Today marks the 10th anniversary of Lehman Brothers filing for bankruptcy. Certainly this is not a time for celebration since many issues in the financial system have not been resolved and the world is still feeling the negative effects of the Global Financial Crisis. As Adam Tooze in this recent INET video explains, the financial crisis was not the worst crisis in economic history but a narrow miss. It was the economy’s Cuban missile crisis.
What went wrong? Who is to blame? These questions and the narratives that attempt to answer them will shape economics and politics for years to come and YSI will be part of this.
With this in mind we are going into the second round of our webinar series “The Global Financial Crisis as History” and invite you to our next session on Tuesday 18th September 9 a.m. EDT / 2 p.m. (GMT+1) / 3 p.m. CET with Prof. Walker F. Todd.
https://ysd.ineteconomics.org/event/5b9d22e13d736a7cd6b9314e
For twenty years, Prof. Todd was an attorney and legal officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a legal and research officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Advising these Reserve Banks’ discount window operations was one of his principal responsibilities. He has numerous publications on emergency lending.
In this webinar, Prof. Todd will explain how the first major bailout of the GFC came to be, and why it might have created an undesirable precedent for how the authorities would deal with 'too important to fail institutions' in the following years. We invite you to join us for the presentation and discussion, and to read Walker Todd's article on INET (link below) to have a more fruitful discussion.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/rewarding-bad-behavior-the-bear-stearns-bailout
We also like to draw your attention to our next upcoming webinars in our series on the GFC:
• 25th September: Discussion of Chapters 6-9 from Tooze (2018)
Discussant: t.b.a.
• 2nd October: Thomas Ferguson (INET) – “Too Big to Bail: The “Paulson Put,” Presidential Politics, and the Global Financial Meltdown”
• 9th October : Discussion of Chapters 10-13 from Tooze (2018)
Discussant: Giovanni Villavicencio
• 16th October: Daniel Munevar (UNCTAD) – “Bending the rules? Greece and the IMF’s lending policy framework“
• 23th October: Discussion of Chapters 14-18 from Tooze (2018)
Discussant: t.b.a.
Check out the webinar series page for upcoming sessions and recordings of past sessions: https://ysd.ineteconomics.org/project/5b7c5656e0806e07e1112df3
We also recommend you to take a look at this INET collection on the GFC with articles, interviews and blog posts by Adam Tooze, George Soros, Ed Kane among others.