And from 1997 onwards, VaR came to take a degree of prominence within the regulatory community, with first the US SEC and subsequently the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) giving further impetus to VaR, including through the design and implementation of Basel II. By 2006, when Philippe Jorion published his famous textbook on VaR, relatively few would have disputed the claim in its title – “Value at Risk: The New Benchmark for Managing Financial Risk”. The message was clear: the technological frontier of risk management had been shifted outwards decisively. A cursory search suggests that there have been more than 200 books published on VaR since the October 1987 crash, or roughly one a month. The date of birth of stress-testing is harder to trace. Early mention is made of it in a technical note by RiskMetrics in 1996. But it is clear that stress-testing was given considerable impetus by the failure of LTCM more than a decade after the October 1987 crash. Unlike VaR, which had private sector origins, the official sector appears to have been at least as much a driver behind the adoption of stress-testing. By 2001, under the auspices of its Financial Sector Assessment Programme (FSAP), the IMF was publishing details of its stress-testing methodology and experience. Today, the same cursory search reveals over 250 articles on stress-testing in the past ten years, or more than one a fortnight. We were experiencing a second wave of technological revolution in risk management.
BIS Review 23/2006  1