Lessons to Be Learned from the Financial Crisis: Undoing Deregulation of the Financial Sector. Suggestions for a New Set-up

Christen Sørensen, former Chairman of the Economic Council of Denmark

"Rescuing Civilization From The Brink"
International Schiller Institute conference
Rüsselsheim, Germany
July 2-3, 2011
http://schiller-institut.de/seiten/2011/konferenz-zivilisation-retten.html

TRANSCRIPT:

Thank you. I think my presentation will be very good after yours, because I appreciate many of the points you made. I will mostly review the "Angelides Report," which is also called the "Financial Crisis Inquiry Report." It was a Congressional report made by ten members, six Democrats and four Republicans. It has more than 600 pages, and more than 6,000 footnotes.

It contains a lot of information which I think is very good to have in mind when we are discussing "What next?" I have, in fact, written 60 pages about it, so, at least myself, I will claim that I know quite a lot about it. The report is a little special because it is mostly based on interviews, and not as much on statistical data analysis, as one would maybe suppose, and it's also very important to notice that it only described how the crisis developed. There are no exact suggestions about what you should do next. But, of course, if you read the report, it's very difficult not to get some impression about what to do, and that's good.

My analysis of this report, I think it's fair to say, is from a traditional point of view of an economist, even thought I have a critical point of view of the financial sector, I will say, as we already have heard. I think you can learn a lot from this report. One of the things is that you should always pursue a decent public policy, and you cannot get public services, unless you are ready to pay for them, and I think that is very important. . ...

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