Biography
Mark K. Bhasin, CFA, is senior vice president of Basis Investment Group, LLC, New York City.
Rethinking Expectations provides fresh approaches to macroeconomic analysis, including imperfect knowledge economics (IKE), which models individual behavior and aggregate outcomes and explores the frontier of what formal macroeconomic and finance theory can deliver. These new approaches are needed, given the recent Great Recession and spectacular boom and bust in asset prices.
James Owen Weatherall argues that given the proven track record of applying ideas developed in physics to finance, it is time to do it again. His book is about the future of finance and the new set of tools that will facilitate the proper functioning of the world’s economies.
John Coates, senior research fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge, offers a number of fascinating lessons from a booming new field, the biology of risk, revealing how risk taking and stress transform our body chemistry and drive us to irrational exuberance or pessimism. When such chemical surges overwhelm traders and investors, they tend to suffer either euphoric overconfidence or extreme timidity.
Thomas Mayer argues persuasively that Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) could work if the member states would embrace a new EMU architecture. Even though all past monetary unions of sovereign states have failed, Mayer remains hopeful that the EMU can develop a more robust framework and contribute to the historical work of European unification.