The introduction by the U.S. Treasury of inflation-indexed notes was one of the most widely publicized innovations in the U.S. capital markets in recent years. Since their introduction in January 1997, $57 billion in 5-, 10-, and 30-year Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) has been...

Successful bank operation requires managers to weigh complex trade-offs between growth, return, and risk. In recent years banks increasingly have adopted innovative performance metrics based on the concept of economic profit, rather than accounting earnings to assist managers in making such...

Diversification is certainly the simplest and perhaps the oldest approach to managing the trade-off between portfolio risk and return. Because diversification tends to reduce risk without a proportional reduction in returns, an overwhelming majority of commercial banks have diversified...

In banking over the past 10 years, management accountants have been instrumental in the creation of new management processes and performance systems. Their innovations have enabled banks to create internal capital markets, measure risks so as to facilitate their proper hedging and pricing, and...

Risk management has received increasing attention in recent years, both from academics and from practitioners. The heightened interest is the result of a number of coincident secular trends, including increased investment in volatile emerging markets and the growing role of capital markets in...

The price of equity has soared during the past five years, stoking concerns that stocks' prices might have risen too far, too fast. These concerns became more pressing as the values of equities rose much more rapidly than earnings during 1998 and early 1999, lifting stocks' prices to record...

The strategies of financial intermediaries in the United States presumed a stability of interest rates that began to break down in the late 1960s. Not only did rising interest rates during the past two decades tend to depress the value of the assets of all intermediaries, they also fostered...

In October 1990 questions were raised about real estate problems in the life insurance industry after the ninth largest life company sustained a major loss as a consequence of a write-down of real-estate-related assets. The value of insurance company stocks declined as the financial community...

The rate of capital formation by businesses has long been among the most closely watched elements of the national accounts. During the last decade, this component of investment attracted considerable interest as capital spending helped support our uncommonly high rate of economic growth. Not...