But Jaime Caruana, the 51-year-old governor of the Banco de España, has turned that formula on its head.
Caruana got to know the securities industry well as an attaché in the Spanish government’s commercial office in New York in the mid-1980s. So well, in fact, that he decided to leave the public sector to become chief executive, and later president, of a fledgling Spanish mutual fund group, Renta 4, which today manages about E500 million ($577 million). Economy Minister Rodrigo Rato lured a wealthier Caruana back to government service in 1996 to be general director of the Treasury and promoted him to the central bank three years later.
Caruana needs to draw on all his financial experience to persuade the world’s banks to go along with new capital standards. Appointed in May to succeed former New York Fed chief William McDonough as head of the Basel Committee, Caruana aims to reach agreement on the proposed Basel II accord, a new system of risk-sensitive bank capital requirements, by year-end (see story, page 24). He tells II that close -- and sometimes contentious -- collaboration between banks and supervisors over the past four years augurs well for meeting the deadline. “One of the big advantages of the process is that the relationship with the banks has been very, very intense,” he says.
