Despite the devastating social consequences of the ongoing financial crisis, human rights law has been virtually invisible in debates on reforming the governance of international finance. While human rights lawyers tend to lack grounding in the basics of finance, financiers tend to be too engrossed in quantitative methodologies to see the value of a more qualitative, human rights focus. This gap could potentially be bridged by using human rights-based analysis to enrich our understanding of the dynamics of tail risk. A human rights-based understanding of institutional power dynamics and social aspects of risk could help shed light on the way the inherited social and institutional architecture of different states shapes the dynamics of risk in global financial markets.