Tom Barry

Free education

I wanted to bring to your attention a rather great new site called Academic Earth. It aggregates lectures from various universities (Harvard, Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Yale - you may have heard of them).

They're pretty good quality (I mean the production values are pretty good; the academic quality is excellent) and you can watch them online or download them for your iPod.

I recommend starting with these lectures on the financial crisis.

Posted at 08:53 24 February 2009 by Tom Barry  |  Comments[2]

Fixing the Global Financial System

The G20 are coming to Washington this weekend to discuss how to fix the global financial and economic system.

Barry Eichengreen and Richard Baldwin over at VoxEU have put together a collection of essays from economists on what they should do. The panel agrees on four broad priorities for action:

• In the financial sector, leaders should act quickly, strengthening and coordinating the emergency measures to staunch the bleeding; 

• In the real sector, they should use fiscal stimulus to get the patient’s heart pumping again;

• They should act immediately to strengthen the ability of the IMF and other existing institutions to deal with the crisis in emerging markets;

• They should start thinking outside the box about longer term financial and monetary reforms; and 

• Do no harm.

These priorities mesh with Prime Minister Gordon Brown's plans for tackling the crisis. The immediate need has got to be restoring confidence in the financial sector and stopping contagion spreading.

Among commentators there is more disagreement about how to prevent a recurrence. I think that more or less everyone reckons that current global institutions are inadequate. Figuring out where to go next will be the challenge for leaders in Washington. Opinions range from a maximal model that would create new international bodies, to better informal co-ordination.

The answer's probably somewhere in between. We have some excellent institutions out there - they just need to be made to work better. The IMF houses some of the best economic brains on the planet, but it is not empowered to act or warn. The G7/8 and the Financial Stability Forum do a good job of getting some of the right people in the room, but they under-represent many of the world's emerging nations and they lack treaty-based legitimacy.

In his Mansion House speech on 10 November, Gordon Brown said:

In Washington this weekend, the British government will work with its G20 partners to establish consensus and begin to build a new Bretton-Woods with a reformed, modern, IMF that offers, by its surveillance of every economy, an early warning system and a crisis prevention mechanism for the whole world.

The G20 Summit will be the start of a long process, that will continue through the start of the next US Administration. But I'm hopeful that when the next economic and financial crisis hits (and there will always be another crisis), the world will be in better shape to deal with it.

Posted at 09:01 12 November 2008 by Tom Barry  |  Comments[0]