The current financial crisis that threatens the entire world has created an ideal opportunity for educators. A number of important lessons can be learned from this financial meltdown. Some are technical and deal with the value of mathematical models and measuring risk. The most important lesson,...

The majority of commentators, along with the public opinion, are inclined to identify the causes of the last financial crisis in a combination of traditional market and regulatory failures in the operation and regulation of financial markets. Whatever cannot be explained along these lines is...

Financial regulation today is largely framed by traditional business categories. The financial markets, however, have begun to bypass those categories, principally over the last thirty years. Chief among the changes has been convergence in the products and services offered by traditional...

Multi-fractal analysis is now widely used in medicine to distinguish healthy and pathological conditions (i.e., healthy and cancerous tissues). We follow the same approach for financial markets: fractal tools disclose hidden information from time series and allow the identification of market...

This paper summarizes my ideas about the causes of and solutions to the 2008 financial crisis and is intended to be written so that a non-specialist can grasp the content and contribute to the discussion. The first section focuses on the immediate causes of the crisis and the appropriate...

This article examines the conditions under which a credit crunch becomes a credit crisis by studying one aspect of the current financial crisis: the month-long turmoil in the interbank loan market. The credit crunch began in 2007 but became a crisis when the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on...

The financial services industry went through a dramatic turn of events during the past year or so, to an extent that many were questioning its long-term viability and sources of strength. While it is imperative that we try and learn as much as we can from past mistakes to prevent them from...

The financial crisis has exposed deep-rooted problems with banks' financial reporting. Long neglected in analyses of bank performance, this article recommends a new focus on bank cash flows. We identify weaknesses and deficiencies in the existing literature on banking performance. Short case...

Does the 2007/08 market crisis herald the end of risk modeling and the empirical method? This paper supports the hypothesis that recent risk modeling problems were caused by the use of inappropriate risk models which are fixable rather than fundamentally flawed. An extensive analysis including...

Events such as the recent global financial crisis, the failure of Lehman Brothers, and the bailout of American International Group, have called increased attention to the opaque workings of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets which have remained unregulated until now. Nevertheless,...