University of Chicago Conference on the Financial Crisis (April 10, 2009), Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

[What follows is my reportage of the Panel 1 of the conference, which I attended. I took pretty thorough notes, but they are necessarily incomplete. I welcome corrections. In the coming week I will better type up my notes on Panels 2 and 3. I did not attend Panel 4. The impatient can find the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3 in my earlier stub post.]

Conference on the Financial Crisis
Co-sponsored by the Money, Markets and Consumption Workshop, Economica, and other organizations. Held at the Franke Institute in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, April 10, 2009. It was mighty.

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis

Moderator: Gary Herrigel (Department of Political Science, University of Chicago)

Douglas Diamond (University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business)

Diamond gave a slightly slow-moving but persuasive talk on financial crises in recent historical perspective. He argued that basically such crises are all the same, being caused by runs on short-term debt. Diamond unfortunately did not do a great job dumbing down his talk, so that my sense was that it was difficult for many people in the room to understand it well. (See below my account of the Q&A session at the end of the panel, where I give more detail on Diamond’s ideas. I took bad notes at the beginning and good notes at the end.)

Mark Mizruchi (Sociology Department, University of Michigan)

Mizruchi presented other, perhaps deeper causes

Financial Crisis Conference 2009, University of Chicago (transcript)

[Dear Reader: What follows is a transcript of the conference held today at the University of Chicago on the origins and implications of the current financial crisis. It was enormously stimulating. The panelists were twelve professors of economics, history, sociology and anthropology from the University of Chicago, Rutgers, the New School for Social Research, the University of Michigan, and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. NB This is the raw transcript; I will correct it for spelling and turn it into full Thucydidean prose in the next week or so.]

Panel 1: Sources of the Crisis
(see separate posting, where I have typed these up complete)

[What follow are the rough notes to Panels 2 and 3. I will turn them into prose soon.]

Panel 2: Crisis in Perspective: Historical and International Comparisons