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With the help of financial engineering – and equipped with the modern technique of risk management – securitisation was supposed to identify and evaluate risks and parcel them out to informed parties who could bear them. In hindsight, we can see that this somewhat simplistic thesis – espoused by market participants as well as the academic promoters of modern techniques of risk management – seemed to promise a great deal more than it could ultimately deliver. At this juncture, however, the danger of regulatory over-reaction – which might be throwing the baby (financial innovation) out with the bath-water (overlooking/under-pricing of risk) – is very real and (in my view) calls for policy measures of this sort should be resisted firmly not only by market participants but also by regulators. This is not to say that regulation should be seen as immune from responsibility in the unfolding of the current credit crisis (quite the opposite would more likely be closer to the truth). As we shall see below (Section “Financial Crisis and Credit Ratings Debacle in SF”), the best risk-management practices – and related tools available before the crisis – provided enough ammunition to caution against the uncertainty surrounding risk assessment for some categories of SF products. However, the increasing complexity embedded in an increasing number of deals did provide genuine new challenges even to best risk-management practices.

Since Thomas Kuhn (1962), a historian of science who gave ‘paradigm’ its contemporary meaning, the term ‘paradigm’ has been widely used in science and social sciences to refer to a theoretical framework or thought pattern in any given discipline, or broadly, a set of experiences, beliefs and values that affect individual perceptions of a reality and their subsequent reactions. A dominant paradigm is the widely held system of thought in a society at a particular period of time. For Kuhn, a dominant paradigm can be changed and replaced by a new one, which often occurs in a revolutionary manner in science. In social sciences, ‘paradigm shift’ implies the changing ways of understanding and organising a social reality.