The Brookings Institution's "The Origins of the Financial Crisis"
- By Professor Prabhu Guptara
- Published 12/6/2008
Professor Prabhu Guptara
Professor Prabhu Guptara is Executive Director, Organisational Development, Wolfsberg (a subsidiary of UBS - one of the largest banks in the world). He is also Freeman of the City of London and of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, and Chartered Fellow of the of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development; he is also Fellow: of the Institute of Directors, of the Royal Commonwealth Society, and of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts Commerce and Manufactures; and he continues to supervise PhD research at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) as well as to be Visiting Professor at various Universities and Business Schools around the world.
Earlier roles include: a Governor of the Polytechnic of Central London, Member of the Council of the British Institute of Management, of the International Federation of Training & Development Organisations (IFTDO), of the Association for Management Education and Development (UK), of the South East Regional Council of the Confederation of British Industry.
Judge, 1988 National Training Awards, 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, 1990 & 1991 Deo Gloria Prize for Fiction; Chair of the Panel of Judges, Deo Gloria Prize 1992 & 1993.
Experience with an enormous range of organisations including: Akzo Nobel (Netherlands), the Associated Banks Institute (Germany), Barclays Bank (UK), British Petroleum (UK), the Council of Europe, Cultor (Finland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), Groupe Bull (France), Federation of Finnish Engineers (Finland), the International Management Association of Japan, Kemira (Finland), Kraft Jakob Suchard (Switzerland), Leadership Academy (Finland), Nokia Telecommunications (Finland), Novo Nordisk (Denmark), Sedgwick International Insurance and Reinsurance Brokers (UK), Singapore Institute of Management, Sonatrach (Algeria), Sun Alliance (UK), UNCTAD, Valeo (France), and so on.
Organiser, chair and lecturer by invitation for numerous international conferences, he has contributed widely to radio and television in the UK and other countries (The Money Program, Any Questions) and has written for Financial Times (London, UK), The Guardian, The Times and other publications; articles, for example, in The Gower Handbook of Management, The Gower Handbook of Quality, and the International Encyclopedia of Business & Management (Routledge).
A CD-ROM has been issued of his lecture at the Professorenforum, University of Zurich, titled "Making the World Better - Why it does NOT happen...and what TO DO about it"
Further information available from rbadertscher@coba.ch
His best-known research publication is "Top Executives in the Global 100 Companies and their IT-Competence" (ADVANCE: Management Training Ltd., UK, and Wolfsberg Executive Development Centre, Switzerland, 1998); and he is included in Debrett's People of Today and in Who's Who in the World. Professor Prabhu Guptara lives in Switzerland.
A friend draws my attention to a paper entitled "The Origins of the Financial Crisis" from the Initiative on Business and Public Policy from the Brookings Institution.
This is very useful.
I note that the authors acknowledge the “pro-cyclicality” of" liquidity and leverage in the financial system" and they even acknowledge that "the push to deregulate of the past thirty years has led to a lack of discrimination in policy. ...we need to improve regulation where it can make markets work better and avoid crises."
However, they do not acknowledge the role of the specific refusal by regulators to implement regulations that were supposed to be in force. Nor do the authors acknowledge the refusal of legislators to legislate when there was opportunity to do that. So the authors do not put the blame where it is due: in the lap of regulators and legislators whose fault the whole caboodle is....on the other hand, the authors are happy to blame everyone else who was, as a consequence of lack of regulation and legislation, incentivised to continue to take bigger and bigger risks....
The belief in lack of regulation was at least partly the result of the rise of a specific economic philosophy related to the rise of the Baby Boomer generation and their rejection of authority, as well as their belief that human beings are all basically good.
These are not, naturally, things to which the authors draw attention, since "The Origins of the Financial Crisis" is the usual sort of compartmentalised analysis, focusing only on finance - as if one can divorce finance from everything else.
