Catapulting from runner-up all the way to the top is the eight-member Morgan Stanley troupe led by Laurence Mutkin, 47. The London-based team has been studying the effects of what it calls regulatory policy activism. “Increasingly, policymakers are looking at regulation as a way of driving investor behavior, because fiscal policy has reached its limits in some ways to stimulate the economy, given the still-gloomy outlook,” he explains. One example: In January the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s decision to relax some liquidity requirements, which financial institutions argued would compel them to curtail lending, was “very much driven by central bank heads,” the team leader states. Mutkin, who earned a master’s degree in law at England’s University of Oxford, was director of fixed-income strategy at Threadneedle Asset Management before joining Morgan Stanley in 2006. “He is an out-of-the-box thinker,” marvels one backer. — Carolynn Koo |
Economics & Strategy – Interest Rate Strategy: First
