Every industry experiences strategic inflection points which throw up both opportunities as well as threats. The crisis of 2007-2009 was one such inflection point for the banking and finance industries. A significant part of the danger arose from the fact that risk pricing of financial products and the existing risk management techniques were found desperately wanting and in need of urgent upgrade.

Risk Pricing is an insightful guide as to how the financial world got risk so badly wrong — and how it can avoid doing so again. The book explains what the risk pricing problem for financial products really is. It deconstructs the failures of the past, and introduces innovative new approaches to de-risking and pricing financial products for the future:

• Why the response of governments to the 2007-2009 crisis was seriously flawed

• The higher order risks the financial industry confronts in the 21st century due to the effects of volatility and complexity — and what can be done about it

• The discipline of risk management from the virtual economy's perspective, including derivative financial instruments

• New methods of dealing with legal risk — particularly rampant in the virtual economy — overleveraging, the risk of poor supervision and its impact on pricing financial products

• How the top methodology of physicists — quantum electrodynamics (QED) — offers a potential solution for de-risking financial products.

This is a path breaking book for finance and banking professionals, academics and regulators about comprehensive, accurate and dependable methods of measuring and managing risk through a correct pricing of the exposure embedded in various financial products.

Dimitris N. Chorafas has advised financial and industrial corporations in strategic planning and risk management for four decades and has given seminars all over the world to thousands of executives throughout the USA, Europe, Asia and Latin America.

A graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Paris, and the Technical University of Athens, Dr Chorafas has been a Fulbright scholar and has served on the faculty of many universities around the world.

Dr Chorafas is the author of 135 books, some of which have been translated into 16 languages.