LYONS
Gerard

• 1. Financial sector career

Gerard Patrick Lyons is a British economist.

Gerard Lyons belongs to an immigrant Irish Catholic family from Kilburn, North West London.

Lyons attended St Mary's Primary School in Kilburn and Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School in Holland Park, London. He studied at the University of Liverpool followed by a Masters in Economics at the University of Warwick. In 1985, he completed his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London.

Financial sector career

Lyons started his career as an economist at Chase Manhattan Bank in the Europe Area Office from 1985 to 1986. From 1986 to 1989 he was the Chief UK Economist at Swiss Bank Corporation. From 1989 to 1999 he was Chief Economist and Executive Director at Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank. Then from 1999 to 2012, Lyons was the Chief Economist and Group Head of Global Research at Standard Chartered Bank, where he was in charge of a division of about 180 staff. In 2010 and 2011, Lyons' team at Standard Chartered was ranked as the top forecasting team globally by Bloomberg. On leaving Standard Chartered, The Times wrote that Lyons "(had) become one of the most influential pundits on the global economy".

Prior to this Lyons reinforced his own reputation as an accurate forecaster with being one of two British economists predicting in August 2008, a month before Lehman Brothers collapsed, a deep imminent recession. He anticipated a GDP fall of 1.6% for the third quarter of 2008 when the consensus predicted a rise of 0.9%. Other accurate contrarian calls include correctly predicting that the Lawson Boom would end in a bust, as well arguing for the economic benefits of leaving the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Regarding the latter, Lyons wrote in The Observer in 1992 that “[S]omething will have to give: either the government’s exchange-rate commitment or the economy,” and he has called the euro “probably the worst economic idea ever thought up by anyone anywhere at any time”.

Currently, Lyons is Chief Economic Strategist at Netwealth, an independent non-executive director at the Bank of China, and a Senior Fellow at the think tank Policy Exchange. Lyons also sits, since 2008, on the Advisory Board of the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment; and has been a member of the Advisory Board of Warwick Business School since 2014.