About the Author

Avinash D. Persaud’s career spans finance, academia, and public policy. He is currently nonresident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC; Chairman of Intelligence Capital, a London-based financial consultancy; and Nonexecutive Chairman of Elara Capital, an emerging market investment firm based in Mumbai. He is also Emeritus Professor at Gresham College in London and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Financial Analysis & Policy at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Previously, he served as Managing Director at State Street Corporation, Global Head of Currency and Commodity Research at JPMorgan, Director of Fixed Income Research at UBS, Chairman of the Warwick Commission on Financial Reform, Chairman of the Regulatory Subcommittee of the UN High-Level Task Force on Financial Reform, Cochair of the OECD Emerging Markets Network, Member of the UK Government’s Audit and Risk Committee, Member of the Intergovernmental Task Force on Financial Taxes, Member of the Pew Task Force to the US Senate Banking Committee, 2010 President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Section F), Trustee of the Royal Economics Society, and Governor to the London School of Economics. In addition, he was Visiting Scholar at both the IMF and ECB and was a founding director of the over-100,000-strong Global Association of Risk Professionals. In 2000, he won the Jacques de Larosière Prize in Global Finance at the Institute of International Finance in Washington, DC, and was ranked as one of the top public intellectuals in the world on the financial crisis by an expert panel for Prospect Magazine. His analytical innovations, including the EMU Calculator, Risk Appetite Index and Event Risk Indicator, and ideas such as liquidity black holes theory and the Persaud Paradox of risk and safety led him to be one of the top analysts in global investor surveys for over a decade.