Olga
Cooperman

Professional Experience

I spent more than two decades on Wall Street, including Managing Director roles at Deutsche Bank and Citi. My work centered on liquidity, funding, collateral, and capital management. These interconnected disciplines enable a bank to meet its obligations and withstand unexpected losses.

Over time, this professional work grew into a broader interest in money and markets: both their mechanics and the philosophical ideas that underlie them.

Today, I work part time with Liquidity Digital Assets to develop a platform that helps banks use tokenization to manage traditionally illiquid credit assets and make more efficient use of regulatory capital.

Writing

Fiction

A contemporary short novel about a married banking executive, her colleague on the other side of the world, and her husband, a tech entrepreneur, as they pursue a fuller life than conventional monogamy can offer. The triangle keeps changing shape as they try to engineer their way around jealousy, distance, unequal stakes, and conflicting desires.

Let me know when the book is available

Nonfiction

I am drafting The Science of Money, an exploration of the nature of money.

John Maynard Keynes called the gold standard “a barbarous relic”; Alan Greenspan saw gold as “inseparable from economic freedom.” Cathie Wood has praised Bitcoin as “a new paradigm for monetary systems”; Warren Buffett dismissed it as “rat poison squared.” The European Central Bank presents the digital euro as a statement of European sovereignty, while the U.S. administration has cast a digital dollar as a possible threat to sovereignty.

These sharp disagreements reveal a serious but rarely acknowledged problem: debates about the past, present, and future of money often proceed from fundamentally different assumptions about what money is and how it works.

My goal for this book is to provide a clearer basis for judging which forms of money should be trusted, treated with caution, or rejected, and to inform debates about monetary and fiscal policy.

Get in touch about organizing a talk, discussion, or course on the science of money →

Essays

Two of the best ways to learn a new subject are to teach it or write about it. Both quickly expose what you do not yet understand. These essays are how I teach myself about ideas that intrigue me.

Essay 01Why Computers WorkWhy one physical device can become a calculator, camera, map, typewriter, chess player, and almost anything else.→Essay 02It’s a Toss-Up: Models of ProbabilityWhat is probability: a feature of the world or a reflection of what we know? Exploring its different interpretations and when each is useful.→

Get in touch about a talk exploring why computers work, for curious minds of any background →Explore desk accessories featuring illustrations from Why Computers Work →

Computational Explorations

Education & Professional Credentials

I hold an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University and a BS in Information Systems Management, magna cum laude, from New York University, where I received the Founders Day Award.

I previously held Series 7, Series 63, and Series 24 registrations, which qualified me to conduct and supervise securities and investment banking activities.