Christmas Cheer with Alumni

The Business Secretary, Greg Clarke has announced a series of corporate governance reforms, including a requirement for companies to publish the pay ratio which measures the pay of the CEO relative to the salary of their average UK employee. The aim of the reforms is to make companies more accountable to their employees and shareholders.

ICMA Centre student, Afua Addae (pictured here with fellow student Aleksander Petreski), who studied the MSc in Financial Risk Management, has received the commendation of runner-up for the Eurekahedge prize for the best paper on hedge funds after working on a major project based on Eurekahedge data for her MSc. After completing a BSc degree in Chemical Engineering in Ghana, Afua moved to the UK and decided to study at the ICMA Centre after working for a year and a half with Nationwide Building Society, UK. She will graduate in July 2007 with a merit. During her MSc study she worked part time as a research consultant with Lepus Management Consultancy, a risk management consultancy in London where her researches on ?Basel II Implementation: Lessons Learnt from the First Round of IRB Applications', ?The Risk and Regulatory Environment in Commodity Trading' and ?Rogue Trading', have been published on Lepus' Risk Monthly Reports.

For those people considering going to university this year at MSc level, this financial crisis will be the first they have experienced. Yet financial crises happen every ten or twenty years. What is different this time is the severity of the crisis ? the likes of which no trader in the City has ever seen before. This article first outlines the causes of the crisis and then asks whether students should steer clear of finance, accounting and economics as subject disciplines and potential careers, until the crisis has receded? I argue that the clear answer is ?no".