Sublime

In December 2010,

Lehman Brothers

Three hours later he returned to find that the markets had changed their minds about the likely effects of Donald Trump on the world’s stock markets. “It was supposed to be Armageddon,” said Sam. “And maybe it was. But it wasn’t Armageddon for US markets.” Markets in the United States actually had rallied, and most of the Jane Street bet was agains

Long-Term Wealth Preservation as a Question of Family Governance

Derivatives serve a valuable purpose. As with any contract, their aim is to shift risk within a market to someone better able to carry it. That’s a good thing, for the market, and the economy generally. That we’ve just seen an economy detonated by derivatives gone wild shouldn’t lead us to ban (as if we could) these financial innovations. It should

This suggests a far more sophisticated understanding of “the risk/reward trade-off” and “the equity premium” than is generally accepted in the realm of modern portfolio theory, and, by extension, the EMH: Bonds are likely to get a lower return than stocks not because they are less “risky” (which in that context is even more questionably interpreted

While the firm did employ a well-regarded chief risk officer, Madelyn Antoncic, who had a PhD in economics and had worked at Goldman Sachs, her input was virtually nil. She was often asked to leave the room when issues concerning risk came up at executive committee meetings, and in late 2007, she was removed from the committee altogether.

It was a telling paradox in the debate about executive compensation: Fuld was a CEO with most of his wealth directly tied to the firm on a long-term basis, and still he took extraordinary risks.