Washington People: Comptroller Beefs Up Troops On Risk Management Front

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency appears to be trying to corner the market on risk regulation. In recent days, the agency has appointed two new riskmeisters:

*Michael L. Brosnan, who has spent most of his 12 years with the Comptroller's office examining capital markets activities at multinational and superregional banks, has taken on the new post of director of treasury and market risk.

*Jeffrey Brown, an economist who joined the agency in 1987, is the new director of risk analysis, a position created last year. He replaces Mark Winer, who left in July to become a senior vice president at PNC Bank in Pittsburgh.

Douglas E. Harris, who as senior deputy comptroller for capital markets has been his agency's most visible risk guru, said the new appointments are part of a definite trend under Comptroller Eugene A. Ludwig.

"Our focus is increasingly on risk, not on the products" that banks buy and sell, Mr. Harris said. "There are too many products to try to regulate them all."

Mr. Ludwig may be building up his troops as risk management becomes another front in the agency's eternal turf war with the Federal Reserve Board.

Mr. Harris' spin on this is that the Comptroller's office and the Fed are working toward the same goals. He said he recently sat next to Ernest Patrikis, general counsel for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at a dinner and found that Mr. Patrikis' views on risk regulation mirrored his own.

In his new post, Mr. Brosnan will head a staff that develops regulatory policy and assists bank examiners looking into the interest rate, market, and liquidity risks faced by multinational banks.

Mr. Brown's risk analysis division consists of economists who help bank examiners evaluate big banks' internal risk assessment models and assist in the development of policies intended to limit banks' risk taking.

Mr. Brosnan earned his BS and MBA in business administration at Lynchburg College in Virginia. Mr. Brown got his BA in political science and economics from the University of Iowa, and his MA and PhD in economics from Brown University.

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No one can accuse Bruce Morrison, the former Connecticut congressman who is now chairman of the Federal Housing Finance Board, of having an inflated sense of his agency's importance.

Apologizing to his fellow board members for a crowded agenda, he said at the start of a meeting last Wednesday, "There's nothing on this agenda that, if we put it off until the middle of September, the world would end."

Then he added, "In fact, the world would not even notice."

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The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago appointed Elijah Brewer 3d as a senior economist and assistant vice president in the research department. Mr. Brewer returns to the bank after a 16-month stint as an associate professor of finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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