Unsystematic Risk: Rethinking Finance

In 2008, Wall St. crashed, and with it took down the US economy. The incoming Secretary of the Treasury, Tim Geithner, reported that the Great Recession wiped out $15 trillion in household wealth, lost 9 million jobs, caused 5 million homeowners to lose their homes, and brought 9 million Americans below the poverty line. What a legacy! How was this possible? Modern finance teaches us that unsystematic risk is fully diversified away when one constructs portfolios. Therefore, supposedly, how bankers, analyst and corporate managers behave will not affect the markets as the unsystematic risk they create is fully diversified away. Not correct. This book shows that unsystematic risk cannot be fully diversified away. By laying the ground work for financial management which includes unsystematic risk, new analyses and tools are provided to quantitatively monitor equities markets, portfolios and risk scoring.

Solomon was Head of Corporate Planning at Westport (Malaysia), in 1995, then a $1,000,000,000 port infrastructure project. As an analyst, 2004-2013, he underwrote Commercial & Industrial loans for UMB Bank and equipment leases for Key Bank; and developed sophisticated proprietary statistical loss models for Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities (CMBS).