This essay, based on the author's presentation last September to the annual meeting of the North American Securities Administration Association (NASAA), addresses several issues related to Rule 506, the most widely-used of the SEC's transactional exemptions from federal registration of...

The global financial crisis has provided clear evidence that the global financial system, including that of Australia, is founded on flawed economic theories. There is no scientific justification for sophisticated risk management, complex institutional structures or intrusive regulation....

Reforming regulation of the financial sector is currently among the most immediate concerns of domestic and international policymakers. Proposals for such reform are proliferating, and the official sector appears committed to adopting at least some meaningful reforms in the near-term. Broadly...

The global banking system can be shown to be a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) that exhibits phase transitions from time to time. These phase transitions can result in significant financial losses to the community that we estimate to be much more significant than losses occurring during...

Concentrated risks in markets for credit default swaps (CDS) are widely considered to have significantly contributed to the recent financial crisis. In this paper we study the structure of the CDS market using explicit connections based on the total number of CDS transactions, notional value of...

From the dawn of civilization, the ever-growing sophistication of human society, division of labour, specialization, and comparative advantage rendered trade an indispensable part of any human enterprise. The need for trade begets the need for finance, and as trade becomes globally...

Financial markets have experienced unprecedented transformations, signs of which have emerged since the late 1970s. In recent years substantial consolidation occurred. In response to changes in macroeconomic variables, such as GDP, industrial production, inflation and the political business...

We compare several models that forecast ex-ante Bitcoin one-day Value-at-Risk (VaR), starting from the simplest ones like Parametric Normal and Historical Simulation and arriving at Historical Filtered Bootstrap and Extreme Value Theory Historical Filtered Bootstrap. We also consider Gaussian...

This paper argues that blockchains or, more broadly, distributed ledgers provide the first viable avenue toward a common economic and financial ledger where, in an envisioned end-state, all economic actors record all their economic assets/liabilities and economic transactions in one virtual...

The papers included in this issue are selected from the 7th International Conference of the Financial Engineering and Banking Society (FEBS) organized by Strathclyde Business School during 1-3 June 2017. With circa 200 academics, practitioners and regulators participating as delegates from...