Uncommon Knowledge Interview

A broad-ranging interview on economics and policy by Peter Robinson as part of the Hoover "Uncommmon Knowledge" series. Click above for youtube, or

· Hoover Institution: http://www.hoover.org/research/whats-wrong-american-economy

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/uncknowledge/status/823926553058775042

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UncKnowledge/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BPF8TnJgsBz/?taken-by=uncommon_knowledge_show

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spe619WX-Q4

· Bitly Link: http://hvr.co/2jqxNkp

The full transcript is available on the episode page at http://www.hoover.org/research/whats-wrong-american-economy.

Equity financed banking video

Video of my talk at the Minneapolis Fed's "Ending Too Big to Fail" symposium. A link to the video (youtube) in case you don't see the above embedded version. The event webpage, with links to the other talks and the agenda.  Summary: AM: Dodd Frank is a big failure, we need a big fix. PM: We'll get it to work with little fixes here and there. I posted the text of my talk earlier.

Is the Fed Pulling or Pushing?

I did a little interview with Mary Kissel of the Wall Street Journal, following up on thursday's oped. Mary is, as you can tell, a well-informed interviewer and asks some tough questions. She did a great job of pushing hard on the usual Wall Street wisdom about how the Fed, though it has not done anything but talk in years, is secretly behind every gyration of stock or housing prices.

The central point came to me hours later, as it usually does. Is the Fed in fact "holding down" interest rates? Is there some sort of natural market equilibrium that features higher rates now, but the Fed is pushing down rates? That's the conventional view, clearly expressed in Mary's questions.

Greece again

I read this morning's news of a deal -- we'll see how long it lasts -- with interest. Here's a video exchange with Rick Santelli on the subject on CNBC (I can't seem to get the embed to work, so you have to click the link.)

My main thought: what about the banks? The minute Greece reopens its banks, it's a fair bet that every person in Greece will immediately head to the bank and get every cent out. The banks' assets are largely Greek loans, which many aren't paying -- why pay a mortgage to a bank that's already closed and will probably be out of business soon anyway -- and Greek government debt; mostly Treasury bills that only roll over because banks hold them. They can't sell either, so the banks will instantly be out of cash.

The deal reported in today's papers really barely mentions that problem. But that is the problem of the hour.

Asset Pricing Summer School

I’m going to offer my online course “Asset Pricing” over the summer. The intent is a “summer school” for PhD students, either incoming or between the first year of foundation courses and the second year of specialized finance courses.

At least one university is going to use this more formally: Require completion of the class for their PhD students (either incoming or between first and second year,) and organize a TA and group meetings around the class. We have found that this sort of social organization helps a lot for students to get through online classes.

After Dodd-Frank

(Youtube link) A talk given at the Mercatus Center / CATO conference "After Dodd-Frank: The Future of Financial Markets." (The link has videos of the whole conference.) The talk is taken from the paper "Towards a Run-Free Financial System," which answers many objections you may have to claims in the talk. (Yes, I have plugged it before on the blog and will likely do again.)

The more I read about it, the more I think it's important to define what is not a problem, and can be left alone. If we have to solve housing subsidies, Fannie and Freddie, global imbalances, Wall Street greed, compensation, inequality, savings gluts, predatory lending, financial utilities, bankruptcy law, behavioral biases of equity managers, living wills, stress tests, capital ratios, Basel regulation, macroprudential bubble-detection and pricking, complexity of derivatives, exchange vs. otc trading, and so on and so on just to save ourselves from the next crisis, we might as well give up now.

Interviews

I did two interviews that blog readers might enjoy.


This is an interview with Jeff Garten at Yale, covering financial crises and reform/regulation efforts rather broadly. Source here. It's part of a very interesting series of interviews on the "future of global finance" with lots of superstars. I give Niall Ferguson the prize for most creative  author photo.

This one is a podcast interview on the ACA and how free-market health care can work, with Don Watkins at the Ayn Rand institute's "debt dialogues" series. If you follow the link you get several formats.

A Brief History of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis

Back in 2008, Gene Fama made a nice video for the American Finance Association on the history of the efficient markets hypothesis. The video is finally out on the new AFA youtube channel here. You may have to drag the cursor back to see the introduction, on which I did a pretty good job if I do say so myself.

The Big Question: Is there an alternative to Obamacare?

A health policy discussion with Booth colleagues Matthew Gentzkow and Matthew Notowidigdo.


The original is here at the Booth / Capital Ideas website. The other "big ideas" videos are really good.

My views expressed here are summed up a bit more eloquently in a recent WSJ Oped, here, and a longer essay "After the ACA" available here. More on health economics and insurance, including how individual insurance can protect against preexisting conditions on my webpage here, and by clicking the "health economics" link to the right.