Introduction

The most important person in any committee is the chairman; during these years all the chairs of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision were men. The chairman sets the agenda and drives the committee forward. The choice of direction by the chair is particularly important when the mandate is broad, rather than narrowly defined, and when the superior body to which the committee reports, the G10 central bank Governors in the case of the BCBS, gives it a loose rein. As will become clear in the course of the remaining chapters of this book, this was the case with the BCBS, so the involvement and leadership of the Chairmen were crucial.

There were six Chairmen during our period, excluding the acting role of Danielsson (Swedish Riksbank) who took over for one meeting after Muller’s death when in office as Chairman, and before Corrigan was appointed. Potted biographies of each of them are presented in Section B. They were: Blunden (Bank of England), Cooke (Bank of England), Muller (Nederlandsche Bank), Corrigan (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Padoa-Schioppa (Banca d’Italia) and de Swaan (Nederlandsche Bank). The latter, Tom de Swaan was only in office for a very short period, for the last three BCBS meetings in 1997, at the tail-end of the years covered here.