Michael Held: Risk management Remarks by Mr Michael Held, Executive Vice President of the Legal Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, at the University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, China, 18 May 2017. * * * It is an honor to join you at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. Thank you for inviting me. As always, the views I will express are my own. They are not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or the Federal Reserve System.1 “Federal Reserve Bank of New York” is a lot to say. From now on, I’ll just call it the “New York Fed.” My topic today is the role of lawyers in what is called “risk management.” I am not sure how familiar the term will be to you. We certainly did not cover it in law school—although, in retrospect, many of the principles I learned might be rephrased in the language of risk. Risk management is, however, a daily feature of my practice as a lawyer at the New York Fed. “Risk” is the possibility of injury or failure. It is a component of most decisions in life—big or small. Opportunities for growth or gain tend to entail some risk of failure. “Risk management,” therefore, does not always mean eliminating all risk. To do so would mean that one is also eliminating all opportunity.
I wish you all the very best of luck as you embark on your careers. I would be happy to take a few questions. 1 James Bergin, Erin Kelly, Lev Menand, Thomas Noone, Brett Phillips, Joseph Sommer, Joseph Tracy, Shawei  Wang and Jennifer Wolgemuth assisted in preparing these remarks. 2 See Michael Power, The Risk Management of Everything: Rethinking the Politics of Uncertainty (2004), 37–38  (“Afunctional explanation for the phenomenon suggests that the emergence of a systematic, generic and broad approach to risk management is a rational response to the fact that the environment of individuals and organizations, indeed the world, has become genuinely ‘more risky.’”). 3 Richard Dzina, Advancing the Fed’s Wholesale Services in an Era of Unprecedented Challenge and Change,  Remarks at Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association’s Operations Conference and Exhibition 2017, Boca Raton, Florida, May 9, 2017. 4 Final Report of Neal Batson, In re Enron Corp., No. 01–16034 (S.D.N.Y. Bankr. Nov. 4, 2003), at 115. 5 Association of the Bar of the City of New York, “Report of the Task Force on the Lawyer’s Role in Corporate 6/7  BIS central bankers' speeches  Governance” (2006), 95. 7/7  BIS central bankers' speeches