Author

Rick Bookstaber 28 posts 0 comments

Rick Bookstaber is currently working in Washington as Senior Policy Adviser to the Financial Stability Oversight Council and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC. Before the current stint, Rick worked at Bridgewater Associates, ran the Quantitative Equity Fund at FrontPoint Partners and was in charge of risk management at Moore Capital Management. In investment banking, Rick was in charge of firm-wide risk and a member of Salomon Brothers' Risk Management Committee. Rick also spent ten years at Morgan Stanley, designing derivatives, doing proprietary trading, and concluding as the firm's first market risk manager. Rick is the author of four books and scores of articles on finance including A Demon of Our Own Design. Bookstaber received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.

Economy

The Product is the Promise: Finance and Social Values

Rick Bookstaber Mar 4, 2013

In the first paragraph of my book A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley, 2007) I observe that “You don't deliberately obliterate hundreds of billions of dollars of investor money. And that is at the heart of this book – it is going to happen…

Political Economy

The Great Migration of the 21st Century

Rick Bookstaber Dec 10, 2012

One lesson we should keep in mind as we recover in the aftermath of Sandy is that we are slow learners. Although the vulnerability of many of these communities is undeniable, we have resolved to rebuild the homes. That resolve will no doubt…

Political Economy

The Great Labor Reset: Labor Laundering, Self-Sourcing, and Other Tales of Woe

Rick Bookstaber Sep 10, 2012

By Rick Bookstaber In a recent post I discussed the potential for long-term, structural unemployment, the possibility that some of what we are seeing in the unemployment picture will not be resolved by an economic upturn. The focus of the…

Political Economy

Profit Incentives, Disruptive Technology, and Reducing Health Care Costs

Rick Bookstaber Aug 27, 2012

By Rick Bookstaber Medical care is famously immune to the usual market incentives; the patient has little reason to make a cost-benefit tradeoff. Doctors and hospitals hardly do either; indeed the opposite seems to be the case. Matters are…

Economy

Will the Unemployed Really Find Jobs Making Robots?

Rick Bookstaber Aug 24, 2012

By Rick Bookstaber There is a recent story in the New York Times on the growing use of labor-saving robots to increase production efficiency and, by replacing low-cost overseas labor, to return production to our shores. But the operative…

Political Economy

Class Warfare

Rick Bookstaber May 8, 2012

we are seeing an ever shrinking number of people paying an ever greater portion of the taxes. Though they also are the ever shrinking number of people acquiring an ever greater portion of the wealth. There is little that matches the…

Political Economy

Foxconn and China’s Capitalist Revolution

Rick Bookstaber Feb 25, 2012

The promises of reform at Foxconn are the latest of many as China painfully adjusts to the inevitable social realignment that comes with a capitalist economy. What is occurring in China now happened in Europe during the transition from…

Political Economy

Adam Smith and Joseph Schumpeter on the Bifurcation of Society

Rick Bookstaber Feb 15, 2012

On the issue of the bifurcation of society and the widening income gap in the U.S., and the strains appearing from the factory system in China that have recently been highlighted, there is useful commentary that comes from a surprising…

Political Economy

The Twilight of the Leisure Class

Rick Bookstaber Jan 27, 2012

Taken to its end, industrialization class distinctions are revealed by conspicuous consumption. This points to the objective of industrial production: goods in the realm of common consumption become removed from social distinction. This is…

Economy

The Bifurcated Society

Rick Bookstaber Jan 13, 2012

There is less mobility in the work force because the computers are not simply displacing jobs, they are taking out the middle. Because they take out the middle, it is a lot harder to pursue the American dream by working your way up the…