There are many lessons to be learned from the financial crisis. There is a considerable body
of opinion that considers that poor risk management lay at the heart of the credit crisis. This
lack of awareness of risk exposure is reinforced by Sir John Gieve, who stated when Deputy
Governor of the Bank of England, that a weakness in the British banking system “was the
failure of the banks and many other investors to appreciate, price and manage risk”. The Bank
of England published its analysis of the vulnerabilities of the system in its Financial Stability
Reports of 2006 and 2007 (Gieve 2009). It delivered its findings to the CEOs of banks in both
London and New York. In particular, it described the banks’ exposure to global imbalances,
dependence on wholesale funding and the risk of structured credit markets seizing up in a
downturn. However, these executives paid scant regard to the reviews as they took comfort
from the sophistication of their risk management systems and hedging strategies and were
confident they could ride out the storm. The issue though, as Gieve explained in his speech,
was that the banks’ systems were preparing them for a shower, not a hurricane.
The predominant assumption of the banks was that the scale and complexity of the securitised
credit market had been matched by the evolution of statistically sophisticated and
effective techniques for measuring and managing the resulting risks. Central to many of the
techniques applied was the concept of value at risk (VaR), enabling mathematical inferences
about forward-looking risk (and future price movements) to be drawn from the observation of