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While interpreting violent market movements can potentially be illuminating, many experienced finance practitioners shy away from this exercise, having recognized the difficulty of this task. At the same time, the majority of them appears to have accepted the premise that supply‐and‐demand dislocations have emerged as increasingly influential forces driving fixed income markets. In both business‐as‐usual and catastrophic market environments, their impact on interest rates, credit spreads, and implied as well as realized volatilities rivals that of geopolitical events, economic fundamentals, and credit crises.

Today, most institutional investors, practitioners, and regulators seem relatively content with the current state of the art. Although most academics and practitioners fully recognize the conceptual and technological limitations of the “state‐of‐the‐practice” models, systems, and policies, it would appear that no urgent issues remain. However, this author argues that the risk management revolution is not over, and poses some fascinating questions that remain unanswered. The author discusses some challenges that practitioners face and proposes a line of inquiry for future commentary.

This second installment of commentary regarding recent financial crises discusses market dislocations over the past year (the first installment focused on market conditions surrounding September 11, 2001). The authors describe the events, and the fundamental and technical forces, that contribute to the current conditions of illiquidity and increased equity, credit, interest rate, and spread volatility. They suggest that in the current environment, more prudent leverage of market participants has mitigated the contagion effects observed in 1998.

The author surveys how recent crises—in particular, the LTCM collapse of 1998 and the events of September 11, 2001—have influenced the application and interpretation of risk models by various practitioners within the financial markets. The article highlights notable differences in risk management practices within the fixed income and swaps markets between these two market periods. The conclusion is that, exclusive of certain fundamental differences between the two events (the moral hazard inherent in the LTCM collapse, and the Fed intervention during the fall of 2001), the institutional response to market shocks has evolved over the past three years, although measurement methods remain essentially unchanged.

Value‐at‐Risk (VaR) has become a mainstream risk management technique employed by a large proportion of financial institutions. There exists a substantial amount of research dealing with this task, most commonly referred to as VaR backtesting. A new generation of “self‐learning” VaR models (Conditional Autoregressive Value‐at‐Risk or CAViaR) combine backtesting results with ex ante VaR estimates in an ARIMA framework in order to forecast P/L distributions more accurately. In this commentary, the authors present a systematic overview of several classes of applied statistical techniques that can make VaR backtesting more comprehensive and provide valuable insights into the analytical properties of VaR models in various market environments. In addition, they discuss the challenges associated with extending traditional backtesting approaches for VaR horizons longer than one day and propose solutions to this important problem.

Assumptions regarding long‐term expected returns have significant implications for asset/liability management of financial institutions. This article questions the validity of common assumptions regarding long‐term expected returns that are employed by financial institutions, in particular insurance companies. Although this article directly addresses this issue in the context of the insurance industry, the discussion is relevant for all institutional investors in fixed income markets.

This commentary discusses issues related to the important task of separating the spreads of fixed income securities into various components, related to liquidity, credit, and the duration and convexity of cashflows. This treatment is intended to provide intuition and a general framework for thinking about spread dynamics, rather than a mathematically rigorous treatment of the topic. In addition to being an introduction for those who are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of the market dynamics of spreads, the article also serves as a commentary and reminder to those practitioners with more experience in the analysis of spreads.

This article discusses credit migration of diversified loan pool securitizations, as evidenced by the ratings transitions of mortgage‐backed securities (MBS) and asset‐backed securities (ABS). The authors contrast the ratings (i.e., credit) stability of MBS and ABS relative to ratings migration of general obligation corporate credit. They also use holding period returns to compare the total return portfolios of MBS/ABS to portfolios of senior unsecured corporate obligations.

Revelation of controversial fundraising practices by the Clinton‐Gore reelection campaign in 1996 and continuing controversy over proposed campaign finance reform legislation has brought this subject into public focus and discussion. This article provides an overview of key recent developments in campaign finance accompanied by coverage of literature and Web sites produced by scholars, government agencies, and participants in the ongoing debate over campaign finance and its role in the American political process.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a practical means of incorporating ecological capital into the framework of business entities. Investors and shareholders need to be informed of the viability and sustainability of their investments. Ecological (natural) capital risks are becoming more significant. Exposure to material risk from primary industry is a significant factor for primary processing, pharmaceutical, textile and the financial industry. A means of assessing the changes to ecological capital assets and their effect on inflows and outflows of economic benefit is important information for stakeholder communication.

This paper synthesises a body of literature from accounting, ecological economics, ecosystem services, modelling, agriculture and ecology to propose a way to fill current gaps in the capability to account for ecological capital. It develops the idea of the ecological balance sheet (EBS) to enable application of familiar methods of managing built and financial capital to management of ecological assets (ecosystems that provide goods and services).

The EBS is possible, practical and useful. A form of double-entry bookkeeping can be developed to allow accrual accounting principles to be applied to these assets. By using an EBS, an entity can improve its capability to increase inflows and avoid future outflows of economic benefit.

Although major efforts are under-way around the world to improve business impact on natural resources, these efforts have been unable to satisfactorily help individual businesses elucidate the practical economic and competitive advantages conferred by investment in ecological capital. This work provides a way for businesses to learn about what the impact of changes to ecological assets has on inflows and outflows of economic benefit to their enterprise and how to invest in ecological capital to reduce their enterprise’s material risk and create competitive advantage.

No one has synthesised knowledge and practice across these disciplines into a practical approach. This approach is the first demonstration of how ecological assets can be managed in the same way as built capital by using proven practices of accounting.