Additional Content

How to Kill Financial Regulation…and the Global Economy

“While it's incredibly difficult to get a regulatory reform passed, it's far easier – and more profitable to politicians – to kill it.

So says Matt Taibbi, in his audacious new article in Rolling Stone called, “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform.” In it, Taibbi examines how cash from the financial industry swamped elected officials and regulators and thwarted any efforts to create meaningful financial reform. Read more

[INET Spotlight] Edward Kane: New Economic Thinking Tackles Financial Risk

You can’t control what you don’t understand. Just take a look at the financial sector.

Despite the trauma of the 2008 financial crisis, the opacity of the financial sector and the oblique way decisions about financial risk are handled by institutions have remained central problems for the global economy. With this in mind, INET Grantee Edward Kane offers some new thinking on how to measure systemic risk in the financial sector.  Read more

Regulation? What Regulation?

Being the smartest guys in the room doesn’t prevent you from making bad decisions.

This is the lesson Paul Krugman offers in his recent NY Times column. “Even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on,” Krugman writes.

The key to solving this conundrum, in Krugman’s mind, is smarter regulation. Read more

Insights from Bagehot, for these Trying Times

Here is a talk I gave recently at Wake Forest University.  It is pretty long, but you can page through the video (on the left) by paging through the powerpoint (on the right), and anyway the last twenty minutes are devoted to questions.  I couldn't figure out how to embed it in the blog, but the link will get you there.

INET Spotlight: Jamie Galbraith

What has been driving the worldwide growth of inequality, both within and between countries? Jamie Galbraith has an idea: “Surely financial policies strike me as a very plausible culprit.” Read more

Let me tell you everything

Our usual problem in history (of economics) is a lack of information. Archival sources, if available at all, always present gaps of correspondence between people you just know should be there, and never contain that vital review report, or the minutes of that one crucial meeting. Moreover, if the people you write about are alive and willing to talk, it turns out they’re only human: they’ve forgotten the vast majority of their past, mix up events and people, mistake a recollection they once read for their own memory, or even willfully rewrite history. All too bad, although it gives us the possibility, perhaps even obligation, to speculate, interpret, and fill in. And then of course spend hours and hours discussing with one another whether we have done so correctly. Read more

Sometimes it takes a little overreaching to remind us that the future isn’t certain

And as the ship is still sinking both literally and figuratively, an intrepid Australian billionaire has given us a timely reminder. Recently, billionaire mining-magnate Clive Palmer announced his intention to build the Titanic II, which will be a modernized replica of the original Titanic – because we all know that went well. Read more

How to Save a Sinking Ship?

That was the question at the “Future of Europe” panel at INET Berlin. German International Broadcaster Deustsche Welle offers a look behind the scenes at INET’s recent Berlin conference. The video segment - titled “Economists Planning a Revolution” - asks, “What will the new solution be for Europe?” Read more