The Bankers’ New Clothes
Speaker Series: Anat Admati, George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance & Economics, Stanford GSB
Lunch, Monday, 8 April 2013, 12:15-14:00, Asia Society Hong Kong Center
How Nothing Has Changed Since 2008 & The Continued Danger of the Unbalanced Financial System
Co-Sponsor: The Asia Society
Event Details:
The Asia Society & The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong co-hosted a lunch discussion with Professor Anat Admati of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. 45 alumni and guests attended. During the lunch, Professor Admati discussed some of the main insights and views discussed in her forthcoming co-authored book, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It.
At the core of The Bankers’ New Clothes is an aggressive claim: that nothing has changed since 2008. In the face of financial reform, bankers, politicians, and regulators insisted that making the banking system safer would require sacrificing lending and economic growth. The Bankers’ New Clothes exposes this claim and its cousins as invalid, dangerous distractions from the real dangers that our unbalanced financial system still presents. In particular, Anat insists that banks must increase their capital reserves (i.e. equity). She tackles the various myths that banks have spread about their relationship to capital, including the widespread claim that increasing capital reserves somehow takes money out of circulation.
Biography:
Anat Admati, George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance & Economics, Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Anat Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.
She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, trading mechanisms, portfolio management, financial contracting, including the widely cited “What Jamie Dimon Won’t Tell You” and, most recently, on corporate governance and banking.
Since 2010, she has been active in the policy debate on financial regulation, particularly capital regulation, and has spoken, inter alia, before the US Federal Reserve, the United States Congress, the UK Independent Commission on Banking, the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision at the 2011 Bretton Woods Conference on large & complex financial institutions.
Professor Admati received her BS from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University. She is the recipient, inter alia, of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Batterymarch Fellowship, is a fellow of the Econometric Society, and has served as board member of the American Finance Association. She is a member of the FDIC Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee