Clark Center Forum

Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales ForeignPolicy.com; March 30, 2009 As Timothy Geithner pushes for an overhaul, it is time to rehabilitate one of the tools that got us into this mess: the credit-default swap. Just days after announcing his plan to clean up banks’ balance sheets of toxic assets, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner hit […] 

New York Daily News, March 25, 2009 On Monday, the market rallied 7% at the announcement of Treasury Secretary’s Timothy Geithner’s plan to deal with banks’ toxic assets. Should taxpayers celebrate as well? The answer is a resounding no. Geithner’s plan is just a more risky and cagey version of the original plan by his […] 

Douglas Diamond and Anil K Kashyap Professors Diamond and Kashyap list their priorities for the next steps in combating the financial crisis. Read more> 

Economist.com; Economist Debates In answer to the question: “Are we all Keynesians again? If not, should we be?” Professors Luigi Zingales and Brad DeLong argue opposing sides of issue in Tuesday, March 10th’s live debate on the Economist.com. Read statements> 

Anil K Kashyap and Frederic Mishkin FT.com Opinion, March 3, 2009 Last week, President Barack Obama asked Congress to move swiftly to create a new financial regulatory system for the US. The system is clearly broken, and fixing it should be a high priority. However, moving swiftly to put in place a new regulatory system […] 

February 25, 2009 Kedran Panageas from JP Morgan Chase gave the Booth finance faculty a very informative presentation on the “Decline and Fall of Securitization Markets”.  At the suggestion of several faculty, we thought the presentation might be of general interest to the readers of the IGM blog. View pdf> 

IGM, Global Market Series, number 1 This report is the first of the Global Market Series, which will focus on timely subjects in international business, financial markets, and public policy. Reports in this series will combine insights from scholarly research with other valuable ideas and analysis from other sources. The Initiative on Global Markets, at […] 

Eric A. Posner and Luigi Zingales *UPDATED* The housing crisis threatens to destroy hundreds of billions of dollars of value by causing homeowners with  negative equity to walk away from their houses. A house in foreclosure is worth 30 to 50 percent less than a house that a homeowner either retains or sells on the […] 

The Squam Lake Working Group on Financial Regulation is a nonpartisan, nonaffiliated group of fifteen academics who have come together to offer guidance on the reform of financial regulation. Four Chicago Booth Faculty (John Cochrane, Douglas Diamond, Anil Kashyap and Raghuram Rajan) are members. The group’s first memo describing a “New Information Infrastructure for Financial […] 

Pietro Veronesi and Luigi Zingales City Journal – February 19, 2009 In spite of great expectations, the Financial Stability Plan that Treasury secretary Tim Geithner presented last Tuesday was short on details. Its biggest innovation was a way for the government to persuade private investors to buy toxic assets from banks. The investors would have […]