Finance boss: enlist academics to head off future meltdowns
The leader of Scotland's financial services industry has called for a new collaboration between Scottish business and academe to prevent a repeat of the systemic failure of the global credit system that helped destroy 90% of the value of Scotland's two biggest companies last year.
In his first interview since the banking crisis of last autumn, which saw the UK government take a 58% stake in RBS and expedite a takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB, John Campbell, chairman of Scottish Financial Enterprise, called for a "new form of research facility to challenge and test the global financial market model to determine potential risks to the global system".
Campbell, who is also deputy to chairman Alex Salmond on the Scottish government's financial services advisory board (FiSAB), told the Sunday Herald he would be discussing with colleagues over the next few months a committee to "wargame" possible threats to Scotland's financial stability, adding that "this could be a research programme of industry to a range of industry stakeholders".
Full story at Sunday Herald