Lutz Kilian 21 April 2012
Was the surge in the oil prices between 2003 and 2008 caused by financial investors taking speculative positions in oil futures markets? Many pundits and policymakers seem to think so, but this column says this view goes against the extensive body of evidence.
A popular view is that the unprecedented surge in the spot price of oil during 2003–08 cannot be explained by changes in economic fundamentals, but was driven by the increased financialisation of oil...

Via the Blog of the FOC Project, a European Science project aimed at understanding and forecasting systemic risk and global financial instabilities, comes this interview with Stefano Battiston, physicist at ETH Zurich (Switzerland).
"We need a cockpit where policymakers can look to see early alerts of future financial crises", says Stefano, who might be familiar to MoneyScience users as one of the authors of a paper which made something of a splash last year: The network of global corporate...

The Global Association of Risk Professionals, (GARP, www.garp.org ) presented its 2011 Risk Manager of the Year Award today to Aaron Brown, Head of Risk Management for AQR Capital Management at the Association's 13th Annual Risk Management Convention & Exhibition at the New York Marriott Marquis in New York City.
The Risk Manager of the Year Award was established in 1997 by the Association to recognize the outstanding contributions and positive impact made by individuals or organizations...

This talk was given at the 2012 American Finance Association meeting in Chicago.
The speaker, Daron Acemoglu is a Professor of Economics from MIT and the Managing Editor of Econometrica. He was also the winner of the 2005, John Bates Clarke medal which is awarded to the best economist under the age of 40.

 
You might be interested in some of Daron's other research:

Dynamics and Stability of Constitutions, Coalitions, and Clubs
The Environment and Directed Technical...

Financial crises are somehow similar to blackouts, pandemics, extinctions, earthquakes... there is something common to all these phenomena: their underlying networks. FOC (Forecasting Financial Crises) is a European scientific project that uses this paradigm for understanding and forecasting systemic risk and global financial instabilities.
http://www.focproject.net

You might also be interested in the Systemic Risk section of our Financial Research Library.