Dr. Rick Bookstaber

Rick is a noted expert in financial risk management, and is the author of The End of Theory (Princeton, 2017), and A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley, 2007).

He is a co-founder of Fabric, acquired by MSCI in 2024 and now renamed MSCI Wealth. With the acquisition he joined MSCI as managing director, later leaving that role to serve as a senior advisor to the firm while independently developing AI-powered innovations for risk management.

He has been in chief risk officer roles at Salomon, Morgan Stanley, Moore Capital, and Bridgewater Associates. From 2009 to 2015 he served at the SEC and the U.S. Treasury, drafting the Volcker Rule and modeling risk for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and recently was the chief risk officer in the University of California Office of the CIO for the university’s $170 billion pension and endowment funds.

His roles have placed him at the center of financial crises of the last three decades – working with portfolio insurance during the 1987 Crash while at Morgan Stanley, overseeing risk at Salomon during the 1998 failure of Long-Term Capital Management (dubbed “Salomon North”), and with the aftermath of the 2008 Crisis while in the regulatory sphere.

A black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Rick can be found training at the Renzo Gracie Academy in his free time.

Rick received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT.