Crashes and Crises: Lessons from a History of Financial Disasters

The London Whale and Value at Risk (1x21)

Air date: Aug 16, 2018

Explore a risk-management tool called value at risk, or VaR. Developed by economists at J. P. Morgan in the 1990s, VaR estimates the largest loss that a given investment strategy can be expected to sustain under normal market conditions. Chart the successes of this model—and its spectacular failure in an incident involving a high-rolling trader nicknamed the “London Whale.”