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Anat Admati interview with EconTalk

April 10, 2013 by

Earlier this week Anat Admati, coauthor of The Bankers’ New Clothes, appeared on EconTalk with Russ Roberts to discuss the book. Hear the full interview here.

Anat Admati of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her new book (co-authored with Martin Hellwig), The Bankers’ New Clothes. Admati argues that the best way to reduce the fragility of the banking system is to increase capital requirements–that is, require banks to finance their activities with a greater proportion of equity rather than debt. She explains how debt magnifies returns and losses while making each bank more fragile. Despite claims to the contrary, she argues that the costs of reducing debt are relatively small for society as a whole while the benefits are substantial.

 

Filed Under: Banking, Economics, Interview, Twitter

Why Our Banking System is Broken–and the Reforms Needed to Fix It

March 15, 2013 by

j9929[1]What is wrong with today’s banking system? The past few years have shown that risks in banking can impose significant costs on the economy. Many claim, however, that a safer banking system would require sacrificing lending and economic growth. The Bankers’ New Clothes examines this claim and the narratives used by bankers, politicians, and regulators to rationalize the lack of reform, exposing them as invalid. Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig argue we can have a safer and healthier banking system without sacrificing any of the benefits of the system, and at essentially no cost to society.

Learn more about it from Anat Admati’s interview from NPR’s Morning Edition:
http://n.pr/YwxWQK
Anat Admati argues that banks carry too much debt and have too little equity.

We invite you to read a book excerpt at npr.org at:
http://n.pr/16xGA8Q

The Bankers’ New Clothes:
What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It
by Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig

“Crucial . . .”–Jim Surowiecki, NewYorker.com

“Ms. Admati and Mr. Hellwig, top-notch academic financial economists, do understand the complexities of banking, and they helpfully slice through the bankers’ self-serving nonsense. Demolishing these fallacies is the central point of The Bankers’ New Clothes.”–John Cochrane, Wall Street Journal

We also invite you to try your luck and enter for a chance to win a copy of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking & What to Do about It at Goodreads:
http://bit.ly/ZNAI66

Filed Under: Banking, Book Giveaway, Economics, Finance, Political Science and International Relations, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,

Stanford finance prof Anat Admati discusses her new book, with Martin Hellwig, THE BANKERS’ NEW CLOTHES

January 15, 2013 by

Stanford finance and economics professor Anat Admati discusses her new book, with Martin Hellwig, THE BANKERS’ NEW CLOTHES: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, out in March, with the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Follow Professor Admati on her popular Twitter feed @anatadmati

Filed Under: Banking, Business, Economics, Finance, Interview, Pod/Vodcast, Twitter

New Economics and Finance Catalog!

January 2, 2013 by

We invite you to browse and download our new economics and finance catalog!
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/econ13.pdf

Of particular interest are some of our forthcoming titles including Benn Steil’s remarkable The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, Ben S. Bernanke’s insightful The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis, and Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig’s engaging and accessible The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It. Also note Justin Yifu Lin’s The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off. Interwoven with insights, observations, and stories from Lin’s travels as chief economist of the World Bank and his reflections on China’s rise, this book provides a road map and hope for those countries engaged in their own quest for prosperity.

Our catalog also exhibits critical textbooks including David M. Kreps’ rigorous Microeconomic Foundations I: Choice and Competitive Markets, Steven Tadelis’ comprehensive Game Theory: An Introduction, Ariel Rubinstein’s essential second edition Lecture Notes in Microeconomic Theory: The Economic Agent, and Michael Wickens’ superior second edition Macroeconomic Theory: A Dynamic General Equilibrium Approach.

If you’re interested in hearing more about our economics and finance titles, sign up with ease here: http://press.princeton.edu/subscribe/ Your email address will remain confidential!

We’ll see everyone at the meeting of the Allied Social Science Associations January 4-6 in San Diego, CA. Come visit us at booth 308! Be sure to stop by Saturday, January 5 at 1:00 p.m. for a book signing with Justin Yifu Lin, author of The Quest for Prosperity: How Developing Economies Can Take Off.

Filed Under: Banking, Economics, Finance, New Catalog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Paul Seabright “On Lying, Risk-Taking and the Implosion of the Euro” – The Princeton in Europe annual lecture

April 2, 2012 by

The launch of the Euro was a promise of prosperity made by Europe’s political élites to the citizens of the Euro area. But it has gone badly and dangerously wrong. Why? Much has been written about the causes of the Euro crisis and much ink spilt on trying to assign blame among the active participants in the drama: financiers, politicians, regulators, central bankers.

In this lecture Paul Seabright asks a different question: why did the rest of us play along? The active participants needed our money, our bank deposits, our votes – our trust, in short – in order to construct the Euro project. Trust in the project, like trust in the financial system and in many of the projects of modern democracy, required us to deploy psychological capacities that proved quite inadequate to the task.

Behavioural economics and neuroscience are starting to illuminate just why we have such difficulty evaluating complex financial promises like those made by the founders of the Euro project. In particular we have an evolved tendency to deal in dichotomies – such as risk/safety and truth/lies – that are quite unsuited to the continuous gradations of the modern economic landscape. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from neuroscientific experiments to air accident reports, Seabright brings home to us how much our collective illusions contributed to a major financial disaster with potentially serious consequences for democracy in Europe.

Paul Seabright is professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics. He has been a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, and Churchill College, University of Cambridge. ‘The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Revised Edition) was published by Princeton in 2010 and his new book ‘The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present’ will be published on 14 May 2012.

The lecture takes place on 18 April 2012 in the Great Hall at Goodenough College from 6.30pm.

For further information, or to register for the event, please contact princeton_publicity@pupress.co.uk.

Filed Under: Banking, Economics, Events, Finance, PUP Europe, Twitter Tagged With:

Excerpt series of Robert Shiller’s FINANCE AND THE GOOD SOCIETY this week on Bloomberg View

March 6, 2012 by

A series of excerpts from FINANCE AND THE GOOD SOCIETY, the new book from economist and New York Times Economic Scene columnist Robert J. Shiller, is running this week on Bloomberg View.  Yesterday’s piece, “Walt Whitman, First Artist of Finance,” is already generating quite a discussion and today’s “Finance Isn’t as Amoral as It Seems,” already is sure to continue .  Stay tuned thoughout the week for more slices from the book.

Walt Whitman, First Artist of Finance
One of the myths surrounding economic inequality in our society is that high incomes are often the result of selfishness and narrow-mindedness, rather than idealism and humanity. We tend to think that those in careers other than our own are fundamentally different kinds of people.

Personality and character differences are, indeed, somewhat associated with occupation. But we tend to attribute the behavior of others to personality differences far more often than is warranted.

We tend to think of philosophers, artists or poets as the polar opposite of chief executive officers, bankers or businesspeople. But the idea that those involved in business have personalities fundamentally different from those in other walks of life is belied by the fact that many often combine or switch careers. Consider a few examples.

Walt Whitman is one of our most revered poets, and his poetry is among the most transcendent. But he could not ignore more material concerns; he had to make a living. To do so, he turned to fiction — more marketable than poetry — and made his name with a commercial novel called “Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate: A Tale of the Times”….

Filed Under: Banking, Business, Economics, Finance, In the News, Twitter