De-Detour: FCIC Economists' Forum

I spent most of Friday at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission forum, which we are hosting at the American University Washington College of Law.  I am going back on Saturday morning.  The forum is open to the public, the papers are posted, and the proceedings are webcast live.  At a minimum, this is a pretty high-end conference, featuring some of the top names in the crisology business:  Brunnermeier, Geanakoplos, Gorton, Gourinchas, Jaffee, Kashyap, Kroszner, Lusardi and Mayer.  The presentations are quite accessible, reflecting the FCIC’s public inquiry mission. If it is any indication, a goodly number of my students came, stayed awhile, and seemed to leave happy.  Even where the underlying material is not new, I have found the exchanges among the panelists and the commissioners well worth tuning in for. A rare mix of economics and civics.

Comments

[mkamdar]

In the spirit of openness, it is unfortunate that the webcast is based on Microsoft Silverlight, an inconvenience for most Linux users. While Novell's Moonlight is an option for Linux users (http://www.go-mono.org/moonlight/), often there are compatibility issues.

[Ted K]

Well if this is accessible to those not only using Microsoft garbageware it should be a great thing. I like this site (CreditSlips) and I'm surprised it's not listed on more blogrolls. I'll go American U's webcast and cross my fingers it works.

I have a blog mostly about investing, but I focus quite a great deal on finance reform legislation (not too nitty-gritty just recent news) if anyone is interested.
http://grahambrokethemold.blogspot.com

[mt]

I clicked on the links. Thank you. I was disappointed that all the presentations I saw listed came from academics. It is like having a trial with only expert witnesses. Plus many of those academics have already expressed their views in columns or blogs and they are not really giving out new analysis or information. I would think it would be more useful to be gathering detailed financial information from the entities that failed and analyzing that, as opposed to rehashing ideological or ivory tower perspectives.