Monday, January 29 · 1:30 – 3pm EST

From the Columbia Center for Political Economy’s Money and Finance Idea Lab:

In recent years, the old orthodoxy of a clear separation between markets and states has given way to state policies that seek to leave decision making with private actors with the state nudging, insuring (ex ante), or backstopping (ex post) them by absorbing the risk private actors are unwilling or unable to take. Examples include private-public partnership (PPPs), environmental policies to encourage investments in green technologies, and monetary policies aimed at crisis prevention. These public policies have earned the label “de–risking”, a term that creates the illusion of a win-win situation, in which efficient markets do their bidding with the state only lending a helping hand. Yet, risk cannot be purged from them but inevitably is shifted to others. This session explores the backstopping policies the leading central banks have developed since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and their effects on the structure of financial markets and the distribution of wealth.

Discussants: Daniela Gabor and Martín Guzmán

Daniela Gabor is Professor of Economics and Macrofinance as UWE Bristol (UK) and currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University. Her research includes critical central banking, collateral intermediation, shadow banking, IMF, capital controls, transnational banking.

Martín Guzmán is Professor of Economics at Columbia University (SIPA) and the former Minister of Economy of the Republic of Argentina. His research focuses on the emergence, propagation, and resolution of macroeconomic disequilibria, monetary economics, and economic development.

This exciting talk is the last of a four-part series of seminars on the “Political Economy of Liquidity” organized by the Columbia Center for Political Economy’s Money and Finance Idea Lab.  Registrations, as well as additional information on the series, are available here. For more information on the Center for Political Economy, including upcoming events, please visit the Center’s website.