Closing Speech, Professor Sheri Markose
CCFEA 10 Years Anniversary Workshop

It is a pleasure to attend the 10th Anniversary celebration for CCFEA and to see so many of our past colleagues and students who attended the event. CCFEA was born from the vision Edward Tsang and I have that Economics and Finance should adopt a multi-disciplinary curricula so that problems are addressed using tools that can best solve them, free of narrow doctrines. Fortunately, we were supported in this by Sir Ivor Crewe, the then VC, whose extraordinary ‘nous’ for a good idea and the Essex tradition for cross-disciplinarity led to many developments at Essex that were ahead of their time. In 2001, when Ivor Crewe was told how agent based models can help policy design by experimentation within virtual environments, he famously remarked “ this cannot fail”. CCFEA was given carte blanche to set up its own curricula and to appoint its own staff. CCFEA attracts some extraordinarily talented students. The multi-agent credit risk network model which has become part of the novel systemic risk modelling tools at central banks of India and Mexico, and also the real time rebuild of the London stock market electronic order book - started off as class projects in CCFEA in 2004. CCFEA students are well versed in the modelling of fat tailed extreme events and understand the complexity of Red Queen type arms races . Today in the post 2007 crisis period, when many are looking for new perspectives for Economics and Finance, CCFEA provides an interesting rubric.