Financial Origami

An in-depth look at the failure of Wall Street's "proven" financial models Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper into intricate and aesthetically attractive shapes. As such, it is the perfect metaphor for the Wall Street financial engineering model, which ultimately proved to be the underlying cause of the 2008 financial crisis. In Financial Origami, Brendan Moynihan describes how the Wall Street business model evolved from a method to transfer risk into a method for manufacturing risk. Along the way, this timely book skillfully dissects financial engineering and addresses how it's often a mechanism to evade regulatory constraints, provide institutional investors with customized products, and, of course, generate revenue for financial engineers. Reveals how Wall Street's financial engineering business model morphed into something destructive Highlights how the origami model worked well in the comparatively stable years of the early 2000s, when there was less risk to transfer Discusses how Wall Street began manufacturing risk by creating products that multiplied risk exposures and encouraged subprime lending With the collapse of Lehman Brother the Wall Street business model effectively broke. But there are many lessons to be learned from what has transpired, and Financial Origami will show you what they are.

James B. Stewart, bestselling author of Den of Thieves, raves that Fixers “is a hugely entertaining novel that steps boldly into the most perplexing and enduring mystery of the financial crisis: why its perpetrators were not only not punished, but rewarded by the government.” In Fixers, Michael M. Thomas, the New York Times-bestselling novelist and longtime financial insider, has crafted an exhilarating thriller of a top conspiracy between Wall Street and the White House. On a winter’s night, a well-heeled “cultural consultant” named Chauncey Suydam gets a call from the head of the world’s most powerful investment bank, who says a financial crisis is brewing and has a plan to insulate Wall Street from the fallout—and keep people such as himself out of jail. His mission for Chauncey is simple: to help funnel millions of dollars to a presidential candidate espousing change, in exchange for a few Wall Street–friendly names in the resultant administration. Yet as Chauncey wends his way among the nation’s political elite and becomes addicted to his masterful manipulations, he sees with greater clarity than ever how decisions really get made—on Wall Street and in Washington. And as the magnitude of the fix he’s perpetrating begins to sink in, its poisonous affect on Main Street becomes apparent, and his addiction to his masterful manipulations evident, Chauncey starts to have second thoughts. Is it too late?

Conducting research and technology design for domestic life is by no means easy. Methods commonly used in the field of Human-Computer Interaction in settings like the workplace may not easily translate to the richness and complexity of domestic life. This book documents new ways in which researchers are studying domestic life, as well as designing and evaluating technology in the home. Each chapter is a candid discussion about methods that were successfully used for research studies with a focus on the challenges that the researchers faced and the best practices they learned. Discover new research methods for exploring family life and evaluating and designing domestic technology. Learn about the challenges in designing for and studying domestic life from experts in the field. Read researchers' candid stories about what works and what does not work in practice. More information available at the companion website: http://lessonsfromhome.org/

An economy of services largely dominates our world today, but no patent system is available to support it. All signs point increasingly to evidence that in almost all countries—and as enshrined in the TRIPS Agreement—patent rules and procedures are seriously handicapped in their incapacity to respond to current economic reality. Many inventions today are made without any materiality, yet they are nonetheless genuine inventions, such as those that arise from the banking, insurance and business consulting industries. Today’s patent system remains deeply linked to the making of things with human hands. It must evolve and adapt so that the new economy can also benefit from its advantages. This book is about that adaptation—which will come, or, rather, as the author shows, has slowly started to come. By describing details and historical events that shed light on how patent law has evolved from the pre-industrial to the industrial economy, the book manifests the need for a further evolution of patents to the post-industrial economy.

Blockchain is not just a technology, it is a groundbreaking concept for decentralized money and finance. Monty Metzger has done something really important: showcasing the business impact of that concept, revealing just how revolutionary it is. In a book that is one part prophecy and future research report, one part documentation and case studies, and one part survival manual, internet entrepreneur and thought leader Monty C. M. Metzger showcases the impact of Blockchain on finance and money, to discover seven leadership opportunities and straight forward rules for every digital leader. At the same time, he illuminates the new financial order of the internet of value: how it challenges and destroys the status quo but also opens up new areas of innovation. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything - from corporations to governments, nations to individuals - must evolve in the blockchain era. Blockchain Banking is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about technology. It is about you. - "Blockchain is not just a technology, it is a groundbreaking concept for decentralized money and finance. Monty Metzger has done something really important: showcasing the impact of that concept, revealing just how revolutionary it is" "Blockchain Banking is a must-read for anyone looking to understand the opportunities and challenges of using blockchain technology in the financial industry. The book provides a clear and concise overview of the key concepts, and offers valuable insights into how businesses can use blockchain to create new, more efficient and more secure financial services." "Blockchain Banking is a thought-provoking and timely book that offers a fresh perspective on the future of finance. Monty's deep knowledge of the industry and clear writing style make it a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of blockchain and banking."

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, the impacts of climate change have been fierce, causing loss of human life and irreparable destruction to natural and man-made infrastructure in many parts of the world. The difference between climate change now and in the past is that of sudden and disproportionate disruption of the natural energy dynamics by the changing consumption patterns of billions of human beings who have polluted terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The picture that emerges from the exhaustive analysis of international data drawn from the most reliable sources indicates that we have possibly gained access to the gateway of extinction and it is time that we take corrective steps immediately. Global climate change is further altering our relationship with the environment, modifying relatively stable climatic factors and making them uncertain, unpredictable, and threatening. Changes in land use and an increasing demand for water resources due to climate change have affected the capacity of ecosystems to sustain food production, ensure the supply of freshwater resources, provide ecosystem services, and promote rural multi-functionality. Ensuring food production does not just depend on increasing water efficiency, promoting climate resilient crop production, or reducing land-use competition for urbanization but also on a more suitable and stable climate as the changes in climatic factors like precipitation, temperature, radiation, evaporation, and wind bring about some major shifts in global food supplies. According to Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), focused on greenhouse gas emissions projections, and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change increases the risk of simultaneous crop failures (including corn, rice, legumes, and vegetables) if irrigation systems are not fully adapted to water stress situations. A changing climate could have many adverse impacts on other sectors of our environment. This book offers concrete, up-to-date, and appropriate study cum research material for students, researchers, academicians and policymakers. It will be of a greater interest to students and researchers in the field of environmental science, agriculture science, agronomy, and sustainable development.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of two workshops held at the 24th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2020, in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, in February 2020. The 39 full papers and 3 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers feature four Workshops: The 1st Asian Workshop on Usable Security, AsiaUSEC 2020, the 1st Workshop on Coordination of Decentralized Finance, CoDeFi 2020, the 5th Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting, VOTING 2020, and the 4th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts, WTSC 2020. The AsiaUSEC Workshop contributes an increase of the scientific quality of research in human factors in security and privacy. In terms of improving efficacy of secure systems, the research included an extension of graphical password authentication. Further a comparative study of SpotBugs, SonarQube, Cryptoguard and CogniCrypt identified strengths in each and refined the need for improvements in security testing tools. The CoDeFi Workshop discuss multi-disciplinary issues regarding technologies and operations of decentralized finance based on permissionless blockchain. The workshop consists of two parts; presentations by all stakeholders, and unconference style discussions. The VOTING Workshop cover topics like new methods for risk-limited audits, new ethods to increase the efficiency of mixnets, verification of security of voting schemes election auditing, voting system efficiency, voting system usability, and new technical designs for cryptographic protocols for voting systems, and new way of preventing voteselling by de-incentivising this via smart contracts. The WTSC Workshop focuses on smart contracts, i.e., self-enforcing agreements in the form of executable programs, and other decentralized applications that are deployed to and run on top of specialized blockchains.