We’ve all been affected by the recent global financial crisis in one way or another, with the collapse of financial institutions, bank bailouts, and stock market crashes, as well as high unemployment, evictions, and home foreclosures in the United States and elsewhere.
Wish you knew more about the larger context? Wonder what’s next? Learn more about what led to the crisis, what’s currently happening, and how we might move forward from experts from the Federal Reserve, Standard & Poor’s, The Washington Post, and academia at Grinnell College’s Global Financial Crisis symposium Feb. 21-23.
Sarah Purcell — director of the Rosenfield Program in Public Affairs, International Relations and Human Rights, the symposium sponsor — says the symposium topic continues to be of great interest and concern, “as our students look for jobs, in an election year, and as the intensity evolves from day to day.
“The global finance issue touches all three of our program areas ― public affairs, international relations, and human rights ― and we are very fortunate to have experts joining us who can address issues from all these perspectives.,” Purcell adds.
The symposium draws together different expertise and analysis to put the current the global dimensions of the crisis in context. “It’s a particularly interesting time,” Purcell says, pointing to political changes like the protests in Greece and the Occupy movement, differences in economic recovery between nations, and policy issues.
Symposium activities include:
- John Chambers ’77, managing director of Standard & Poor’s and chair of its sovereign rating committee, presenting “Dislocations in the Euroarea,” which opens the symposium. He will argue that external imbalances are as important as fiscal imbalances in the Eurozone and examine implications for the global economy. (Chambers will also share how an English and philosophy major landed a job in finance in a special session for Grinnell students.)
- Steven Pearlstein, business and economics columnist for The Washington Post, giving the Scholars’ Convocation “The Crisis is Over. Now Comes the Hard Part.” Pearlstein received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for commentary that anticipated and interpreted the recession. He is also the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University.
- A screening of Inside Job, an Academy Award-winning documentary about the 2008 global economic crisis with interviews from financial insiders in the United States, China, England, France, Iceland, and Singapore, co-sponsored by the campus Cultural Films Committee.
- Mark Copelovitch’s “Picking Up (and Rearranging) the Pieces: Global Financial Governance After the Great Recession.” Copelovitch, assistant professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin, teaches courses about the international political economy and in 2010 published a book on the International Monetary Fund.
- Federal Reserve economist Elizabeth Laderman’80 closing the symposium with “The Financial Crisis and Lending in Low-Income Neighborhoods.” Laderman works for the Federal Reserve’s San Francisco region.
With the exception of the student session with Chambers, all events are open to the public. See “Rosenfield Program to sponsor global financial crisis symposium Feb. 21-23” for more details.
