F#-Time, Functions and Processes: Towards Sustainable Investment Risk Benchmarks

‘I made a mistake’: Alan Greenspan (Financial Times: Alan Beattie and James Politi: Washington, 23rd October 2008). Such are the words of great men, for even in troubled times their self-effacing manner provides useful guidance. Whilst Mr Greenspan may feel this way, he is a product of his environment, one that has seen the cumulative development of financial instruments and strategies that have not been thought through as to their impact on a complex economy. Mainly this is because risk is thought to be discrete and the methods used to price it are flawed. To an engineer the control of a machine is built-in. Although the economy is not a machine, but an intensely connected complex of ever emerging businesses, the process of control needs to be structured in a similar manner. Pricing investment risk in this environment should never have been left to opaque institutions, or processes that do not recognise the co-dependencies of business and systemic functionality. To do so is to ignore the correlation of events in a highly connected world. These events are dynamic and conditional, whose outturns are unknowable. This does not mean unmanageable, but that the control process be built-in to businesses and government in a consistent manner, transparent yet using different parameters. Transparent means that data, assumptions and processes need to be monitored and published in timely manner. As far as accounting for results is concerned it should be recognised that budgeting and reporting to investors is founded on dynamic processes that are therefore changeable; usually out of date; and co-dependent upon others within a complex dynamic network that is both internal and external to the business. The works of Stafford Beer (Brain of the Firm, Heart of the Enterprise, Diagnosing the System) Fredrick Vestor (The Art of Interconnected Thinking) and others are examples of how to manage the internal dynamics of a business and point to a methodology that synthesises the approaches of investors such as Warren Buffett so that extreme outcomes such as the Credit-Crunch 2008 can be reduced in frequency but investors are free to ‘take their risks’. This research aims to compare two extreme events in the financial arena, the ‘Reinsurance Spiral of the late 1980s’ and the ‘2008 Credit-Crunch’, show their commonalities and propose methods that supply liquidity in all but gross systemic failure and allow investment risk to be more ably assessed and priced. It is not meant to be a