Financial Market Transparency

Sironi, Paolo
Paolo Sironi is author of bestselling literature on quantitative finance and fintech innovation. Currently an elective member of IBM Industry Academy, he advises financial institutions globally on business model transformation by linking finance and technology. Formerly startup entrepreneur and quantitative risk manager for investment banks.

The history of capitalism is about growth, but the rude awakening of the Global Financial Crisis was a moment of reckoning that highlighted the flaws in our understanding of financial markets. Unbearable accumulated costs hidden by efficiently inefficient price mechanisms caused the collapse and may do so again. Meanwhile, environmental externalities caused by expectations of continuous growth are exceeding planetary limits. Solutions based on self-serving industry supplied forecasts don't reconcile with economic reality and increase global instability. Only transparency creates a consequentialist ethic that changes our behaviour and reconciles short-term personal needs with long-term development goals to solve these problems. FMT's breakthrough is in recognising homo sapiens as both rational and irrational while facing uncertainty. This biological approach overcomes both restrictive neoclassical hypothesis of rationality and behavioural finance's incomplete attempts to nudge investors. FMT proposes novel micro foundations that describe the biological nature of financial markets to increase antifragility. Readers will make better decisions under uncertainty that profit us all.