Intrinsic Market Resilience (IMR)

The evolution of markets from physical trading floors to interconnected, electronic venues has introduced new speed, transparency, and efficiency, but has also created new attack surfaces and systemic risks. Modern markets, which host trading for everything from equities and bonds to energy and cloud computing resources, can be manipulated in ways unanticipated by their designers. The 2010 United States Equity market "flash crash" and the 2000-2001 California energy crisis demonstrated how weaknesses in a market's public interfaces could have dramatic consequences. Similar design issues in today's complex, interacting market systems could be used to cause economic damage, which the IMR program technology seeks to prevent. The IMR program aims to develop repair methods to protect essential economic sectors against devastating attacks that exploit the public interfaces of modern markets. Current legal and regulatory protections focus on deterring profit-seeking manipulation and ensuring compliance, but they do not sufficiently protect markets from adversaries aiming simply to cause disruption.