The FSA’s Stress Testing Thematic Review?
Perhaps because of dressing it up in non common words or perhaps because of a general disregard for such matters, I find it interesting that the FSAs report yesterday that it had sent out a letter to Chief Executives of regulated firms about ‘Stress Management’ hasn’t been more widely reported. In fact, and forgive me if I have missed one, but I can’t find any mention of it anywhere in any of the National Newspapers.
In this context ‘Stress’ is taken to mean the stress that a business can be subject to before it breaks down and is not the stress of a 16 hour a day, whisky drinking, chain smoking white collar worker with high blood pressure, as one might think. The idea behind the FSAs work in this area is presumably to guard against disasters - whether it be financial implosion, natural disaster or terrorism action that 
threatens to bring capitalism to its knees. I guess someone has to worry about it and, rather than everyone pressing the panic button, it is perhaps an opportune moment to quote JFK who said ‘it is better to repair your roof when the sun is shining’.
As part of its work on Stress Management the FSA visited 10 large organisations to see what levels of contingency planning, risk management and risk measurement the firms had in place. Presumably the FSA concentrated on large organisations with the belief that financial meltdown and therefore capitalism breakdown would only happen if firms like those were directly impacted. Perhaps they forget that in a house of cards the ones at the top are held up by the ones below. I just wonder how seriously businesses take risk management and how much resource is thrown at it. Oh well, if you get bored you might want to read the FSA’s PDF about it for yourself.
