Geoffrey L. Bell

Founder, Group of Thirty; Former President, Geoffrey Bell and Company

Geoffrey Bell was President of Geoffrey Bell and Company which advises a wide range of central banks and governments on their international reserve asset and liability management programmes.

He was financial adviser to the Central Bank of Venezuela for over twenty five years and has acted as financial advisor to the Government of Barbados for more than twenty years and the Government of Jamaica for almost a decade. The company acts as a consultant to major corporations and banks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and South America providing advice on capital market transactions as well as undertaking economic, financial and country risk analysis. The company also specializes in bank regulation and has worked closely on issues relating to the Basel Banking Committee. Geoffrey Bell was Chairman of Guinness Mahon Holdings, one of London’s oldest merchant banks, from October 1987 to April 1993 and negotiated its sale to the Bank of Yokohama in 1989.
Born in Grimsby in 1939 and educated at the London School of Economics, he joined H.M. Treasury after graduation. In 1963 he was a Visiting Scholar with the Federal Reserve System mainly based at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

During 1964 and 1965 he lectured on monetary economics at the London School of economics. Between 1966 and 1969 he was Economic Advisor to the British Embassy in Washington. 

In 1969 he joined one of London’s leading merchant banks, Schroders, as Assistant to the then Chairman, Gordon Richardson, who later became Governor of the Bank of England. He became a director of the company as well as an Executive Vice President of J. Henry Schroder Bank in New York working on the international expansion of the group.

Geoffrey Bell formed his own company in 1982. He was the Founder and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Consultative Group of International Economic and Monetary Affairs known as the Group of 30. His book, “The Euro-Dollar Market and the International Financial System” has been translated into French and Japanese and he writes frequently in the International Herald Tribune and in other financial journals. Geoffrey Bell was appointed a Governor of the London School of Economics in 1994.