I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.
Robert F. EngleIf you pay attention to where your exposures are, you might tend up buying credit default swaps against a variety of people that you - companies that you deal with.
Robert F. EngleI agree with a lot of the points in Taleb's book, but I don't agree with many of his conclusions. It seems to me that he rightly points out that risk managers miss a lot of the risks, but the conclusion is that he draws, is that we should abandon risk management, whereas my conclusion is we should improve it.
Robert F. EngleI think that's something that investment banks have worried about for a long time and are continuing to worry about, but it's not an easy solution when you have lots of people betting the company's money, how do you really allocate those risks? How do you make sure that the people that take the risks are feeling the risks in an appropriate kind of fashion?
Robert F. EngleThe collateralized debt obligation, the CDO, is a structure which allows you to more or less continuously choose how much risk you want to take in a whole batch of securities. And the reason why they got us into so much trouble is that it's hard to figure out how much risk you really are taking.
Robert F. EngleWhen large companies take on risk, then they impose risks on the rest of the system. And these are systemic risks and these systemic risks we never used to think were really that important, but as soon as we recognize how the financial sector - the risks the financial sector takes on can impact the entire global economy, we realize that those risks needed to be controlled for the social good.
Robert F. Engle