Tobias Adrian

Tobias Adrian serves as Financial Counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department at the IMF. He previously was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. With Markus Brunnermeier, he co-developed CoVaR — a measure of the conditional value-at-risk of the financial system given that a specific institution is in distress. This measure captures spillover effects and became an important tool for systemic risk measurement. Adrian's research on financial intermediary balance sheets and their relationship to risk premia has influenced both academic literature and central bank risk management. His work on the procyclicality of financial institution leverage — showing that broker-dealer balance sheets expand and contract with the business cycle in ways that amplify market volatility — contributed to post-crisis thinking on macroprudential regulation and countercyclical capital buffers. At the IMF he oversees the Global Financial Stability Report, one of the most closely watched publications in institutional finance.