Richard Bookstaber for Age of Economics

Age of Economics: in the first part of this project a diverse group of global thinkers answers 8 fundamental questions about economics and capitalist civilization.

Rick Bookstaber is a noted expert in financial risk management, and is the author of The End of Theory (Princeton, 2017), and A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley, 2007). He is the founder of Talagent Financial, a platform for providing risk management to asset owners. His career has spanned chief risk officer roles on both the buy-side at Moore Capital and Bridgewater, and on the sell-side at Morgan Stanley and Salomon. From 2009 to 2015 Rick served in the public sector at the SEC and the U.S. Treasury, drafting the Volcker Rule, building out the risk management structure for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and developing an agent-based model to assess financial vulnerabilities. Most recently he was the Chief Risk Officer in the Office of the CIO for the University of California, with oversight across its $160 billion pension and endowment portfolios. His various roles have put him at the center of the critical crises of the last three decades – working with portfolio insurance during the 1987 Crash while at Morgan Stanley, overseeing risk at Salomon during the 1998 failure of Long-Term Capital Management (dubbed “Salomon North”), and with the aftermath of the 2008 Crisis while in the regulatory sphere. A black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu, Rick can be found training at the Renzo Gracie Academy in his free time.Rick received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Interview by William Hynes

Music: J.S. Bach, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Praeludium 1 in C mayor, BWV 846. Kimiko Ishizaka, piano