A Levy scholar on the financial crisis

Daniel Akst | August 13, 2010

Over the course of the summer, Levy senior scholar James K. Galbraith gave a series of lectures in Europe laying out his view of the financial crisis that originated on this side of the Atlantic. At the most recent of these, in July, he emphasized the role of fraud:

It’s important to recognize that at the root of the financial crisis there was one of the greatest swindles of all economic history. The mortgages that were originated in the private sector in the United States which were then transformed into securities and sold through the financial markets around the world were in effect counterfeits. They were documents that looked like mortgages but were known by the people making them to be certain to fail.

Links to the rest of Galbraith’s talks are listed below:

Remarks at a conference of the Global Progressive Forum and Res Publica in Lisbon, July 9/10.
Listen here and here:
Or read transcripts here and here.
Testimony to the Commission des Finances of the French Senate on June 18.
Remarks in Helsinki on June 11 to a conference entitled “Challenges of the Global Crisis to Macroeconomic Theory and International Finance” sponsored by the Bank of Finland and the Banca d’Italia. The remarks were on a paper by E.S. Phelps of Columbia University, entitled “The Slump, the Recovery and the New Normal.”
Listen or read transcript
A lecture at the Athens Economics University entitled, “The Great Crisis and the American Response,”  June 8.
A keynote lecture entitled “The Imperative of a Green New Deal” at an inaugural conference of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Social Research at Jena, Germany on June 4; the conference title was “Ways Out of Crisis.”
Listen here.
A keynote address, “The Great Crisis and the American Response” to the conference of the German-American Studies Association at Humboldt University, Berlin, May 27.

Comments

Leave a Reply