The existence of large financial market actors that do not care about maximizing their profits magnifies the riskiness of the bets.

This is inevitable, because, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, the riskiness of many investments, being subject to inherent uncertainty, is immeasurable.

The riskiness of the ECB s strategy of using the printing press to bail out banks, including their public and private clients, would become apparent to everyone.

In normal times, capital markets perform this function smoothly but these markets break down from time to time, owing to sudden large changes in perceptions about the riskiness of important asset classes.

Today s crisis indicates that a set of rigid rules allows resourceful financial institutions to mask riskiness in their portfolios or shift things around to make standard risk metrics appear better than they really are.

The procedures and practices of IAD prior to the establishment of OII included analyses used in the development of audit plans that took into account, inter alia, factors relating to the riskiness of an activity.

Most important, however, has been what looks, from today s perspective, like a permanent collapse in the risk bearing capacity of the private marketplace, and a permanent and large increase in the perceived riskiness of financial assets worldwide and of the businesses whose cash flows underpin them.

Relating the riskiness of holding an open position in a currency market to the exchange rate s divergence from parity levels suggests a novel way to think about how central banks can influence the market to limit departures from parity. Although the exchange rate ultimately reverts back to its PPP benchmark, in a world of imperfect knowledge market participants might ignore this possibility in the near term.