Prologue: Crisis Redux

Abstract

I call it the “risk manager’s moment”: a point when you feel nervous tension, light-headedness, a sense of disbelief (and yet, somehow, not really), perhaps a tinge of nausea. And helplessness: complete inability to do anything to stop the train wreck. The risk manager’s moment arrives, of course, when things are going pear-shaped: the deal is collapsing, the client has announced plans to file for bankruptcy, or the markets are in freefall. Nothing to do but watch the whole thing go absolutely wrong.