EWGET 2010, Special Session

THE CURRENT FINANCIAL CRISIS

Friday, June 11, 10:00 - 13:30

Cracow University of Economics, Sports Building, room 9, 2^nd floor
Rakowicka 27, Cracow

Year 2008 will undoubtedly go into history books as the time of global financial crisis. Stock markets across the world plummeted down in a way not seen since the Great Depression. Governments and central banks across the world engaged in an unprecedented wave of bailouts of troubled financial institutions. Most of the industrialized countries went into recession. Poland has been one of the very few exceptions as it recorded positive growth in 2008 and 2009.

The focus of the debate among economists around the world is shifting now to questions of how to avoid such crises in the future, how to reform and regulate the financial sector, and how to assure greater stability of the global banking system.

The Special Session of the XIX European Workshop on General Equilibrium Theory will contribute to this debate with presentations by three distinguished speakers and an open discussion.

Program

9:00 - 10:00 - Registration

10:00 - 10:20 - Opening Remarks, President of the NBP, Chairperson of the PFSA (KNF)
                    Chair of the session: prof. Jan Werner

10:20 - 11:20 - Edward Prescott, 2004 Nobel Laureate
                 (Arizona State University and Federal Bank, Minneapolis)
                 Current Financial Crisis and the Polish and US Economies [slides]

11:20 - 11:40 - Coffee break

11:40 - 12:25 - Xavier Freixas (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
                   Post-Crisis challenges to financial regulation [slides]

12:25 - 13:10 - Dimitrios Tsomocos (Oxford University)
                   A Fremawork for Financial Stability Analysis: Contagion and Policy Measures [slides]

13:10 - 13:30 - Discussion

Speakers

	Edward C. Prescott is W. P. Carey Professor of Economics at the Arizona State University in Phoenix and Senior Monetary Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He is an Elected Member of the U.S. National Academy of Science and the recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics (joint with Finn Kydland), "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles".
	Xavier Freixas is Professor of Economics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. He is Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), past president of the European Finance Association and current president of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) Risk Based Regulation Program. He is the author (with Jean-Charles Rochet) of the influential textbook Microeconomics of Banking (MIT Press).
	Dimitrios Tsomocos is Professor of Economics at the Said Business School of the University of Oxford. He is Research Associate at the Financial Markets Group at the LSE and co-editor of volumes Financial Stability and Financial Regulation and Supervision (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010).