Contagion! The Spread of Systemic Risk in Financial Networks

Tom Hurd
McMaster University

This talk will provide an overview of my new book, a draft of which can be found here: http://ms.mcmaster.ca/tom/tom.html . The book aims to provide a timely summary of a growing body of systemic risk research as well as a unified mathematical framework for the primary channels that can transmit damaging shocks through financial systems. Much of its contents are new, not having appeared previously in published journals. In the talk we will review how to study default and liquidity cascade mechanisms on random financial networks. We find that large graph analytics are available and computable when the network model has a property called ``locally-treelike independence’’, and the cascade mechanism satisfies a ``no direct feedback’’ condition.

Presentation (PDF File)

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