BIO:
Prof. Persaud’s career spans finance, academia and public-policy.
HeProfessor is currently Chairman of Intelligence Capital Limited, an advisor to institutional and sovereign investors. Previously, Persaud was Investment Director, GAM; managing director, State Street Corporation; global head, currency and commodity research, J. P. Morgan and Director, fixed income research, UBS. Persaud placed in the top three of currency analysts in global investor surveys for over a decade and developed a number of well-known analytical tools. According to the Financial Times, his work on investors’ shifting appetite for risk “has entered the popular lexicon of analysts (1999)”.
Persaud was elected, Member of Council, Royal Economic Society (2006- ) and is Emeritus Professor, Gresham College, and Visiting Fellow, CERF, Judge Institute, Cambridge University. He is Governor and Member of Council, London School of Economics & Political Science. Persaud has published on issues of risk, liquidity, capital flows, exchange rates, financial regulation and ethics. The Financial Times has described his work on the failure of modern risk management as the “Persaud Paradox: the observation of safety creates risk.” (2005). Persaud is Co-Chair, OECD Emerging Markets Network and director of the 65,000-strong Global Association of Risk Professionals (2002-). He is a former Visiting Scholar, IMF; Visiting Scholar, ECB; and Distinguished Visitor to the Republic of Singapore.
In 2000, Persaud won the Jacques de Larosiere Prize in Global Finance from the Institute of International Finance in Washington.
Interests:
In my twenty years of experience as a banker and investor it is clear to me that regulators and legislators behave as if they have been captured by the larger banks and investment banks. Bank-friendly and bank-oriented regulation has created a financial system that pays egregious rewards to bankers in quiet times and leads to systemic collapse in noisy times where they are in large part “bailed out” directly by tax payers an d indirectly by savers and those that are economically vulnerable. Banks of course are merely intermediaries in a system that is about the efficient bringing together of investors and borrowers. Long-term investors are potentially a stabilising force in this system as has been seen recently in the behaviour of Berkshire Hathaway and Sovereign Wealth Funds. It is therefore essential in my view that long-term investors play a counterveiling force in the development of regulation and practices that supports financial stability and sustainable investing.
