Author: Benjamin Beasley-Murray

UNITED KINGDOM

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Sushil Wadhwani

As a member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) from 1999 until last summer, Sushil Wadhwani was part of a team that helped provide the financial foundation for 40 consecutive quarters of economic growth in the UK, a record of which governor Eddie George recently said, “You can’t ask for anything more really.”

Wadhwani is hoping some of that Midas touch will rub off on his new enterprise: a global macroeconomic hedge fund. He’s been there before, spending four years at the hedge fund Tudor Capital after heading up equity strategy at Goldman Sachs.

Tudor is stumping up some of the cash for the new fund, which Wadhwani will position to take advantage of what he thinks could be some dramatic shifts in asset prices ahead. “The imbalances are very acute,” he says of today’s global environment, “which is good news potentially, if of course you’re on the right side.”

The 43-year-old Wadhwani began his career at the London School of Economics, where he was reader in the working of financial markets until leaving for Goldman Sachs in 1991. A Keynesian, he co-authored a paper at the LSE that characterized financial markets as “short-termist” and inefficient.

Rules dictate that Wadhwani could not trade for three months after leaving the MPC, and by the time the fund opens in March, nine will have passed. “I’ve been doing plenty of reading,” he says. “When you’re on the MPC you’re following the global economy and markets, of course, but it’s nice to have the time to read more deeply.”

Wadhwani is naming his fund “Keynes” after the economist. As, with his team, he places bets on the directions of currencies and bonds around the world, Wadhwani will doubtless subscribe to the economist’s aphorism that “I would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”

Benjamin Beasley-Murray