Risky business

A column from the New York Times about the biology of risk.

The author has studied London traders and found that the more volatile markets are, the less risk those folks are likely to take.

He goes on to make the counter-intuitive suggestion that the US Federal Reserve could curb stock bubbles by being less transparent about short-term interest rates. If the financial community was less certain about what the Fed was going to do, perhaps they would become less likely to take the kinds of risks that drove the world economy into recession in 2008.

Even if you are not an economics wonk, there is a lot of good fodder in here to help you think about your own perceptions of risk in various contexts and how you manage your reactions to those threats.