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5:15 – 6:00pm – Reception | 6:00 – 7:00pm – Lecture

In this year’s Morrison & Foerster Lecture in honor of Marshall L. Small, B.A. ’49, J.D. ’51, Niall Ferguson, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University will discuss risk management in finance and geopolitics. In the period after around 1950, there was a marked divergence between theories of risk management as they evolved in the financial world, and their counterparts in the realm of national security. Highly formalized approaches to financial risk management led to an excessive reliance on mathematical models that proved disastrously fallible. Contemporary approaches to national security strategy erred in the opposite direction: lacking in a formal framework for risk measurement, they created opportunities for reckless and ultimately very costly decisions based on “gut” instinct. What both approaches missed—and continue to miss—was any systematic attempt to learn from history. By examining decision making in two recent crises—one political, the other financial—this lecture will show the vital importance of the historical dimension.

Niall Ferguson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University To view Niall Ferguson’s full bio, click here.