A new study argues that the Federal Reserve could have saved Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy, but chose not to, partly because of political pressures.
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Could Blockchain Technology Alter the Balance of Power Within the Financial System? Q&A with David Yermack
“Blockchain technology is threatening to remake the financial system from the top down in a way that threatens the existence of all the banks, stock changes, and all of the legacy financial institutions. I expect that within the next 10 years, probably half of the banks will be gone.”
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Revolving Doors in the Private Sector: Quid Pro Quo or Efficient Market Mechanism?
A new paper by Elisabeth Kempf from the University of Chicago looks into the performance of credit analysts who left to work for investment banks and finds that they were more accurate than their peers.
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Watch: Deutsche Bank Whistleblower Eric Ben-Artzi Explains What it Takes to Blow the Whistle on Fraud
Ben-Artzi: “The problem is not that you have misbehavior on Wall Street. It’s that you have misbehavior by the people who are supposed to enforce the law, by the prosecutors, by the regulators.”
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Stigler Center Event: David Yermack on Blockchains and the Future of Finance
Yermack, the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation at New York University Stern School of Business, will teach a mini-course of three stand-alone lunch seminars on the potential implications of blockchain technologies at the Stigler Center next week.
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It Takes a Village to Maintain a Dangerous Financial System: Q&A with Anat Admati
Stanford professor Anat Admati discusses her new paper, in which she explains how a mix of distorted incentives, ignorance, confusion, and lack of accountability contributes to the persistence of a dangerous and poorly regulated financial system.
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The Non-Performing Assets of Wells Fargo
The entire board of Wells Fargo, not just the CEO, needs to be replaced.
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Stigler Center Talk: Deutsche Bank Whistleblower on the SEC and Revolving Doors
Eric Ben-Artzi, the former Deutsche Bank risk officer turned whistleblower who rejected a multi-million dollar award from the SEC, will give a talk at the Stigler Center on Thursday via video conference.
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Corporate Culture in Investment Banking: An Inside Look
A former investment banker examines the culture that incentivizes people in the industry to put their interests before their clients’. Part three in a series of columns by anonymous sources that reveal how industries work from within.
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(God Knows) Wall Street Isn’t Perfect, But It Has Helped Make the World A Lot Better Off
If the criticisms against Wall Street had been accurate, the U.S. corporate sector today would be ailing. Instead, corporate profits are at historical highs both absolutely and relative to GDP.
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Does Wall Street Do “God’s Work”? Or Even Anything Useful?
Bank executives frequently proclaim that Wall Street is vital to the nation’s economy and performs socially valuable services by raising capital, providing liquidity to investors, and ensuring that securities are priced accurately so that money flows to where it will be most productive. There’s just one problem: the Wall Street mantra isn’t true.
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Rents and the High Cost of High Finance: Q&A with Gerald Epstein
New study estimates that the total costs of America’s flawed financial system–rents, misallocation costs, and the costs of the 2008 crisis–will add up to an estimated $22.7 trillion between 1990 and 2023.
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