Sheila Bair Lecture

Sheila Bair, 19th Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), will be speaking November 20th as part of Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School “Leaders and Legends” speaker series, scheduled for the 3rd Thursday of every month beginning in October 2008.

Johns Hopkins University recently consolidated various educational programs in the business domain and created the Carey Business School (named after the Trustee who created the endowment to do this).  Critical to the School’s success will be its ability to understand the realities of the “marketplace” and to integrate its activities with the real world. To that effect, the new Dean, Yash Gupta, has started a “Leaders and Legends” speaker series that will showcase prominent leaders and allow them to share their experience and thoughts on current, relevant topics and issues facing the global economy.

With the financial crisis, Bair has frequently been in the news and I suspect that she is the star of the “Leaders and Legends” series. What you might not know about Bair is that she is the author of two books that teach children about financial management: Rock, Brock, And the Savings Shock and Isabel’s Car Wash.

Before her appointment to the FDIC, Ms. Bair was the Dean’s Professor of Financial Regulatory Policy for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and she has had extensive experience in the financial industry.

Each 8am lecture (generally the 3rd Thursday of every month) is preceded by breakfast at 7:30am and takes place at the Renaissance Hotel at 202 E. Pratt Street, Baltimore. Tickets cost $35/person and may be purchased here.

Scheduled Dates
October 16, 2008 – General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joints Chief of Staff
November 20, 2008 – Sheila Bair, Chairman of the FDIC
December 18, 2008 – Mike Griffin, Administrator of NASA
January 15, 2009 – Ed Nusbaum, CEO of Grant Thornton
February 19, 2009 – Chris Inglis, Deputy Director, NSA
March 19, 2009 – Robert Stevens, Chairman, President and CEO of Lockheed Martin
April 16, 2009 – To be determined
May 14, 2009 (different week due to JHU Commencement) – To be determined
June 18, 2009 – To be determined

David Cay Johnston on the bailout bill

Whether you were for or against the bailout bill, these three essays by David Cay Johnston, written for The Plank (a blog for The New Republic) are worth reading:

• Who Benefits From the Bailout?
• Celebrating The Bailout Bill’s Failure–And Looking Ahead
• Time to Take a Step Back

I’ve been a long-time fan of Johnston’s investigative reporting for The New York Times and after recently reading two of his books — Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich – and Cheat Everybody Else (click here to read an excerpt of the book or click here to read my entries on this book) and Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill) (click here to read my entries on this book or click here to read excerpts and view the table of contents on the author’s website for this book) — I’ve come to trust Johnston as an advocate for the common person.

It seems to me that instead of doing concrete research into how the bailout bill might affect Americans and the global economy, most media sources were simply fear-mongering about the chaos that we were doomed to if the bailout failed to pass. I’m also disappointed that Congress appears not to have considered alternatives to the bailout bill initially proposed by Hank Paulson and instead just worked to improve it.

It couldn’t have hurt them to talk to some of the world’s economists who had differing opinions.

Absent that, we can trust Johnston to speak up for us.

The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs by Charles D. Ellis

Given all the talk about Goldman Sachs, I’d like to read this book I read about in the September 27, 2008 issue of The Economist: The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs by Charles D. Ellis.

All I know about the history of financial institutions I learned from reading Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance — fantastic well-researched book that was fun to read, even for someone who previously had no interest in banking/finance.

So i think it’d be good for me to learn more.

Here’s an excerpt from the review from The Economist:

A year that has seen the emasculation of America’s brokerages may not seem the ideal time to reflect on what made the erstwhile industry leader great. But, amid the torrent of negative news, Charles Ellis’s exhaustively researched history of Goldman Sachs paints a convincing picture of an institution that has got most of the important things right. It is an organisation America can be proud of, even as it is forced to reinvent itself to survive.

I’ll have to add this to my very long list of books to read.

And by the way, Ron Chernow’s books are all fantastic — I highly recommend Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and I’d also like to read Alexander Hamilton, The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family, and The Death of the Banker: The Decline and Fall of the Great Financial Dynasties and the Triumph of the Small Investor.