Kiyoshi Ito, 93, Mathematician Who Described Random Motion, Dies

Steve Lohr
New York Times
November 23, 2008


Kiyoshi Ito, a mathematician whose innovative models of random motion are used today in fields as diverse as finance and biology, died Nov. 17 at a hospital in Kyoto, Japan. He was 93.

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Citigroup Saw No Red Flags Even as It Made Bolder Bets

Eric Dash and Julie Creswell
New York Times
November 22, 2008

“Our job is to set a tone at the top to incent people to do the right thing and to set up safety nets to catch people who make mistakes or do the wrong thing and correct those as quickly as possible. And it is working. It is working.”

Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, in 2006

In September 2007, with Wall Street confronting a crisis caused by too many souring mortgages, Citigroup executives gathered in a wood-paneled library to assess their own well-being.

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What Crisis? Some Hedge Funds Gain

Louise Story
New York Times
November 9, 2008

Bernard V. Drury is a rarity on Wall Street: a hedge fund manager who is making money rather than losing it. While most hedge funds are sinking into red this year and unsettling the markets in the process, a handful of them are posting spectacular gains. Mr. Drury’s fund, for instance, is up 60 percent since Jan. 1.

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Credit Crisis — The Essentials

New York Times | Business

Times Topics - series of articles and latest developments.

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10 Weeks of Financial Turmoil

New York Times | Business
September 27, 2008

A look at the recent events that shook the world's financial system.

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Hedge Fund Managers Ask for a Few New Rules

Louise Story
New York Times
November 13, 2008

WASHINGTON — A House of Representatives committee room was transformed into a club for billionaires for a few hours on Thursday, as five of the richest men in the world testified on the role of hedge funds in financial markets.

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365: Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Ira Glass
This American Life / NPR
October 3, 2008

Alex Blumberg and NPR's Adam Davidson—the two guys who reported our Giant Pool of Money episode—are back, in collaboration with the Planet Money podcast. They'll explain what happened this week, including what regulators could've done to prevent this financial crisis from happening in the first place. You can learn more about the daily ins and outs and join the discussion on the Planet Money blog.

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Wall Street's Shadow Market

60 Minutes CBS TV Program
Sunday, October 5, 2008

The program includes provocative remarks about the mathematicians who design the mortgage backed derivative securities.

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Keep It in Vegas

Thomas Friedman
New York Times
September 16, 2008

Watching some financial stocks just get wiped out in recent months, I often hear a voice in the back of my head, and it is the same voice as one of those dealers in Las Vegas who coolly tells you as he sweeps up your chips after you’ve busted in blackjack: “Thank you for playing, ladies and gentlemen.”

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Fortune Seen as Fate: Quant Jobs After the Credit Crunch

Dominic Connor
Wilmott
October 22, 2008

My firm, P&D Quant recruitment has just taken on two more people to help with the increasing workload. A year ago this would haven a bland piece of corporate puff of so little interest that we'd probably not even have bothered telling anyone. But in today's market, it has caused more than one person to express at least some surprise. So have we completely lost our minds?

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Behind Insurer’s Crisis, Blind Eye to a Web of Risk

Gretchen Morgenson
New York Times
September 27, 2008

Two weeks ago, the nation’s most powerful regulators and bankers huddled in the Lower Manhattan fortress that is the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, desperately trying to stave off disaster.

As the group, led by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., pondered the collapse of one of America’s oldest investment banks, Lehman Brothers, a more dangerous threat emerged: American International Group, the world’s largest insurer, was teetering. A.I.G. needed billions of dollars to right itself and had suddenly begged for help.

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How the Thundering Herd Faltered and Fell

Gretchen Morgenson
New York Times
November 8, 2008

THERE were high-fives all around Merrill Lynch headquarters in Lower Manhattan as 2006 drew to a close. The firm’s performance was breathtaking; revenue and earnings had soared, and its shares were up 40 percent for the year.

And Merrill’s decision to invest heavily in the mortgage industry was paying off handsomely. So handsomely, in fact, that on Dec. 30 that year, it essentially doubled down by paying $1.3 billion for First Franklin, a lender specializing in risky mortgages.

The deal would provide Merrill with even more loans for one of its lucrative assembly lines, an operation that bundled and repackaged mortgages so they could be resold to other investors.

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The Top 10 Quant Schools, According to the Street

Cristina McEachern
Advanced Trading Magazine
July 21, 2008

Quantitative analysts are in high demand on Wall Street as electronic trading and the use of complex algorithms to access liquidity continue to proliferate. While in the past quants often have been Ph.D.s in the academic world before crossing over to the Street, today there are more and more programs geared specifically toward preparing quants for financial services jobs. These programs typically offer a Master in Financial Engineering (M.F.E.) degree, but many offer similar degrees, including a Master of Science in Financial Engineering (M.S.F.E.), a Master of Science in Financial Math (M.S.F.M.), a Master of Science of Mathematics in Finance (M.S.M.F.) and a Master in Mathematical Finance (M.M.F.).

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Don't Blame The Quants

Steven Shreve
Forbes
October 8, 2008

Financial markets are a mess, and the excesses of the finance industry are dragging down the whole economy. In recent years, safe investments delivered unusually low returns, and hordes of investors seeking to be above average (as Garrison Keillor would say) bought extremely complicated instruments.

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In Modeling Risk, the Human Factor Was Left Out

Steve Lohr
New York Times
November 4, 2008

Today’s economic turmoil, it seems, is an implicit indictment of the arcane field of financial engineering — a blend of mathematics, statistics and computing. Its practitioners devised not only the exotic, mortgage-backed securities that proved so troublesome, but also the mathematical models of risk that suggested these securities were safe.

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