Lectures
"The US Financial Culture- a Giant Ponzi Game?"
Thursday, March 25, 2010, 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
It has become a journalistic commonplace to complain that the Meltdown of the financial market in the years 2007-2009 came as a surprise to almost everyone. The Crash, starting in the US financial system, was huge and sudden, unprecedented, and the financial, economic and social fall-out affected the whole world. Many ask, why didn't anybody see it coming? In fact, many economists and commentators did see it coming; many observers predicted a financial meltdown of just the sort that occurred – starting in housing, then picking up speed as overleveraged financial firms went under, then screeching to the bottom as unregulated derivatives and other new and under or un-collateralized securities collapsed. What are the business culture features of the US financial sector and has the American financial culture, as the movie by Michael Moore, "Capitalism: A Love Story" suggest, followed a giant Ponzi game? The talk will deal with the rise of such culture of finance, its crisis and the current efforts to reform it.
Willi Semmler, Professor at the Department of Economics at the The New School for Social Research, New York. He is author or co-author of more than 85 articles in international journals and is author or co-author of 11 books. He is member of the New York Academy of Sciences and has been a visitor of Columbia University and Stanford University and the Cepremap in Paris. He was Fortis-Bank Visiting Professor of the University of Antwerp, Visiting Professor at the University of Marseilles/Aix-en-Provence and has taught financial economics for the European Quantitative Economics Doctorate (QED) Program at universities in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany. He taught at the Bielefeld University and serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Empirical Macroeconomics, Bielefeld University, and has served to evaluate research projects for the National Science Foundations of Austria, Germany, Belgium, and the U.K. He has also lectured at the UNAM in Mexico City, the University of Orlean, France and Chuo University, Tokyo. He evaluates research projects for the European Union and he serves as a consultant for the World Bank and the ILO. He is on the scientific committee on annual conferences and workshops of economic societies. Recently the second edition of his book "Asset Prices, Booms and Recessions" (Springer Publishing House, 2006) was published. He is also co-editor of a book series at Springer Publishing House. He also co-edited a book on "Foundations of Credit Risk Analysis" (Elgar, 2007). Willi Semmler sporadically writes for the German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" and writes regular columns for the German Spiegel-on-line.
