Richard Bookstaber is a Wall Street insider and outspoken critic of many of today's financial practices who predicted the current economic meltdown.

Bookstaber was named to this year's Conde Nast Portfolio list of top 25 technical innovators, joining the ranks of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Eric Schmidt. He has testified in the House and Senate, calling for greater transparency and improved regulation for Wall Street long before it was fashionable.

Called "one of Wall Street's 'rocket scientists" by The New York Times, Bookstaber is the author of A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, a book that pinpointed the market weaknesses that spun out of control to create today's financial crisis. A Demon of Our Own Design ranked number one on Amazon in finance and was selected as a finalist for the prestigious Loeb Award.

Bookstaber recently worked at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, and before that ran the Quantitative Equity Fund at FrontPoint Partners. He was in charge of risk management at Moore Capital Management, another hedge fund with over $10 billion in assets. He served as the managing director in charge of firm-wide risk management at Salomon Brothers and was a member of Salomon's powerful Risk Management Committee. Bookstaber also spent ten years at Morgan Stanley, first designing and marketing derivative instruments, then as a proprietary trader, and concluding his tenure there as Morgan Stanley's first market risk manager.

In addition to A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley, 2007), he is the author of three other books and scores of articles on finance topics ranging from option theory to risk management. He has won the Graham and Dodd Scroll from the Financial Analysts Federation and the Roger F. Murray Award from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance for his research. Bookstaber has a Ph.D in Economics from M.I.T.