Financial Engineering Futures

Introduction byKatepalli Sreenivasan
Provost, Polytechnic Institute of NYU
Senior Vice Provost for Science/Technology for the Global Network University

ABSTRACT:

A new finance is always due, essentially for one reason—the world changes and has changed—

both economically, financially and otherwise, revealing financial fallacies in their scion. These include:

• The Ostrich Syndrome, the demise of risk and the risk-free rate.
• The fallacies of a mass-market rationality (and strategic multi-polar financial markets) and the too big to fail firms. • The fallacies of a self-serving rationalities and the risks of inequalities.
• The fallacy that regulation has no risks and the risk externalities of regulation.
• Each of these fallacies have an important implication to quantitative theories of finance and, in particular, in defining the elements that make up Quant finance—how we measure assets, how risk relates to uncertainty, and how they are used to value and price financial assets. A number of future quantitative challenges and a presentation of preliminary results will cover among others:
• Finance without the risk-free rate
• Contagions finance and persistent stochastic finance
• Strategic finance and economies in collisions and self-serving altruism