest to scholars and theorists.

Cut risk and generate profit even after the market drops The Second Leg Down offers practical approaches to profiting after a market event. Written by a specialist in global macro, volatility and hedging overlay strategies, this book provides in-depth insight into surviving in a volatile environment. Historical back tests and scenario diagrams illustrate a variety of strategies for offsetting portfolio risks with after-the-fact options hedging, and the discussion explores how a mixture of trend following and contrarian futures strategies can be beneficial. Without a rational analysis-based approach, investors often find themselves having to cut risk and buy protection just as options are at their most over-priced. This book provides practical strategies, expert analysis and the knowledge base to assist you in recovering your portfolio. Hedging strategies are often presented as expensive and unnecessary, especially during a bull market. When equity indices and other unstable assets drop, they find themselves stuck – hedging is now at its most expensive, but it is imperative to hedge or face liquidation. This book shows you how to salvage the situation, with strategies backed by expert analysis. Identify the right hedges during high volatility Generate attractive risk-adjusted returns Learn new strategies for offsetting risk Know your options for when losses have already occurred Imagine this scenario: you've incurred significant losses, you're approaching risk limits, you must cut risk immediately, yet slashing positions would damage the portfolio – what do you do? The Second Leg Down is your emergency hotline, with practical strategies for dire conditions.

Why are we obsessed with calculating our selections? The author argues that competitive trade nurtures calculative reason, which provides the ground for most discourses on economy. But market descriptions of economy are incomplete. Drawing on a range of materials from small ethnographic contexts to global financial markets, the author shows that economy is dialectically made up of two value realms, termed mutuality and impersonal trade. One or the other may be dominant; however, market reason usually cascades into and debases the mutuality on which it depends. Using this cross-cultural model, the author explores mystifications of economic life, and explains how capital and derivatives can control an economy. The book offers a different conception of economic welfare, development, and freedom; it presents an approach for dealing with environmental devastation, and explains the growing inequalities of wealth within and between nations.

The accepted narrative of the global financial crisis of 2007–09 is that the central banks saved us from an inferno caused by Wall Street greed. While there is no doubt they did save us, did the firefighters actually cause the fire as well? The Bank of England and US Federal Reserve have used the bait of low interest rates together with the bite of inflation in their quest for economic growth. Bluff reveals how these tactics have failed and instead left us with an unhealthy mix of debt, alternating booms in real estate and equity markets and laggard wages. In an incisive critique, Bluff makes the case for a much-needed public debate on the role of the all-powerful central banks; an acknowledgment of the damage caused by flawed policy decisions; and a vital reassessment of the social contract between the people and their central bank.

For more than thirty years, Kevin Phillips' insight into American politics and economics has helped to make history as well as record it. His bestselling books, including The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and The Politics of Rich and Poor (1990), have influenced presidential campaigns and changed the way America sees itself. Widely acknowledging Phillips as one of the nation's most perceptive thinkers, reviewers have called him a latter-day Nostradamus and our "modern Thomas Paine." Now, in the first major book of its kind since the 1930s, he turns his attention to the United States' history of great wealth and power, a sweeping cavalcade from the American Revolution to what he calls "the Second Gilded Age" at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Second Gilded Age has been staggering enough in its concentration of wealth to dwarf the original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier. However, the tech crash and then the horrible events of September 11, 2001, pointed out that great riches are as vulnerable as they have ever been. In Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips charts the ongoing American saga of great wealth–how it has been accumulated, its shifting sources, and its ups and downs over more than two centuries. He explores how the rich and politically powerful have frequently worked together to create or perpetuate privilege, often at the expense of the national interest and usually at the expense of the middle and lower classes. With intriguing chapters on history and bold analysis of present-day America, Phillips illuminates the dangerous politics that go with excessive concentration of wealth. Profiling wealthy Americans–from Astor to Carnegie and Rockefeller to contemporary wealth holders–Phillips provides fascinating details about the peculiarly American ways of becoming and staying a multimillionaire. He exposes the subtle corruption spawned by a money culture and financial power, evident in economic philosophy, tax favoritism, and selective bailouts in the name of free enterprise, economic stimulus, and national security. Finally, Wealth and Democracy turns to the history of Britain and other leading world economic powers to examine the symptoms that signaled their declines–speculative finance, mounting international debt, record wealth, income polarization, and disgruntled politics–signs that we recognize in America at the start of the twenty-first century. In a time of national crisis, Phillips worries that the growing parallels suggest the tide may already be turning for us all.

The Regional Economic Outlook assesses the near-term outlook for each of the three subregions: the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (MENAP) oil exporters, the MENAP oil importers, and the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA). The report also looks at medium-term issues of particular concern to the region, namely the need to boost competitiveness and growth to address high levels of long-standing unemployment in the MENAP region, and enhance the effectiveness of monetary policy and regional cooperation in the CCA.

A groundbreaking narrative of how an elite group of men transformed the American economy and government, dictated foreign and domestic policy, and shaped world history. Culled from original presidential archival documents, All the Presidents' Bankers delivers an explosive account of the hundred-year interdependence between the White House and Wall Street that transcends a simple analysis of money driving politics-or greed driving bankers. Nomi Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and proté relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. These families and individuals recycle their power through elected office and private channels in Washington, DC. From the Panic of 1907 to the financial crisis of 2008, this unprecedented history of American power illuminates how the same financiers retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation. All the Presidents' Bankers explores the alarming global repercussions of a system lacking barriers between public office and private power. Prins leaves us with an ominous choice: either we break the alliances of the power elite, or they will break us.