Crisis Wasted? Leading Risk Managers on Risk Culture

12 Adrian Blundell-Wignall

Paris, 28 April 2015

At the heart of the crisis was under-pricing of risk that was made possible by the emergence of the universal bank business model following the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

Adrian Blundell-Wignall is the Acting Director of the Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs (DAF) and Special Advisor to the Secretary General for Financial Markets at the OECD and a former official of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

He contends that how some new regulations facilitate both concentration and under-pricing of risk, so could have the effect of aggravating the next crisis.

Adrian Blundell-Wignall:

I went to a government school, in a relatively poor area, and didn't have any of the silver spoons things that some people get in life. In my third year at high school I wrote an economics essay called, “What Is the Market Mechanism?” This won me my first ever A+ for an essay and encouragement from my teacher, so I concluded that I must be good at economics. It is amazing what influence a good teacher can have on your life. Even at this late stage in my career I still have this enthusiasm of my youth when it comes to looking at what's happening in the world and why. After school I did an undergraduate degree and a PhD in Economics at Cambridge. My first proper job was as a junior economist in the Economics Department at the OECD.

After six years in the OECD I went back to Australia as Assistant Secretary at the Economic Planning Advisory Council. ...