Credit default swap gives you something to do. You can buy some credit default swaps from them to protect yourself against the bankruptcy of people who owe you money.

Well if you've got information about a company, or you believe that a company is undervalued, you can go out and buy their stock and you can make some profit on it.

I agree with a lot of the points in Taleb's book, but I don't agree with many of his conclusions. It seems to me that he rightly points out that risk managers miss a lot of the risks, but the conclusion is that he draws, is that we should abandon risk management, whereas my conclusion is we should improve it.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

I'd like to see a little more action on the energy side of things. I've been pushing for some kind of a carbon tax for years, and it seems to me we've had lots of opportunities to do it.

We're talking about should we increase taxes? Why not put a tax on carbon emissions. It would raise a lot of money, it would reduce the environmental damages in the future, it would solve so many problems, and it would be a much more constructive thing to do than to think about raising the income tax.

You know, some of the portfolios we might consider buying are portfolios which would do especially well if we have an economy-wide, or I mean, a global climate change that impacts us very negatively there are some companies that will do well, and so it might make sense to hold some of those in your portfolio.

I think we're fooling ourselves if we think that regulators are going to be able to outsmart the bankers. So, the task of designing regulatory reform is trying to make more or less foolproof regulation and that's one of the advantages of the systemic category.

If you pay attention to where your exposures are, you might tend up buying credit default swaps against a variety of people that you - companies that you deal with.

I don't see what the alternative to risk management is. If it's just getting rid of the models and instead using the smart people who can figure it out? How do you train them? What do you teach them? Do you just put them in a cockpit and let them stumble for 10 years of their life and then after that they're good at it?

If you have information that a company is not as good as its stock market valuation, you don't have a way to sell that stock unless you already own it. And so that information doesn't get incorporated in the company's stock price as fast if you don't allow short selling.