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“With deft prose and page after page of keen insights, Heffernan shows why we close our eyes to facts that threaten our families, our livelihood, and our self-image--and, even better, she points the way out of the darkness.” --Daniel H. Pink In the tradition of Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Margaret Heffernan's Willful Blindness is a tour de force on human behavior that will open your eyes.Why, after every major accident and blunder, do we look back and say, How could we have been so blind? Why do some people see what others don't? And how can we change? Drawing on studies by psychologists and neuroscientists, and from interviews with business leaders, whistleblowers, and white collar criminals, distinguished businesswoman and writer Margaret Heffernan examines the phenomenon of willful blindness, exploring the reasons that individuals and groups are blind to impending personal tragedies, corporate collapses, engineering failures-even crimes against humanity.We turn a blind eye in order to feel safe, to avoid conflict, to reduce anxiety, and to protect prestige. But greater understanding leads to solutions, and Heffernan shows how-by challenging our biases, encouraging debate, discouraging conformity, and not backing away from difficult or complicated problems-we can be more mindful of what's going on around us and be proactive instead of reactive.

1.1 Problem Statement and Research Question Active loan portfolio management is becoming more and more imp- tant. In the year 2004, European banks sold credits worth EUR 249 billion. Big deals were made by the German banks Hypo Real Estate (EUR 3.6 billion) and Dresdner Bank (EUR 1.2 billion). In addition, credit exchanges were established which made loans more liquid. For example, in October 2004 the German “Deutsche Kredit-B¨ orse” was established, which focuses on trading loans assigned to medium-size businesses. It is empirically shown that active loan portfolio management can 1 be very pro?table. However, a precondition to bene?t from active loan portfolio management is having knowledge about valuating loan po- folios. Shareholders can steadily bene?t from such transactions only if banks valuate loan portfolios correctly. This is this dissertation's mo- vation for dealing with pro?tability measures for loan portfolios. Nowadays, banks measure the pro?tability of loan portfolios p- marily by calculating the return on risk adjusted capital (RORAC). Here return is the expected pro?t after re?nancing and operational costs. Risk adjusted capital, more frequently called economic capital, istheamountofequitywhichmustbeheldtoguaranteeacertaingiven solvency level of the bank. However, calculating this ratio is not su?cient when valuating loan portfolios. The calculation of economic capital implies that the bank 1 See Cebenoyan and Strahan (2004). 2 1 Introduction already knows which solvency level is optimal. It also presumes that the optimal solvency level is independent of the risk-return pro?le of the loan portfolio. But this need not be true.

Bank failures, crises, global banking, megamergers, changes in technology—the effect of these world events is to weaken existing methods of regulating bank safety and soundness, and even to make some methods ineffective. Federal regulators are evaluating new ways to solve them. Dr. Gup and his panel of academics and regulatory professionals explore these problems and the difficulties in implementing solutions. They point out that global banking, megamergers, and changes in technology are drastically altering the way financial services are delivered. They also argue that existing methods of bank regulation, formulated in the United States and elsewhere as early as the 19th century, are not able to cope with these changes. The search now underway for new methods that are global in scope. Inevitably, they will involve cross-border supervision and international cooperation.Covering a wide range of topics, from the rationale of banking regulation to optimal banking regulation in the new world environments, this book examines the innovative tools needed to cope with these problems. Greater reliance on market discipline; the use of internal controls based on statistical models, such as Value-at-Risk; and subordinated debt are discussed. This timely, probing analysis of one of the hottest topics in bank regulation today, is an important resource for professionals and their academic colleagues in the fields of banking, finance, investment, and world trade.