BARD COLLEGE TO LAUNCH INNOVATIVE MBA IN SUSTAINABILITY

Now Enrolling Students for Fall 2012 in New York City

The Bard MBA is structured around five weekend intensives every term (four in New York City and one in the Hudson Valley), with additional instruction between intensives. The program’s innovative residency structure—with classes held over long weekends once a month—will enable students and professionals from across the East Coast to attend and will allow regional and national leaders in business sustainability to engage students in the classroom. The New York City campus will become a laboratory for first-year students, who will participate in yearlong consultancies with New York–area businesses, government agencies, and nonprofits. Bard MBA faculty and guest lecturers will include leading scholars in business, economics, and environmental policy from Bard’s full-time faculty as well as cutting-edge practitioners in business sustainability, corporate and nonprofit leaders, journalists, and consultants.

“The Bard MBA is one of only a handful of programs around the world that builds sustainability into the curriculum from the ground up,” said Bard CEP Director Eban Goodstein, who will direct the new program. Goodstein, who has been working with General Motors to refine its own sustainability strategy—seeking competitive advantage by developing low-emissions transportation options—recently took the stage at the company’s headquarters in Detroit to speak to 1,000 GM employees about a sustainable clean-energy future. “It’s not something we would have imagined as recently as four years ago. Sustainability is mainstream, and increasingly a key factor in corporate strategy,” Goodstein said. “It’s time for business education to catch up.”

For more information about Bard College’s MBA in Sustainability, please visit www.bard.edu/mba

Policy coordination and information exchange are critical to resolving the eurozone crisis. With this in mind, the Levy Institute is making selected publications that address aspects of the crisis—including policy briefs, one-pagers, and working papers—available online in Greek translation. A list of our current titles is available at www.levyinstitute.org/greek/, and more will be added weekly.

Dan Monaco, writing for The Straddler, attended this year’s Minsky Summer Seminar at the Levy Institute and put together an engrossing (and accessible) article that looks at the work of Hyman Minsky, paying particular attention to Minsky’s interpretation of Keynes (including his views about the misinterpretation of Keynes by mainstream economics).  The article is sprinkled with excerpts from Monaco’s interview of Dimitri Papadimitriou:

“Economists have lost their credibility because they do not actually deal with the real world,” Dimitri Papadimitriou, President of the Levy Institute, told me in my conversation with him. …

“Minsky was in some ways a pioneer. He saw that economic theory assumed that everything is known and that there is some tendency of the system to reach for equilibrium and, at times, to reach periods of ‘tranquility,’ as he preferred to call them. Of course, he never believed that stability was possible. He didn’t believe in the invisible hand. There’s a reason why it’s invisible—because it’s not there.”

Read the entire thing here.

The 20th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, organized by the Levy Institute with support from the Ford Foundation, featured a broad range of speakers, including Gary Gensler (CFTC Chairman—occasioning some interesting back-and-forth in Q&A regarding commodities speculation), Paul McCulley, Andrew Sheng, Phil Angelides, Charles Plosser, Gary Gorton, Charles Evans, Vitor Constancio (Vice President of the ECB), Sheila Blair (head of the FDIC), Martin Mayer (who is apparently writing a biography of Minsky), and more.  The proceedings, including Q&A sessions, can be found here; select audio can be accessed here.

There’s a lot of good material to mine, but I’d like to highlight one particular session:  “Financial Journalism and Financial Reform: What’s Missing from the Headlines?” (the title explains itself), moderated by John Cassidy of the New Yorker and featuring Jeff Madrick, Joe Nocera, Steve Randy Waldman, and Francesco Guerrera (see “Session 2” for the audio).  There’s a great quotation from Steve Randy Waldman here:  “Goldman Sachs is just an off-balance sheet special purpose vehicle of the United States government.  Lloyd Blankfein is either a civil servant or a government contractor.  It’s just [that] his pay is out of line.”

The context is a discussion (starting at the 9:50 mark of Waldman’s presentation) that jumps off from this Minsky quotation: “financial reform needs to confront the public nature of much that is private.”  Waldman argues that while financial writers talk about the heads of the big six banks as though they were captains of private industry, their institutions ought to be treated as pseudo-government entities (just as Citibank ultimately had to stand behind its SIVs, which were supposed to be legally distinct, the US government ultimately has to stand behind the big banks in cases of insolvency).

This post provides our latest update of the quarterly figures for the real and nominal GDP of U.S. trading partners (1970q1-2016q4), which were presented a few years ago in a Levy Institute working paper and have now been updated to the second quarter of 2011, with predictions up to 2016 based on the latest IMF World Economic Outlook.
The database has been requested over the years by other researchers, so we decided to put it up on our web site. It is, and will be, available here: http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/gdp_ustp.xls

Our index for the annual growth rate in the real GDP of U.S. trading partners, reproduced above, now shows that no boost in U.S. exports from accelerating growth in the rest of the world can be expected. More specifically, according to the IMF the eurozone will not contribute much to global growth, and if fiscal consolidation in Southern European countries will indeed be implemented, we expect a further slowdown in the area. Given that the eurozone accounts for roughly 16 percent of U.S. exports, the impact on the U.S. economy of a European slowdown, through trade, will not be dramatic — certainly not as dramatic as the potential negative impact on financial wealth if the eurozone sovereign debt crisis spirals out of control.

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Today in the New Yorker John Cassidy asks “where is the new Keynes”?  Where, in other words, are the new ideas that have emerged from this historic economic crisis?  While there is nothing, he insists, comparable to a new Keynesianism, there has been a rediscovery of some “important ideas.”  The first:

1. Finance matters. This lesson might seem obvious to the man in the street, but many economists somehow managed to forget it. Two who didn’t were Hyman Minsky and Wynne Godley, both of who were associated with the Levy Institute for Economics at Bard College. Minksy’s now-famous “Financial Instability Hypothesis” can be found here, and one of Godley’s warnings about excessive household debt can be found here. (It is from 1999!)

Levy Institute President Dimitri Papadimitriou, as quoted in the Huffington Post in reference to revelations of the Fed’s $1.2 trillion in “secret loans” to banks and other companies.

Papadimitriou told The Huffington Post that the Fed issued many of its biggest loans during the Bush administration, and that “they didn’t appear to have any difficulty supporting the financial sector, but very much difficulty supporting the real sector, households.” …

“One would assume banks are too interconnected, you have to help all of them,” Papadimitriou said. “But if you take households in total, they are also all interconnected. They are also too big to fail.”

Research Associate Pavlina Tcherneva was interviewed by Ian Masters for his “Background Briefing” about S&P’s downgrade, the distressing new State of America’s Children report, and our misguided focus on debt rather than growth and jobs.

“If you take care of the economy, the debt and the deficits take care of themselves.”