The Next Stage: Financial Reforms, Jobs and Housing, the Dollar and the International System
Working Groups on the Economics Crisis: Finance, Monetary and Banking Issues
Co-sponsored by The New America Foundation and the World Trade Center Washington, DC
Program
Welcoming Remarks: James K. Galbraith — Economists for Peace and Security (transcript)
Session One: Banks and Regulation (video)
Chair: Mike Lind — New America Foundation, Economic Growth Program
William K. Black — University of Missouri, Kansas City
Perry Mehrling — Barnard College, Columbia University
Robert A. Johnson
Stephanie Griffith-Jones — Columbia University, Initiative for Policy Dialogue
Keynote: Damon Silvers — Congressional Oversight Panel (video, transcript)
Keynote: Phil Angelides — Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (video, transcript)
Session Two: Jobs and Housing (video)
Chair: Andrew Brimmer — Brimmer & Co.
Dean Baker — Center for Economic and Policy Research
Gary Dymski — University of California Center Sacramento (prepared remarks)
Sherle Schwenninger — New America Foundation, Economic Growth Program
Session Three: The Dollar (video)
Chair: Steve Clemons
Pierre Calame — Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer
Jane D'Arista — University of Massachusetts Amherst, Political Economy Research Institute
Jan Kregel — Levy Economics Institute of Bard College and University of Missouri, Kansas City
Participant Biographies
Phil Angelides
Phil Angelides has made his mark in California and the nation as an effective public leader, as a successful businessman, and as a trailblazing environmental innovator. He currently serves as the National Chairman of the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of business, labor, environmental and community leaders committed to accelerating our nation’s transition to a clean energy future.
Mr. Angelides is a Principal of Canyon Capital Realty Advisors and Chairman of the Canyon Johnson Urban Communities Fund, a partnership of Canyon and Earvin “Magic” Johnson, focused on investing in, improving, and greening residential rental and mixed use properties in urban communities across America. He was the California State Treasurer from 1999-2007 and the Democratic nominee for Governor of California in 2006.
For over two decades, Mr. Angelides has been a leader in the movement for sustainable economic progress. In the 1980’s, he pioneered the planning and building of smart growth communities long before the concepts of sustainability were embraced by the marketplace. Among his ventures was the town of Laguna West which was featured in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” and sparked a national dialogue around building more livable, environmentally responsible communities.
During his eight years in elected office, Mr. Angelides transformed the State Treasurer’s Office into a force for progress, launching ground breaking policy initiatives. He directed $26 billion in state investments to promote smart growth and create jobs, housing, and opportunities in inner cities, catalyzing a wave of reinvestment in America’s urban centers. He put the weight of California’s $400 billion pension funds behind investment in clean energy and the fight against global warming – seeding the “green tech” investment revolution. And, he mobilized investors across the nation to usher in a new era of social and environmental responsibility.
He has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Inner City Leadership Award from the Initiative for Competitive Inner City; the California League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Leadership Award; and the Congress for the New Urbanism’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dean Baker
Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999 and currently serves as co-director. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy, The United States Since 1980, Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot), and The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer. His blog, Beat the Press, provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.
William K. Black
Bill Black is an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at UMKC. He is the Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention. He has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University. He has held positions as an attorney with Squire, Sanders of Dempsey, litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and Senior Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement. He recently helped the World Bank develop an anti-corruption initiative.
Pierre Calame
Pierre Calame has been for twenty years Senior civil servant in various positions related to physical and urban planning, housing, international cooperation. In 1985 he was appointed General Secretary of Usinor, the industrial group in iron and steel industry.
Since 1988, he is the General Director of the Foundation Charles Léopold Mayer for the Progress of Humankind, a Swiss-based international foundation, devoted mainly to the mobilization of knowledge and experience to help in facing the next decade’s major challenges.
A member of the Founders' Committee of the China Europa Forum, he is working on the development of a dialogue between Chinese and European societies, a prototype of what could be in the future the society-to-society dialogue between other parts of the world. The author of many books and publications, his most recent work is “Essai sur l'oeconomie” in reference to the Greek work “Oikos” meaning “home”.
Jane D’Arista
Jane D’Arista writes and lectures on economics and finance and is a Research Associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Financial Markets Center. She served as a staff economist for the Banking and Commerce Committees of the U.S. House of Representatives, as a principal analyst in the international division of the Congressional Budget Office and has lectured in graduate programs at Boston University School of Law, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Utah and the New School University. Her publications include a two volume history of U.S. monetary policy and financial regulation as well as studies of international and domestic monetary systems, financial restructuring, the U.S. international investment position and capital flows to emerging economies.
Gary Dymski
Gary Dymski has been founding Director of the University of California Center, Sacramento (UCCS) since July 2003. He received his B.A. in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He obtained a Masters in Public Administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University in 1977. He worked as economic analyst at Legal Services Organization of Indiana from 1977 to 1979; from 1979 to 1981, he served as fiscal advisor and staff director for the Democratic Caucus in the Indiana State Senate. He began doctoral study in economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1981, and received his Ph.D in 1987.
Gary spent 1985-86 as the Leo Model Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He held a position as assistant professor of economics at the University of Southern California from 1986 to 1991; in 1991 he joined the economics faculty at the University of California – Riverside (UCR). He was promoted to professor of economics in 2001. In the 2001-02 academic year, Gary served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. In the 2002-03 academic year, Gary was founding director of the Edward J. Blakely Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at UCR.
James K. Galbraith
James K. Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School. He holds degrees from Harvard (B.A. magna cum laude, 1974) and Yale (Ph.D. in economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge in 1974-1975, and then served in several positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee. He was a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1985. He directed the LBJ School's Ph.D. Program in Public Policy from 1995 to 1997. He directs the University of Texas Inequality Project, an informal research group based at the LBJ School. Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute and as Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security. He writes a column called "Econoclast" for Mother Jones, and occasional commentary in many other publications, including The Texas Observer, The American Prospect, and The Nation. He is an occasional commentator for Public Radio International's Marketplace.
Stephany Griffith-Jones
Stephany Griffith-Jones is currently Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. She is an economist whose areas of expertise include global capital flows to emerging markets, especially macro-economic management of capital flows in Latin America, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, and international financial reform with special emphasis on regulation (Basel II, hedge funds and derivatives).
Prior to joining IPD, Professor Griffith-Jones was Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at University of Sussex, United Kingdom and served as Senior Official at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Economic Commission of Latin America (ECLAC), and as Head of International Finance at the Commonwealth Secretariat (UK). She has acted as senior consultant to governments in Eastern Europe and Latin America and to many international agencies, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and United Nations, especially UNDP and ECLAC. She began her career at the Central Bank of Chile.
She has published many articles and written or edited 18 books on international finance and economic development, most recently International Finance and Development with Jose Antonio Ocampo and Jan Kregel. She was recipient of Association of Latin American Financial Institutions prize for best essay on Latin America's international finance, and the Distinguished Czech Woman of the World Award (2006), granted by Charles University and Czech government.
Robert A. Johnson
Dr Johnson was previously a managing director at Soros Fund Management where he managed a global currency, bond and equity portfolio specializing in emerging markets. Prior to the time Dr. Johnson was a managing director of Bankers Trust Company.
Dr. Johnson served as Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire and before that Senior Economist of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of Chairman Pete Domenici.
Dr. Johnson received Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.S. in both Electrical Engineering and Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr Johnson is a member of the Development Advisory Board of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY and is the former President of the National Scholastic Chess Foundation. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Economic Policy Institute and the Institute for America's Future. In 2007-8 He was an executive producer of Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar Winning Documentary produced and Directed by Alex Gibney.
Richard Kaufman
Richard Kaufman is a member of the board of directors and a vice chair of Economists for Peace and Security, and Director of Bethesda Research Institute, which he founded. He was formerly a staff economist and general counsel of the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. At the Joint Economic Committee he directed numerous investigations of the Pentagon and its spending and contracting practices. As he would point out, that was at a time when there was more rigorous and relevant congressional oversight than we have had over the past 8 years, and when oversight meant to look hard, not to hardly look.
Jan Kregel
Jan Kregel is a Senior Scholar and Director of the Monetary Policy and Financial Structure program at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, and currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri–Kansas City and Professor of Development Finance at the Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. He was formerly Chief of the Policy Analysis and Development Branch of the United Nations Financing for Development Office and deputy secretary of the U.N. Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters. Before joining the U.N., Kregel was professor of economics at the Università degli Studi di Bologna, as well as professor of international economics at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where he also served as associate director of its Bologna Center from 1987 to 1990. His most recent book is International Finance and Development (with J. A. Ocampo and S. Griffith-Jones), 2006. Kregel studied primarily at the University of Cambridge, and received his Ph.D.from Rutgers University. He has recently been pursuing research dealing with the relation between global imbalances and economic development, the origins of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the problems of financing for development.
Michael Lind
Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is the author, with Ted Halstead, of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Doubleday, 2001). He is also the author of Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New America Books/Basic, 2003) and What Lincoln Believed (Doubleday, 2005). Mr. Lind has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. From 1991 to 1994, he was executive editor of The National Interest. He has also been a guest lecturer at Harvard Law School. Mr. Lind has written for The Atlantic Monthly, Prospect (U.K.), The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, and other leading publications, and has appeared on C-SPAN, National Public Radio, CNN’s Crossfire, and PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Mr. Lind’s first three books of political journalism and history, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (Free Press, 1995), Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (Free Press, 1996), and Vietnam: The Necessary War (Free Press, 1999) were all selected as New York Times Notable Books. He has also published several volumes of fiction and poetry, including The Alamo (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which the Los Angeles Times named as one of the Best Books of the year, and a prize-winning children’s book, Bluebonnet Girl (Henry Holt, 2004). His ground-breaking study of American grand strategy, The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life was published by Oxford University Press in October 2006.
Perry Mehrling
Perry G. Mehrling is Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University where he has taught since 1987. His research interests lie in the monetary and financial dimensions of economics, a field he approaches from a variety of methodological angles. His most recent book is Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance (Wiley 2005). Dr. Mehrling’s training in economics includes a MSc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics from the London School of Economics (1983), and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University (1988). His webpage is here.
Sherle Schwenninger
Sherle Schwenninger directs the New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program, and the Global Middle Class Initiative. He is also the former director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Fellows Program. Mr. Schwenninger was Founding Editor of World Policy Journal from 1983 to 1992, and served as Director of the World Policy Institute at The New School from 1992 to 1996. He was also Director of the Institute's Policy Studies Program and its Transnational Academic Program. More recently, Mr. Schwenninger served as Senior Program Coordinator for the Project on Development, Trade, and International Finance at the Council on Foreign Relations, and is the author, with Walter Russell Mead, of the CFR publication A Financial Architecture for Middle-Class-Oriented Development. He is also a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute. Mr. Schwenninger writes and speaks frequently on questions of American foreign policy and international economic strategy.
Damon Silvers
Mr. Silvers was the Chair of the Competition Subcommittee of the United States Treasury Department Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession and a member of the United States Treasury Department Investor’s Practice Committee of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets. He is also a member of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Standing Advisory Group and the Financial Accounting Standards Board User Advisory Council.
Prior to working for the AFL-CIO, Mr. Silvers was a law clerk at the Delaware Court of Chancery for Chancellor William T. Allen and Vice-Chancellor Bernard Balick.
Mr. Silvers received his J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School. He received his M.B.A. with high honors from Harvard Business School and is a Baker Scholar. Mr. Silvers is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude, and has studied history at Kings College, Cambridge University.
Mr. Silvers is the author of “Securities and Exchange Commission: Restoring the Capital Markets Regulator and Responding to Crisis,” published in Change for America: A Progressive Blueprint for the 44th President (2008).