Aaron Brown: to learn how to handle a crisis, create one

Scenario analysis still isn’t taken seriously; it should be, says AQR’s former risk chief

Back in 2018, Aaron Brown ran a pandemic scenario for a major financial institution. The exercise involved a disease that would spread like flu and kill like smallpox. It wasn’t so far off what is happening now.

Brown, one of the best-known figures in risk management, does not claim to have seen Covid coming, or even to have seen a pandemic coming. But pandemics are something he has thought about a lot, and he thinks the current crisis shows why scenario analysis exercises such as the one he