Risk Management in Banking, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: Great intro, but a bit repeatitive
Review: Bessis' volume is an elementary introduction to the basic "concepts" of risk management in banking. This is by no mean a technical book and should be accessible to most people with high school maths background. Judging on the capacity to explain basic ideas in layman's term, this is an excellent book!

However, the author seems to be a bit repeatitive and some basic concepts are to be repeated a few times throughout the book. I find it annoying but others might well find it a desirable feature for a "textbook". On the other hand, although the book is full of diagrams and illustrations, a small number of them are quite puzzling, e.g. contain symbols which are nowhere defined and is probably up to the reader to guess!

Anyway, if it is the first book you'll ever read on this subject, I believe it is an excellent choice!

Rating:
Summary: technical but with errors
Review: It's easy to find what you need. If you are accessing the topic from scratch, it has some noisances you wouldn't like too much. There are many errors and also some sentences are not clear at all. One example? "Either the sovereign rating is one notch lower than the sovereign ratings, or it is the internal bank rating." Are you OK?

Rating:
Summary: good overal beginner reference to risk management in banking
Review: The book is very well structured and I think and excellent introduction to the risk management in banking. I bought this book as hope to give me some more detailed presepective of risk management, but after reading it I think it should be used as a side reading reference to finance courses that some of the universities offer today in risk management or financial engineering. The author covers almost everything that we should know in risk management if we are new to it. However, if you are more experienced with finance or risk management I think this could be potential waste of money. I also think that the book has a bit high price for what it offers.One of the main reasons is the fact that the book is written in an elementary/intermediate form. Even as an elementary/intermediate level book I think that there should have been more examples or applicable activities that one can acctually see how some aspects of risk management are applied in the real world. Yes, there are some examples but not to an extent as there should be especially in the field as risk management and finance, where more and more people read these kinds of books in order to see or find how they can apply the information in the book to some real time activities in the financial market or corporate institution.

If you are looking for some more concrete text with some serious derivation of mathematical formulas for finance and risk management, or some more detailed presentations (more complex to read) I think you should then consider buying some other book.

Rating:
Summary: Structured well
Review: The concepts are structured quite well and could serve as foundation for further studies in this area.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but Overpriced, Reference on Bank Risk Management
Review: This is an excellent book which I have found to be very useful. The book gets 5 stars for its content. The negative is that the book is overpriced, particularly when the publisher released a paperback version priced at less than half the price of the hardback version shortly after the hardback was published - hence the lower rating.