Patrick Honohan: Risk – banks and government Address by Mr Patrick Honohan, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, at the International Centre for Monetary and Banking Studies, Geneva, 15 March 2011. *  *  *  From the start of the global crisis, perhaps the most salient feature has been the jump in the appreciation of risk and in risk aversion.
To be sure, in the previous years, the reverse was true: market appetite for risk was very high and risks were under-estimated. Indeed, I have long maintained that credulity in mechanical risk management models is likely to have been the most important of the several factors that were at the root of the imbalances and excesses that occurred in the run-up to the crisis.