<p> The global financial system appears to be heading for a major financial crisis. This crisis is being driven by a growing global debt. This crisis is not limited to nations that are heavily in debt such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy or Cyprus but to such others as the United States. While there has been a great deal of emphasis on debt, there are many other issues. In many cases, the underlying causes of this potential crisis are very complex. As this dissertation will show, it is the complexity of these causes and their interrelationships, coupled with a lack of a global financial management system that may be the real culprit in the potentially impending global financial crisis. </p><p> One very important aspect of these potential crises is the state of the world reserve currency and how it is managed. The concept of reserve currencies is widely recognized and these currencies are often used for international transactions. There is a very long history of the concept of a reserve currency. This history involves a combination of economic and political powers, real or perceived, that may influence global reserve currencies. </p><p> Recent years have witnessed a tremendous growth in information and communication systems that facilitate the design and implementation of complex inter-enterprise processes. The basic hypothesis of this dissertation is that an appropriately structured global reserve currency, based on use of an information and knowledge management system, can provide stability to currencies, whereas an unmanaged single or unstructured group of currencies will not provide currency stability. The proposed Information and Knowledge Architectures for System Management of a Global Reserve Currency (IKASM-GRC) can provide a system and methodology which can stabilize a reserve currency.</p>

<p> This research informs an ongoing debate regarding a firm&rsquo;s incentives to invest in information security. Previous research reported that data breaches have had a decreasing impact on a company&rsquo;s stock price over time, leading researchers to conclude that market-based incentives are decreasingly effective. Some information security economists also suggested that further regulation is necessary because they found that capital market participants poorly accounted for the spillover effects of a breach&mdash;the effects of a breach that are external to the breached company. However, some studies indicate that sector-wide systematic risk could measure spillover effects and that the effects of a data breach on systematic risk may have changed over time. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively describe the relationship between the data breach of a firm and changes to the systematic risk of that firm&rsquo;s sector. This dissertation used event studies of sector-wide systematic risk within American stock markets to measure the external effects of breaches that occurred in companies within the financial, technology, healthcare and services sectors. The use of a repeated measures analysis of variance between those event studies allowed examination of longitudinal changes to sector-wide systematic risk between 2006 through 2016. This analysis found that the breach of an individual company had a significant impact on the systematic risk for that company&rsquo;s entire sector (1.08% in 2016) and that these impacts have increased over time (<i>p</i> = 0.015). The results were consistent across all measured sectors, without any significant correlation attributable to the scope of the breach. Together, these findings suggest that market forces are increasingly incentivizing sector-wide investment in information security. Further research should consider the potential for government enforced meta-regulation of sector defined information security standards.</p><p>