Finance Theory and Future Trends: The Shift to Integration
提出用功能视角替代传统机构视角来分析金融体系，认为金融功能比机构更稳定，能更好预测未来趋势，适合关注金融理论演变和体系设计的读者。
Risk is the central element that influences financial behavior. Measuring that influence, and analyzing ways of controlling and allocating risk, requires sophisticated mathematical and computational tools. Indeed, mathematical models of modern finance practice contain some of the most complex applications of probability and optimization theory. Those applications challenge the most powerful computational technologies. These are two essentially different frames of reference for trying to analyze and understand innovations in the financial system. One perspective takes as given the existing institutional structure of financial service providers, whether they be governmental or private sector, and examines what can be done to make those institutions perform their particular financial service more efficiently and profitably. An alternative to this traditional institutional perspective-and the one I favor-is the functional perspective, which takes as given the economic functions served by the financial system and examines what is the best institutional structure to perform those functions. The basic functions of a financial system are essentially the same in all economies, which makes them far more stable, across time and across geopolitical borders, than the identity and structure of the institutions performing them. Thus, a functional perspective offers a more robust frame of reference than an institutional one, especially in a rapidly changing financial environment. It is difficult to use institutions as the conceptual anchor for forecasting financial trends when institutional structures are themselves changing significantly-as has been the case for more than two decades, and which appears likely to continue well into the future. During the past 25 years, finance theory has been a good predictor of future changes in financial practice. That is, when theory seems to suggest that an institution, instrument, or a service should be there and it is not, practice has evolved so that it is. Placed in a normative context, current theory has been a fruitful source of ideas for subsequent innovations in finance practice.