Financial Crisis, Public Policy, and Economic Recovery
Hosted by College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Association
Fear and uncertainty have become mainstays during the current financial crisis in the United States. Americans have witnessed the collapse of major banks, insurance companies, automakers, and the real estate market and unemployment numbers continue to break records. The U.S. government continues to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, with no end in sight to what has been called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The College of Arts and Science’s Discovery Series for alumni invited Boston University faculty experts in the area of politics and economics to analyze what has brought the country to this point, debate whether the worst is over, and offer remedies to get the United States back on track financially.
Speakers Robert Bench, a senior fellow at the School of Law’s Morin Center; Simon Gilchrist, a professor of economics; Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics; Charles Whitehead, an associate professor of law; William Grimes, an associate chairman and associate professor of international relations; andGraham Wilson, a professor of political sciences and director of graduate studies, offered their opinions on what caused the current economic crisis, including risky lending, the collapse of the real estate market, and the structure of the financial system itself. They also offered solutions, such as limited-purpose banking and modification of current regulations on the market.
A question-and-answer period followed the panel discussion.
April 16, 2009, 7 p.m.
Photonics Center
Video length 01:24:15.
About the speakers:
Robert Bench is a senior fellow at the Boston University School of Law’s Morin Center, where he is a strategy advisor. He has spent over 40 years in financial regulation and supervision, serving as a national bank supervisor for the U.S. Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of Currency and as managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers regulatory advisory services practice. Bench has also served as advisor to the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, chairman of the steering committee of the financial services forum in Toronto, a member of the Governing Council of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovations in London, an advisor to the central banks of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Korea, and a leader of a World Bank project to modernize regulation at the People’s Bank of China.
Simon Gilchrist is a professor of economics at Boston University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the leading nonprofit economic research organization in the United States, and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review, and an associate editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics. Gilchrist was a staff economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and was an academic consultant to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the International Monetary Fund.
Laurence Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the Econometric Society, and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company that produces financial planning software. Before coming to Boston University, he was a professor of economics at Yale University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was also senior economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the government of Russia, the government of Ukraine, the government of Bolivia, the government of Bulgaria, the Treasury of New Zealand, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the American Council of Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AT&T, and AON Corp.
Charles Whitehead is an associate professor of law at Boston University, where he teaches courses in corporations and securities regulation. His areas of interest include securities regulation, corporate governance, the regulation of financial institutions, domestic and international business and Japanese law. He is currently on the U.S.–Japan Bridging Foundation’s board of directors and reviews fellowships for advanced research in the social sciences of Japan for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Before coming to Boston University, he practiced law in New York, London, and Tokyo and was an editor and translator for the Journal of Law in Japan.
William Grimes is associate chairman and associate professor of international relations at Boston University. His interests include Japanese and East Asian political economy, Japanese politics, and international political economy. Grimes wrote Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics, 1985–2000 and was co-editor of Japan’s Managed Globalization: Adapting to the 21st Century. He has written extensively on East Asian financial regionalism, the impacts of financial globalization in Japan, Japanese monetary policy making, and the relationship between the United States and Japan.
Graham Wilson is a professor of political sciences and director of graduate studies at Boston University. Before coming to Boston University, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a lecturer at the University of Essex and the University of Oxford. He has received numerous awards and grants, including the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant, the PricewaterhouseCoopers Foundation grant, the Vilas Associates Award, the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professorship, and the Nuffield Foundation grant.
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