Risk awards 2012

Market participants have endured a 12-month period of dramatic upheaval. Despite the challenges they faced, some companies managed not just to survive but to thrive – and helped clients to do so, too. By Matt Cameron, Laurie Carver, Mauro Cesa, Clive Davidson, RamyaJaidev, Peter Madigan, Mark Pengelly, Joe Rennison, Nick Sawyer, Michael Watt and Duncan Wood

As the US debt ceiling talks laboured towards their eleventh-hour agreement last year, market participants quietly began to prepare for what would have been a catastrophic event: the country's default. At JP Morgan, the bank's risk managers and senior business leaders found themselves planning for events that seemed unthinkable just a few months earlier. The bank discussed how it would handle benefits cards through which banks offer credit that is repaid by the US government, for example, and