The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century Princeton University Press ( 01 April, 2003 ) Book Our Price : £ 15.20 List Price : £ 16.88 You save £1.68 (10% off) Prices subject to change. usually dispatched within 24 hours.

A Must-Read!

Economist Robert Shiller became a household name when he published his previous bestseller Irrational Exuberance just as the dot.com boom was peaking. In The New Financial Order, he capitalizes on his celebrity to put forward a thoughtful, detailed proposal for managing economic risks. This highly readable book portrays a future in which many serious individual financial risks are dispersed to savvy global investors, thanks to technology. Imagine violinists being able to insure their careers in addition to their Stradivarius instruments, developing countries securing generous loans from the first world by tying the repayment schedules to their future GDPs and a revamped tax system preventing the gap between rich and poor from widening. We ....suggest this book to risk-management professionals who want to step back and look at the big picture, as well as to anyone who has a stake in creating new financial products to meet twenty-first century needs.

Everything is a risk

Are you a private investor looking for handy tips on hot stocks? Good luck, but this might not be for you. You wont find get-rick-quick advice in this scholarly work, but you might learn why youre drawn to actively managed funds despite their history of market underperformance. Youll also be enriched by the stories and depth of research here. Another reviewer objects that Bernstein credits the Greek mathematicians with less understanding of probability than a school child. It seemed to me that Bernstein is saying something different: Even if Socrates had a private opinion about the frequency of VI on an astragali roll it wasnt a respectable part of his intellectual framework. He might of known it, but he refused to study it. The author clearly considers his subject the most important in history, and in 330 pages identifies every significant step in the development of *thinking about* risk. In some ways though, the focus is too narrow. It becomes clear towards the end of the book that he has been building up the strands of probability theory as precursors to the taming of risk in modern financial theory. I was hoping that an ambitious work on the history of probability would include the discovery that all of reality is based on chance, but you can search the index for Quantum Mechanics in vain. (However Quant is there - Bernstein himself was once a financial mathematician.) In a subject as huge as risk there will always be more to say, and what is included here makes a cohesive whole whilst being important or interesting in it parts. Ok, maybe you dont love chance as much as me - what you need to know about portfolio theory is in Chapter 12 onwards - youll still have 140 pages of important results. Its even topical, Kahnemans Prospect Theory is covered in detail (and he won the Nobel last year).

A superb popularisation of a complex subject

Bernstein has managed to take a subject which at first sight seems intensely boring, and has made it fascinating. Whether or not you have any interest in Risk, Statistics or Econimics, you owe it to yourself to read this book. It is quite simply a "Ripping Yarn". Its greatness lies in Bernsteins ability to tell the story in an accessible manner, without dumbing down the essential facts. Let me say it again: Read this book because it is a fascinating and well written story. The fact you will know a lot more about Risk at the end of it is an incidental, but very welcome, extra.