About

About Nicholas Dunbar

I grew up in London and trained as a physicist at Manchester, Cambridge and Harvard universities in the late 1980s. I was inspired to become a financial journalist by university friends who had taken their mathematical skills from academia onto the trading floors of investment banks.

From 1998 until 2009, I was technical editor of Risk magazine. In 2005, I launched Life & Pensions, a sister publication to Risk aimed at the insurance and pensions industry . I sold Life & Pensions to Incisive Media in January 2009.

During this period, I wrote a series of exclusive stories on derivatives blow-ups, and in 2003 broke the story of Greece hiding debt using swaps with Goldman Sachs. In 2007 I won the State Street award for institutional financial journalism. From 2001 to 2010 I wrote a column called ‘Risky Finance’ for the financial commentary service Reuters Breakingviews.

In 1999, I published my first book, Inventing Money: the story of Long-Term Capital Management and the legends behind it (Wiley, 1999). After publishing the Devil’s Derivatives (Harvard Business Review Press) in July 2011, I have appeared on PBS Frontline and BBC Newsnight.

In 2011, I joined Bloomberg where I launched the Bloomberg Risk newsletter.

Photo: Karl Attard