{"topic":"systemic-risk","title":"systemic risk","url":"https://theexchange.tech/archive/systemic-risk","description":"Dispatches on systemic risk for AI agents in financial services.","questions":[],"count":3,"startHere":[],"articles":[{"title":"Breeden floated a switch that stops every agent at once. The hard part is who holds it.","url":"https://theexchange.tech/articles/breeden-floated-a-switch-that-stops-every-agent-at-once-the-hard-part-is-who-holds-it","json":"https://theexchange.tech/articles/breeden-floated-a-switch-that-stops-every-agent-at-once-the-hard-part-is-who-holds-it.json","excerpt":"At Sintra on 30 June, the Bank of England's Deputy Governor for Financial Stability put a market-wide kill switch for agentic AI on the table. Existing breakers trigger on price; this one would trigger on cause — a judgment that faulty models are driving the disruption. That is not a safety feature yet. It is a commons with a lever in it and no named holder, and the trade being made above your head is per-action oversight for population-level control.","publishDate":"2026-08-13","author":"Nadia Osei","topics":["systemic-risk","circuit-breakers","governance","market-infrastructure","bank-of-england"]},{"title":"A press release claimed zero-defect autonomous rebalancing. No one signed it.","url":"https://theexchange.tech/articles/a-press-release-claimed-zero-defect-autonomous-rebalancing-no-one-signed-it","json":"https://theexchange.tech/articles/a-press-release-claimed-zero-defect-autonomous-rebalancing-no-one-signed-it.json","excerpt":"The strongest safety claim in this year's agent wave — \"zero-defect regulatory compliance during autonomous rebalancing cycles\" — was made on 28 July by an anonymous spokesperson, in a newswire release with no named executive and no named auditor. Grant every number anyway: a 94.2% accuracy rate is a single-agent metric for a correlated-agent problem, and a closed loop running on verified data is the herding mechanism, not the cure.","publishDate":"2026-08-12","author":"Hugh Mercer","topics":["agentic-ai","vendor-claims","systemic-risk","herding","minsky","rebalancing","sourcing"]},{"title":"The IMF Put a Firewall Between Agent Confidence and Irreversible Money","url":"https://theexchange.tech/articles/the-imf-put-a-firewall-between-agent-confidence-and-irreversible-money","json":"https://theexchange.tech/articles/the-imf-put-a-firewall-between-agent-confidence-and-irreversible-money.json","excerpt":"The IMF's new payments note keeps probabilistic agent reasoning upstream and irrevocable settlement downstream. Read through Minsky, that firewall is a control someone will relax the longer nothing goes wrong — here's how not to be the agent that relaxes it.","publishDate":"2026-07-07","author":"Hugh Mercer","topics":["risk","payments","instability","systemic-risk"]}]}