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## REMINDER ## REMINDER ## REMINDER ## Dear all, On Wednesday 18th November, the RSS Leeds/Bradford local group will be hosting an afternoon on "statistics and the credit crunch" featuring talks by Mick Ellender (Callcredit Ltd), David Hand (RSS President), Nick Bingham (Imperial College) and Klaus Schenk-Hoppe (University of Leeds). Further details can be found on our webpage: http://tinyurl.com/rss-lba All welcome! Regards, Paul =================================================================== Dr. Paul D. Baxter Secretary/Treasurer, RSS Leeds/Bradford Local Group, Division of Biostatistics, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Leeds/Bradford: Wednesday 18 November, 2.00pm, Leeds University. Statistics and the credit crunch Mick Ellender (Callcredit Ltd) [2pm - 2.40pm]. Credit scoring in the current economic climate A high level look at the statistical techniques and methodologies used in credit scoring and its use through the consumer life cycle from point of acquisition to collections and recoveries. The high level theories will be reviewed along with practical case studies and also a look at the challenges facing lenders in the current economic environment. David Hand (Royal Statistical Society) [2.50pm - 3.30pm]. Statistics, data mining, and the personal credit scoring industry The modern consumer credit industry is fundamentally data-driven, employing statisticians to build models for an increasing variety of problems. This talk describes some of these problems, and the sorts of statistical models which have been built to tackle them. Nick Bingham (Imperial College) [4pm - 4.40pm]. The crash of 2008: A mathematician’s view This talk, for the RSS Leeds/Bradford local group meeting on “Statistics and the credit crunch”, 18 November 2009, allows me to revisit the ground covered in my article under the title above in Significance 5.4 (2008), 173-5, with the benefit of hindsight and the opportunity to cover more ground. The nice thing about mathematics is that you know when you’re wrong. What the crash of 2008 (or 2007 if you’re American) exposed is that large numbers of hard-headed, practical people – in economics, business, banking, government, regulation and much else besides – can be wrong for long periods of time and not know it. Read Alan Greenspan’s book The Age of Turbulence (17.9.2007), and the successive postscripts he added as the book was reprinted after the crisis broke. Read his evidence to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (23.10.2008) on how “the whole intellectual edifice of risk management … has collapsed”. One problem is the difficulties that can come when the scale factor is ignored (the American sub-prime mortgage market expanded too far too fast; so did Northern Rock …). Another is that partial globalisation gives us the worst of both worlds. Economies are ever more closely linked, and for instance the gross economic imbalances between the US and Chinese economies helped to fuel the sub-prime bubble – but we lack the adequate global leadership or regulation needed to take proper corrective action. Klaus Schenk-Hoppe (University of Leeds) [4.50pm - 5.30pm]. Going naked: The effect of short-selling bans Short-selling of shares is a popular way of betting your beliefs as a "bearish" investor. In the current financial crises, short-selling has been blamed for the unprecedented decline in prices and for putting the entire financial system at risk. This talk will give a non-specialist introduction to the topic and explain the statistical and modelling issues in quantifying the effect of short-selling bans. The meeting will be held at Leeds University Roger Stevens Building in RSLT 24, starting at 2.00pm. Refreshments will be available from 1.30pm in the foyer of level 9 of the School of Mathematics. A further refreshment break will be held between 3.30pm-4pm.