In this second installment of his three-part series on antitrust’s recent resurrection, Matt Stoller discusses the legacy of Obama’s presidency. The real policy for which Obama will be known is not Obamacare or Dodd-Frank, but bailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crisis and helping Americans and the rest of the world understand that liberal democratic rhetoric was really an ornamental cover for a system of concentrated financial and political power.
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Experts from academia and industry gathered at the University of Oxford to revisit what went wrong in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, whether the actions that were taken since seem sufficient, and the risks that might forestall a new crisis.
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Historian and author Adam Tooze talks to ProMarket about how the financial crisis “remade” American capitalism, why the US response to the crisis was “nakedly oligopolistic,” and how Europe could have solved its own crisis if it had an organized oligopoly of its own.
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Is the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis responsible for the rise of populism in the US and Europe?; the real Google censorship scandal is its re-entry into China; Europe’s new controversial copyright law could change the Internet; and can Facebook unbreak democracy?
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What can policymakers do to prevent future financial crises? An emerging consensus holds that so-called macroprudential regulation is key: policies that aim to mitigate risks to the financial system as a whole. In a recent paper, Karsten Müller of Princeton shows that such policies were systematically loosened in the run-up to two-hundred seventeen elections across 58 countries. This raises the question of whether regulators can, in practice, withstand political pressures.
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Relatively few American companies have bankers on their boards. New research reveals that bankers were commonly represented on corporate boards in the 19th century, and that affiliations with banks helped sustain non-financial corporations in the wake of financial crises.
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In an interview with ProMarket, former Bank of England deputy governor Sir Paul Tucker explains why the “unelected power” of central bankers threatens our system of government.
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Google gives up Project Maven following “terrible” backlash; angry Facebook shareholders demand an end to Mark Zuckerberg’s “dictatorship”; American startups are in a 13-year slump; and Italy has a new government.
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Wells Fargo is in hot water again; President Trump reportedly pushed the US Postmaster General to double the rate that Amazon pays to ship packages. Why are Google and Facebook investing half a billion dollars in journalism? And can the Senate bring back net neutrality?
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To accompany Paul Tucker’s mini-course at the Stigler Center this week, we offer here an extract of the former Bank of England Deputy Governor’s ambitious new tome Unelected Power: The Question for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State.
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Can depositor activism make a real difference? New research set to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center Political Economy of Finance conference examines the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy and similar events and suggests that banks see significant decreases in deposit growth after experiencing environmental, corruption, and tax evasion scandals.
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If, as California political legend Jesse M. Unruh once quipped, “money is the mother’s milk of politicians,” it’s reasonable to expect that countries might wield their financial power for geopolitical purposes on the world stage. Accordingly, a fascinating new paper slated to be presented at the upcoming Stigler Center Political Economy of Finance conference tracks how China punishes countries whose heads of state accept meetings with the Dalai Lama by curbing bilateral lending flows from its state banks.
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