"Restoring Confidence In The Financial System" is a ground-breaking book in which a top mathematician, who is also one of the City of London's most experienced traders, and an experienced City banker explore how confidence in the global financial system was destroyed by the current banking crisis. Drawing on his firsthand experience of steering the trading floor at a major European bank, Sean Tully, together with Richard Bassett, analyses the steps that led up to the crisis and pinpoint precisely one of the main causes of the lending bubble with whose consequences we are all now living. The authors explain the intricacies of the regulatory framework of Basel I and Basel II, the two landmark events in banking regulation which inadvertently laid the foundation for the current crisis. The authors then show how a radical and new but easily understood measure of risk, revealed here for the first time, can prevent another such bubble from ever happening again. This new measure, called see-through leverage or STL, can be used to restore faith in the financial system by allowing a rapid means of differentiating between potentially toxic and healthy 'AAA'-rated securities.Armed with STL, investors, rating agencies and regulators alike can cut through the complexity of economic modeling to the nub of the problem: leverage. "Restoring Confidence In The Financial System" is a vital book for the international business community. In a globally interconnected world, no one can claim to be untouched by the crisis. How could bankers have got their sums so wrong? How could regulators and politicians have failed to see the storm coming? Above all, how can confidence be restored to get the wheels of the global finance machine working again? This book has the solution.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Preface Introduction 1. Brave New World 2. The Unintended Consequences Of Basel I And Basel II 3. Rating Agencies And The Shadow Banking System 4. How The Current System Failed And The Need For See-Through Leverage (STL) 5. How STL(X) Should Be Used In Practice By Investors, Regulators And Rating Agencies 6. Towards A Basel III Glossary Bibliography Index

Author Biography

Sean Tully is one of the City of London's most experienced traders. An American, he graduated from the State University of New York in Mathematics as a departmental Scholar and Magna Cum Laude. He went on to do a Master of Science in Mathematics at Clarkson University, and research in Mathematics at the University of Illinois. On leaving academia he joined Citibank, eventually heading up their short-term interest rate derivatives trading desk. Sean was appointed a Managing Director at Citibank in 1996, moving on to run global US interest rate swaps trading, Canadian interest rate derivatives trading and a proprietary trading activity. In 1999, Sean joined WestLB as Managing Director and New York Regional Head of Global Derivatives and Fixed Income, and since 2005 he has had global responsibility for several different trading areas in Derivatives and Fixed Income trading at WestLB in London. Sean is Head of Credit and Fixed Income Trading at WestLB. Richard Bassett studied Law at Christ's College, Cambridge, and then took an MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. He was a staff foreign correspondent for The Times in Central and Eastern Europe from the early 1980s until the end of the Cold War, before moving to the City where he has worked for seventeen years. He is an acclaimed biographer and author whose books include THE AUSTRIANS, BALKAN HOURS, KURT WALDHEIM and HITLER'S SPY CHIEF: The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery. Richard is head of Strategic and Corporate Communications at WestLB's London branch.