Date: |
11 February 2011 (Fri) |
Time: |
4:00 – 6:00 pm |
Venue: |
HKAICS Conference Room |
Speaker: |
Dr Michael Edesess |
This talk will describe how risk is conceptualized in the investment and finance fields. It will explain how risk concepts and measures were developed in the academic world and how they are applied by institutional investors. It will explain their flaws, the debates about these measures, and why they notoriously failed to estimate risk accurately prior to the financial crisis. It will describe approaches to the estimation and explanation of risk that are used by financial advisors with their retail clients, and how they communicated risk inadequately to retail investors, for example in the case of target-date funds. It will describe how risk measures used in finance and investment often suffer from what Alfred North Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” It will discuss how perspectives offered from outside the fields of finance and investment might help to improve definitions and measurements of risk. The talk will also cover the risk that the finance and investment industries pose to the broader society, known as systemic risk, and will explain the concept of moral hazard and its relevance.
Liang Hongling: hlliang@cityu.edu.hk
Phone: (852) 3442 6480
