 A central concept here is that of risk. Since financial assets are essentially promises of future money payments, a main challenge for financial agents is to develop rational expectations or hypotheses about relevant future outcomes. The two main factors in this regard are (1) expected return on the asset, which is typically calculated as the value of all possible outcomes weighted by their probability of occurrence, and (2) financial risk, which is typically calculated as the level of variation in these returns. The concept of financial risk is especially interesting from a philosophical viewpoint since it represents the financial industry’s response to epistemic uncertainty. It is often argued that the financial system is designed exactly to address or minimize financial risks—for example, financial intermediation and markets allow investors to spread their money over several assets with differing risk profiles (Pilbeam 2010, Shiller 2012). However, many authors have been critical of mainstream operationalizations of risk which tend to focus exclusively on historical price volatility and thereby downplay the risk of large-scale financial crises (Lanchester 2010, Thamotheram &amp; Ward 2014).