David Viniar

Biography A 1972 alumnus of The Bronx High School of Science, Viniar spent summers at Kozan's Bungalow Colony in Ellenville, New York, and graduated from Union College, New York, in 1976, where he majored in economics. He then attended Harvard Business School, earning an MBA in 1980.

In September 2012 Viniar announced that he would be retiring from Goldman Sachs in January 2013. On January 31, 2013, he retired from his positions as CFO and executive vice president and took on the role of director at Goldman Sachs.

On October 30, 2013, Viniar became a director on the board of Square, Inc., the mobile payments firm run by Jack Dorsey.

"25 standard deviations" quote On 13 August 2007, The Financial Times reported Viniar's explanation of why two large hedge funds managed by Goldman Sachs had both lost over a quarter of their value in a week, requiring the injection of $3 billion to support them. Viniar ascribed the events to a series of exceptional events: "We were seeing things that were 25 standard deviation moves, several days in a row". This has since been used to illustrate the problems of inappropriate mathematical models in finance, especially those based on the assumption of Normality. Kay & King (2020, p. 68) refer to the 'Viniar problem': 'He confused a probability as calculated within a model with a probability in the world of which the model claimed to be a representation. To make a statement about probability in a real world it is necessary to compound the probability derived from the model itself with the probability that the model itself is true. And there is no means of knowing whether the model is true."

Senate testimony Viniar testified in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 regarding the role of investment banks in the 2008 financial crisis and, specifically, the role of Goldman Sachs in that crisis.

Affiliations Viniar served on the board of trustees of Union College and is a member of the board of trustees of both Children's Aid and Family Services and the Financial Accounting Foundation.

Family Viniar is married and has four children.