A panel discussion among Harvard faculty financial experts brought a variety of perspectives — but not always agreement — on the causes, consequences, and answers for righting the listing US economy. Check out the video, or read a summary from Harvard Magazine.
Dramatis personae:
Drew Faust, President, Harvard University. “We have witnessed an unfolding financial crisis without precedent in most of our lifetimes.”
Jay Light, Dean, Harvard Business School. “In the long run what we need is a new regulatory structure, because it is very clear that the old structure of Wall Street is gone; it’s not going to return.”
Robert Kaplan, HBS professor of management practice and former Goldman Sachs exec. “While this is a financial crisis, it is also symptomatic of a another very deep issue, which is a severely weakened middle class in the United States.
Elizabeth Warren, Gottlieb professor of law. “What the bailout is doing is trying to support a whole market, and I thought I learned from the market guys that you can’t do that.”
Greg Mankiw, Beren professor of economics. “The basic problem facing the financial system is that lots of people made very big bets that housing prices could not fall 20 percent.”
Kenneth Rogoff, Cabot professor of public policy. “The financial sector … is too big, it is not sustainable, it needs to shrink.”
Robert Merton, McArthur University Professor and Nobel Prize winner for Economics. “We can’t lose sight of the fact there has been real wealth loss, loss not offset by someone else’s gain.”
