Risk Budgeting, Second Edition Risk Appetite and Governance in the Wake of the Financial Crisis

This fully updated and revised second edition of the best-selling guide Risk Budgeting expands upon the first edition, continuing to provide a road map for more effective risk allocation and better return per unit of risk taken.  This edition reflects in particular the growing focus on risk appetite and governance in the risk budgeting environment.

The second edition of Risk Budgeting expands upon its original themes to encompass risk appetite and risk governance, the importance and visibility of which have increased exponentially in the wake of the financial crisis.

While risk budgeting was just emerging as a best practice for pension funds and asset managers when the first edition was published in 2000, there have been many developments since, the prime example being the 2007/8 financial crisis, which cast a shadow over the quantitative techniques and tools used to mitigate and budget for risk up until that point. As Leslie Rahl herself says in the book’s “Introduction”, the years subsequent to the crisis (which also saw the collapse of Bear Stearns, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, and the federal takeover of Fannie Mae) fundamentally changed the landscape of risk management to such a degree that the original methods of approaching risk have become obsolete.

This altered financial environment has made the industry much more conscious of the need to embed risk allocation into their traditional strategic planning processes. New regulations such as Basel III were introduced, representing a new approach to risk (particularly attitudes towards VaR and liquidity measures). A new examination of the topics discussed in the first edition of Risk Budgeting is clearly due.

Risk Budgeting, the second edition, is a fully updated accessible guide which includes new chapters such as:

• Risk Budgeting in the Evolution of Insurance Company Risk Management
• Holistic Risk Budgeting
• Value-at-Risk: a dissenting opinion
• Risk Appetite Statements and Risk Governance

This timely second edition is necessary reading for all practitioners, from CEOs, CROs and CIOs to portfolio managers, regulators and risk professionals across a variety of industries such as pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies and banks.