Avinash D. Persaud's career spans finance, academia, and public policy. He is currently Chairman of Intelligence Capital, a London-based financial consultancy; Chairman of Elara Capital, an emerging market investment firm based in London and Mumbai; and Chairman of Paradise Beach, the company developing Four Seasons Barbados. Previously, he served as managing director at State Street Corporation; global head of currency and commodity research at JP Morgan; and director of fixed income research at UBS. His analytical innovations led him to be ranked as one of the top three currency analysts in global investor surveys for over a decade. According to the Financial Times, his work on investors' shifting appetite for risk "has entered the popular lexicon of analysts." Mr. Persaud was formerly Chairman of the Warwick Commission on Financial Reform; Chairman of the regulatory subcommittee of the UN High-Level Task Force on Financial Reform;Co-Chair of the OECD Emerging Markets Network; Memberof the UK Government's Audit and Risk Committee; Member of the Intergovernmental Task Force on Financial Taxes; and Member of the Pew Task Force to the U.S. Senate Banking Committee. He is Emeritus Professor at Gresham College; Senior Fellow at London Business School; Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Financial Analysis & Policy at Cambridge Judge Business School; 2010 President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Section F); and former Governor to the London School of Economics. He was Visiting Scholar at both the IMF and ECB and was a founding director of the 90,000-strong Global Association of Risk Professionals. In 2000, he won the Jacques de Larosiere Prize in Global Finance from the Institute of International Finance, and he was recently ranked as the No. 2 public intellectual in the world on the financial crisis by an expert panel for Prospect Magazine.