The Londoner

By Sikander Hayat  The problem with the Euro is that it treats a country like Greece as if it is the same as Germany in terms of its economy, politics, culture and other aspects of its social fabric. We know very well that this is not the case as countries and cultures acquire ways of doing things in their own way. Greece cannot be turned into Germany, Germany cannot be turned into Greece and yet the single currency euro tries to do just that. Since 2008, Greece's economy has gone down 25%, loosing millions of jobs, forcing citizens to emigrate, pension schemes to collapse, loss of sovereignty and directly leading to the rise of ultra right and ultra left wing political parties. Germany is widely blamed by the Greek for their country's problems. People of Greece invoke second world war and occupation by Nazi Germany as an earlier example of German belligerence . Greeks argue that what Germans did militarily during the second world war , they are now doing to ...

Book Review by Sikander Hayat  As far as I have been able to decipher, this book is about the emergence of an event which  is  totally unforeseen, unpredictable and which cannot be modelled for by our usual  forecasting models . Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a great book to read despite  its length and tone which shows its anger against the current establishment in academia,  industry and just about anyone in high places. Nassim has been a quant in his previous life,  has practised financial forecasting methods in trying to choose the eventual winners and has  tried to use his practitioner's knowledge to inject life into the idea of his Black Swan thesis.  Although he has used forecasting models in his life as a trader, he is fully aware of the short  comings of these models and in fact, he makes a strong case against modelling risk with the  current tool...

By Sikander Hayat The problem with forecasting a financial crash is that no two crashes are the same. Causes could range from bingeing on collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) as the largest banks and insurance companies did before the crash of 2007/2008 (which lead to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and countless smaller market players) to run on the banks to rigidly sticking to Gold standard in the early 1900s. It is possible that remedy for one disaster  results in another disaster which was not envisaged at the time of enacting such remedy.  We know crashes do happen and will continue to happen despite our efforts to contain the risk. It is also true that we can moderate the risk but we cannot hope to eliminate the risk. We can shift the risk from highly regulated markets to markets where attitude to regulation is blasé and sometimes actively risk seeking in order to snatch the business from other parts of the world. This is where the world of...