ABSTRACT: From steel mills to fashion houses, an increasing number of companies have recently pledged to align their greenhouse gas emissions with the reduction goals set in the Paris Agreement. Technical protocols like the Science Based Targets Initiative provide these private actors with detailed guidance on reduction targets, disclosures, and monitoring. As the sector that impacts all other sectors, finance has a central role to play in this emerging framework. In 2021, the UN launched a separate initiative titled Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero to reduce the “financed emissions” associated with financial institutions’ loans and securities. In this moment of institutional flux, the panel will discuss the potential of current efforts to achieve the pace required by the Paris Agreement (50% reductions by 2030, and 100% by 2050). The panel will address the day-to-day workings of financial alignment commitments, the risks of greenwashing, and the scalability of the existing framework to close the global emissions gap. Most fundamentally, the panel will ask whether a framework that ultimately rests on voluntary action by financial institutions is consistent with the sense of urgency and level of coordination required to avoid climate catastrophe.

ABSTRACT: Modern economies increasingly appear tilted in favor of asset holders. Credit flows most abundantly to those who can offer enough collateral to secure their loans; concerns about inflation have biased policymakers towards asset-driven growth to the detriment of social spending and wage-increasing measures; and an oligopolistic asset management sector exercises disproportionate power to decide firms’ fates and extract large shares of value. As asset ownership becomes more concentrated and financialization spreads throughout a wide array of industries, many fear that monetary and financial institutional arrangements will exacerbate the wide wealth gap already separating asset-holders from wage-earners. Against this backdrop, the roundtable will explore the relationship between today’s asset-rewarding economy and our alarming levels of income and wealth inequality. Drawing on different disciplines and perspectives, participants in this session will discuss what the ‘asset economy’ is and where it comes from, its connection to capitalism and financialization, its distributive consequences, the myriad mechanisms through which it may generate or exacerbate inequality, and, perhaps most importantly, what to do about it.

ABSTRACT: This roundtable focuses on innovative attempts to redesign credit as a medium that supports community development.  In particular, the Land Care Cooperative, BerkShares local currency program, and Boston Ujima Project all work with creative modes of obligation clearing that allow participants to share resources and knowledge. In effect, these new credit modes identify and maximize the mutual credit that can be mobilized locally.  At the same time, the modes reduce the amount of external debt, defined as funding offered at interest by the conventional banking system, that participants need to assume.  Panelists will explain their schemes, and a community development finance expert will comment on the commonalities and differences between the projects. Subsequent discussion aims to identify how local credit initiatives can or should connect to the larger monetary and credit system; whether local projects can be “scaled”; and how knowledge and design ideas like the ones in this roundtable can be supported and spread.

ABSTRACT: What could the Fed have done differently in 2020 (or 2008 for that matter) to make the distributive consequences of the relief it provided more equitable? Panelists will identify a problematic aspect of the Fed’s action, and then suggest a preferable intervention. The discussion aims to identify a menu of policy alternatives that would work within the existing hardwiring but push those parameters in new and constructive ways. We hope to explore how much (or little) latitude there is within those parameters, given political, institutional, or economic limitations.

In a globalized world, central banks in open economies cannot afford to ignore other monetary authorities’ policies. More recently, the aftermath of two global financial crises and their economic and geopolitical repercussions have once again put the international dimension of central banks’ operations under the spotlight. Should central banks coordinate their monetary tightening efforts and, if so, to what extent? How could their roles be shaped if the U.S. dollar’s hegemonic status as a global reserve currency erodes while other national currencies rise to prominence? What, if anything, could central banks around the world do as the threat of sovereign debt defaults looms larger over the stability of increasingly interconnected financial institutions? Participants in this session will address these and other timely questions as we rethink central banks’ position in international monetary and financial systems.

Since at least 2008, the Fed, Treasury and the FDIC have taken increasingly controversial steps to support the financial system, including following the recent failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Does this suggest that more far-reaching structural reforms are in order? Panelists will be asked what reforms they would suggest to make money a more “democratic medium” in this time of crisis and uncertainty.