Софийско бизнес училище

Sofia Business School AUT 2022

MANAGING GLOBAL ECONOMIC RISKS

AUTUMN EDITION

14 November 2022

The Inflation Storm: How do the US, UK, and the European Countries Weather it? The Takeaways for Bulgaria

Programme Outline

Uniart Gallery - New Bulgarian University

10:30 – 10:40

Welcome Аddress

Opening

Ambassador Ilian Vassilev – Co-founder of the Reform Union Club; Programme Director of the Sofia Business School

10:40 - 11:10

The Inflation Storm and the British Approach

Keynote Speaker: Ms Jasmine Birtles

Jasmine Birtles is a TV personality, ‘money guru’, presenter, speaker, freelance journalist, author of 38 book and founder of popular consumer money website MoneyMagpie.com.

A regular commentator about all things money on TV and radio, she has a regular weekly slot on ‘On the Money’ on GB News and can also be seen on BBC TV News, ITV News, Channel 5 News, Sky News, ‘This Morning’, BBC TV’s ‘Inside Out’. She broadcasts, writes and speaks about all aspects of personal finance including investments, pensions, mortgages, credit cards, banking and apps, savings, debt, utilities, FinTech and cryptocurrencies.

Her most recent brand partnerships include PR and media campaigns for Heycar, Gumtree, Alton Towers, Iceland, Tesco Clubcard, Zopa, Funding Circle, Nutmeg, Visa, American Express and Marks & Spencer Bank.

She’s also the author of several popular books including one Times best-seller. Recent books include ‘Beat the Banks‘,‘The Money Magpie’, ‘The Money Book’ and ‘A Bit on the Side’.

11:10– 11:40

The Inflation Overseas: How are the US tackling the Crisis?

Keynote Speaker: Mr. John Butler

John Butler has 25 years experience in international finance, most recently as a FinTech executive and director for alternative payments, savings and investment platforms. He has previously served as a Managing Director for bulge-bracket investment banks on both sides of the Atlantic in research, strategy, asset allocation and product development roles, including at Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers. He has advised some of the world’s largest institutional and private investors in matters ranging from wealth preservation to enhancing returns through a wide variety of innovative strategies, and he has been a #1 ranked Investment Strategist by Institutional Investor magazine. His past publications include his popular Amphora Report investment newsletter, The Golden Revolution (John Wiley and Sons, 2012) and The Golden Revolution, Revisited (2017).

11:40 – 12:10

The Role of the European Central Bank in Harnessing the Inflation

Keynote Speaker: Gordon Kerr

Gordon Kerr is an investment banker with broad experience of banking collapses and the need for systemic reform, having started his career working on sovereign debt syndications and the Latin American debt crisis. In the 1990s he specialized in housing finance, designing Scandinavian mortgage securitization structures and rental securitizations for the UK social housing sector. In the UK he helped protect housing associations from the rapacious demands of banks by designing a rent based financing structure that lowered the borrowing cost of the entire social housing sector by about 10% in 1995. Shortly after the LTCM hedge fund collapse and bailout of 1998, he designed regulatory arbitrage structures that used credit default swaps combined with US monoline wraps to create synthetic regulatory capital, a structure that was deployed Europewide to releverage Europe’s largest banks. In 2002 he met with the UK bank regulator, the FSA, to attempt to explain that wrong accounting for derivative products would cause the banking system to collapse.

Gordon Kerr set up Cobden Partners shortly after the banking system collapsed. He is the author of “The Law of Opposites, Illusory Profits in the Financial Sector”. He is a senior fellow of the Paris-based research foundation Institute for Research in Fiscal Issues and a frequent financial commentator for influential business and financial news TV channels.

12:10 – 12:30

The Takeaways for Bulgaria

Keynote Speaker: Levon Hampartzoumian

Levon Hampartzoumian is a President at Bulgarian Business Leaders Forum. He has served as the CEO and Chairman of the MB of UniCredit Bulbank for a period of almost 20 years.

12:30 – 13:00

Q&A Session

Moderators

Ambassador Ilian Vassilev

Amb. Ilian Vassilev is Managing Director of Innovative Energy Solutions ( investment and energy strategic and project consultancy); Member of the Board of the Centre for Balkan and Black Sea Studies; Honorary Chair of the Bulgarian Economic Forum; Chair of the Board of Alternatives & Analysis; Co-founder of the Reform Union Club.

Ekatherina Tzvetanova

She is an assistant professor at New Bulgarian University. Her area of expertise includes modelling of economic processes, enterprise risk management, and credit risk evaluation. She participated in different projects as an expert in the field of asset quality review in the Bulgarian banking sector, implementation of an Enterprise Risk Management system, and construction of credit risk models. Also, she is participating in different scientific projects in the agriculture sector.