Janet M. Tavakoli
Janet Tavakoli is the founder president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a Chicago-based consulting firm established in 2003.
Ms. Tavakoli posts topical finance updates at her business site: Tavakoli Structured Finance.
She posts blogs related to her novels at her author's web site: Janet Tavakoli.
She is frequently published and quoted in financial journals including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, New York Times, The Economist, Business Week, Forbes and Fortune. Frequent television appearances include CBS's 60 Minutes, CNN, C-Span, CNBC, Fox, CBS Evening News, Bloomberg TV, and BBC.
Ms. Tavakoli earned a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. She earned an MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. She is a former adjunct associate professor of finance at the Booth School of Business.
Books by Janet Tavakoli
Credit Derivatives (John Wiley & Sons, 1998, 2001, 2022)>
Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (John Wiley & Sons, 2003, 2008): an expose of grave flaws in the structure, sales practices, and methodology for rating structured financial products.
Decisions: Life and Death on Wall Street, is Janet Tavakoli’s nonfiction account of Wall Street skullduggery.
Archangels: Rise of the Jesuits, is Janet Tavakoli’s financial fiction (Fi-Fi) mystery thriller debut.
Unveiled Threat: A Personal Experience of Fundamentalist Islam and the Roots of Terrorism is Janet Tavakoli's non-fiction autobiographical account.
Dear Mr. Buffet: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street (John Wiley & Sons 2009): the causes of the greatest credit bubble in the history of the world, how we could have avoided it and how we can prevent it from happening again.
The New Robber Barons (2012): Janet Tavakoli's on-going chronicle of the global financial crisis captured in her articles from the September 2008 meltdown through February 2012.
“Homeland security requires a secure homeland currency.”
“Ricci created memory palaces in his mind. Each item in the palace represented a series of concepts. The rooms and locations within the palace served as directories and files, similar to computer data storage. Ricci instantaneously learned, retained and retrieved hundreds of new Chinese kanji, to the astonished delight of Chinese nobles.”
“Aristotle was convinced that a trained memory helped the development of logical thought processes.”
“I find it appalling that the Church claims Mary consented at the age of thirteen to become the mother of God.”“But she did,” James said. “There is ample evidence to show she consented.”“Isn’t that the classic defense of the pedophile?” Helena asked. “In Christ’s time and even today in some countries in the Middle East and India, child marriages are customary. But that doesn’t make it right. In Europe and the U.S. we prosecute adults for preying on children. God would be arrested for impregnating a girl below the age of consent.”“People didn’t live as long then,” James said.Helena would not back down. “But human biology hasn’t changed. My point is she was too young to consent. The brain of a young teenager isn’t fully developed.”“The mysteries of the faith require us to have faith.” “Don’t hide behind that nonsense. What kind of message is the Church sending to women? Only virgin children are pure? Experienced mothers are impure and unfit to raise Christ? It’s creepy and insulting when you think about it, but you would have me suspend rational judgment and just accept something I would tear your eyes out for thinking about my underage sister?”
“Strive to engage in activities that require constant self-development. Nurture and develop the physical body, but also our spiritual nature. We exist for a purpose: to honor our spirituality. When we do, we cannot help but love others. Hurting others is easily recognized as a crime against ourselves. It’s no coincidence that all religions teach this at their core.”
“Narcissists have poor self-esteem, but they are typically very successful. They feel entitled; they’re self-important; they crave admiration and lack empathy. They are also exploitative and envious. The malignant types never forget a slight. They may kill you ten years later for cutting them off in traffic. But they act perfectly normal while plotting their revenge.”
“The harder a government, such as a dictatorship, tries to maintain monetary policy autonomy, the more it must either limit the movement of capital into and outside of the country, or the more it must compromise exchange-rate stability.”
“Hedge funds have made massive leveraged credit bets, knowing that their upside is billions in fees and their downside is millions in fees.”