I'm Evan Davis and thank you for downloading this program. In this edition of the bottom line,

we ask a very basic question. What do people who work in finance actually do? Create a better

society or create smoke and mirrors? Hello and welcome to the program. The word engineering

has been applied to a lot of different professions,

and you probably have a pretty clear idea about what most engineers do,

from people who design engines or other mechanical goods

to chemical engineers in the pharmaceuticals industry,

civil engineers who design dams to software engineers too.

But we're not talking about any of those today.

We're going to talk about finance, financial engineering.

I'm guessing you don't have a clear idea of what those so-called rocket scientists

involved in finance actually do.

A mechanical engineer may design a machine, one that does a task or solve some

problem, but what problems does modern finance solve? And can the clever manipulation of debt,

equity or derivatives, can it really make human beings better off? Well, some think finance

is a bit of a racket designed to extract money from the enterprise of others.

Others think modern finance is a miracle that can create value from nothing but a bit of maths

and computer programming in an office. So we'll try and get to the bottom of that argument today.

And we have a variety of perspectives around the table. First up, from the banking world is

Jessica James. She works for Commerce Bank.

It's a leading European bank and Jessica's our mathematician on the panel. Your work is all

about financial engineering, Jessica. You run the Forex quantitative solutions group at Commerce

...