Financial Crisis Webinar Series

JANET M. TAVAKOLI
President
Tavakoli Structured Finance

Janet Tavakoli has over 30 years’ experience in complex finance. She has traded, structured, and sold derivatives and structured products at major financial institutions in New York and London and headed marketing of complex derivatives to Japan. Tavakoli is the former executive director and head of financial engineering in the global financial markets division at Westdeutsche Landesbank in London. She headed market risk management for the capital markets group and credit derivatives development for Bank One in Chicago. At Bank of America, she was the CreditMetrics™ Manager for the bank’s co-sponsorship with JP Morgan, and structured and sold structured products and credit derivatives. Tavakoli headed the asset swap trading desk at Merrill Lynch in New York, headed mortgage-backed securities marketing for Merrill Lynch in New York, and headed mortgage-backed securities marketing to Japanese clients for PaineWebber in New York. She also worked for Goldman Sachs in mortgage marketing and for Bear Stearns heading marketing for quantitative research. She has an MBA from the Booth Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago and a BS in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Tavakoli consults for financial institutions, insurance companies, and law firms on risk management and expert witness consulting. She has also served as an expert in large, high-profile civil suits, all of which have had successful outcomes for clients.

More Than One Million Reasons to Lie about Structured Finance
The Journal of Structured Finance

VINEER BHANSALI  
Ph.D., Founder and CIO,
LongTail Alpha LLC

Vineer’s 28-year investment career started at Citibank, where he founded and managed the Exotic and Hybrid Options Trading Desk. He later joined Salomon Brothers in its Fixed Income Arbitrage Group, followed by the CSFB Proprietary Trading Group. Dr. Bhansali was at PIMCO for 16 years, serving the last eight years as MD and Head of the Quantitative Portfolios Team, which he founded in 2008. He has written four books on finance: “Pricing and Managing Exotic and Hybrid Options”; “Fixed Income Finance: A Quantitative Approach”; “Bond Portfolio Investing and Risk Management”; and his most recent, “Tail Risk Hedging”, and authored over 25 refereed papers on topics such as option pricing, fixed income, tail hedging, asset allocation and economics in leading Journals that include the Journal of Finance, Financial Analysts’ Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and Journal of Risk. He has received numerous awards, including the Graham and Dodd Scroll Award and TIME magazine’s college achievement award. Under Bhansali’s leadership, PIMCO received the Risk Manager of the Year Award in the asset-management category in 2002 from Risk Magazine. Dr. Bhansali received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Harvard University in 1992 and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Physics from Caltech in 1987. He has served on the Investment Committee of the American Physical Society, and currently serves on the Investment Committee of the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

Right Tail Hedging: Managing Risk When Markets Melt Up
The Journal of Portfolio Management

M. BARTON WARING
Owner
Bartonwaring.com

M. Barton Waring is the retired chief investment officer for investment policy and strategy, emeritus, at Barclays Global Investors (since merged with BlackRock). He was a managing director there and started up the firm’s highly respected client advisory group in 1995, which he ran until going into semiretired status at the end of 2006. He fully retired in January 2009. Mr. Waring’s research and his many published articles have focused on helping today’s investors control their risks and enhance their returns, in both beta and alpha dimensions. His 2012 book, Pension Finance: Putting the Risks and Costs of the Defined Benefit Plan Back Under Your Control, has received strong acclaim among pension specialists of all types. He has published more than three dozen articles on surplus asset allocation and pension accounting/management issues, manager structure optimization and risk budgeting, active vs. passive investing, hedge funds, and defined contribution/ individual investor investment strategy. Six of these articles have won awards from their respective journals. He is an associate editor of The Journal of Investing and on the advisory board of The Journal of Portfolio Management. Mr. Waring received a BS in economics from the University of Oregon, a JD with honors from Lewis & Clark College, and an MA with a concentration in financial economics from Yale University.

What Investment Risk Means To You, Illustrated Strategic Asset Allocation, The Budget Constraint, And The Volatility Of Spending During Retirement
The Journal of Retirement