29th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies

May 5, 2021 Dear Colleague: Welcome to the 29th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the US and World Economies. This year’s virtual event marks the 30th anniversary of the conference established by Hyman Minsky in 1991, when significant concerns included the S&L and Latin American debt crises, US banks that were exposed with large positions, and the explosion in private sector debt. Thirty years later, the US and global economies are confronted with a viral pandemic that has caused a deep recession with unprecedented consequences.

This year’s conference focuses on the “Prospects and Challenges for the US and Europe in an Emerging Post-Pandemic Recovery,” exploring the increasing signs of possible financial instability triggered by the explosion of equity markets, the increasing stock of corporate debt, and rising house prices, while the US and European economies implement relaxed fiscal and monetary policies in an effort to restore their respective economies to their prepandemic trajectories.

The signs of the COVID-19 pandemic slowing down in many areas of the world notwithstanding, we are still observing the highest daily infection, hospitalization, and death rates. The increasing rates of inoculation will ultimately control, if not eradicate, the virus, but rebuilding the global economy will require a coordinated effort that would be aided by reforms to the international financial system. In this conference, we seek to identify the challenges in developing the crucial policies that will address and provide viable solutions to economic and social problems caused by the pandemic and assess whether the policies currently being implemented in the United States and Europe are up to the task.

We invite you to join in the discussion of the analytical framework developed in the presentations investigating these issues.

I hope you will enjoy the presentations and discussions that will follow. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

I look forward to seeing you again at future Levy Institute events.

Sincerely, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou President

Wednesday, May 5, 2021 9:15–9:30 a.m.

Welcome and Introduction Dimitri Papadimitriou, President, Levy Institute

9:30–10:30 a.m.

Speaker Charles Evans, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago MODERATOR: Binyamin Appelbaum, Editorial Board Member,

The New York Times

10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Session 1. PROSPECTS FOR REFORMING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM MODERATOR: Robert Huebscher, CEO, Advisor Perspectives SPEAKERS: Paolo Savona, Chairman, CONSOB Jan Kregel, Director of Research, Levy Institute Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor of Banking and Finance, London School of Economics 12:00–1:00 p.m.

Speaker Robert Barbera, Director, J.H.U. Center for Financial Economics;

Economics Department Fellow, The Johns Hopkins University

1:00–2:30 p.m.

Session 2. WHAT’S AHEAD FOR THE US ECONOMY? MODERATOR: Michael Stephens, Senior Editor, Levy Institute

SPEAKERS: Lakshman Achuthan, Cofounder, Economic Cycle Research Institute Michalis Nikiforos, Research Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor University of Geneva Frank Veneroso, President, Veneroso Associates, LLC

2:30–4:00 p.m.

Session 3. ECONOMIC POLICY FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION MODERATOR: David Henry, Reporter, Reuters SPEAKERS: Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of

Economic Policy, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the

Department of Economics at Harvard University Bruce Greenwald, Professor, Columbia Business School

L. Randall Wray, Senior Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, Bard College

Thursday, May 6, 2021 10:00–11:00 a.m.

Speaker Robert Kaplan, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas MODERATOR: Deborah Solomon, Economics Editor, The New York Times

11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Session 4. FINANCIAL GOVERNANCE AND REGULATION MODERATOR: Peter Coy, Economics Editor, Bloomberg SPEAKERS: Patricia McCoy, Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor, Boston College Law School Kathryn Judge, Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law, Columbia Law School Michael Greenberger, Professor, University of Maryland Law School 12:30–2:30 p.m.

Session 5. US FINANCIAL MARKET INSTABILITY

MODERATOR: Jeanna Smialek, New York Times SPEAKERS: Jan Hatzius, Chief Economist, Goldman Sachs Bruce Kasman, Managing Director and Global Head of Economic Research, J.P. Morgan James Paulsen, Chief Investment Strategist, The Leuthold Group, LLC

2:30–3:30 p.m.

Session 6. WHAT’S AHEAD FOR EUROPE? MODERATOR: Dimitri Papadimitriou, Levy Institute

Lex Hoogduin, Professor, Groningen University, the Netherlands; Founder, GloComNet Denis MacShane, Former Europe Minister, UK; Senior Advisor, Avisa Partners, Brussels Gennaro Zezza, Research Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, University of Cassino

Biographies Lakshman Achuthan is the cofounder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI). He also serves as the managing editor of ECRI-produced forecasting publications and coauthored Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy (with Anirvan Banerji; Crown Business, 2004).

Achuthan met his mentor, Geoffrey H. Moore, in 1990 and was immediately fascinated by Moore’s approach to studying business cycles. Together, with cofounder Anirvan Banerji, the three established ECRI in 1996. One of their recent articles is titled “Biden Boom Teed Up Under Trump” (CNN, April 5, 2019).

Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics for the editorial page of The New York Times and the author of The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society. He lives in Washington, DC. Robert J. Barbera has spent the past nine years teaching and doing research at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU). His research focuses on the nexus between finance and macroeconomics. Starting in 1982, he spent some 30 years as a Wall Street economist, with affiliations including Mount Lucas, Investment Technology Group, Lehman Brothers, and E. F. Hutton. Early in his career he served as an economist for US Senator Paul Tsongas and for the US Congressional Budget Office. He began his professional career as a lecturer at M.I.T. Barbera is currently the director of the JHU Center for Financial Economics and an economics department fellow. He is the author of The Cost of Capitalism: Understanding Market Mayhem and Stabilizing Our Economic Future (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Barbera holds a BA and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University.

As a JHU undergrad, he played on the varsity lacrosse team, and was an All-American on their 1974 Division I National Championship team.

Peter Coy is economics editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. He writes on a wide range of domestic and international issues, contributing to the magazine’s Remarks column, cover stories, news sections, and bloomberg.com.

Coy joined the predecessor publication, BusinessWeek, in 1989 as telecommunications editor.

He became technology editor in 1992, associate economics editor in 1997, and economics editor in 2001. He came to BusinessWeek from the Associated Press, where he worked from 1980 to 1989 in Albany, Rochester, and New York City. Previously Coy was a reporter for the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican.

Coy holds a BA in history from Cornell University.

Charles L. Evans has served as president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago since September 2007. In that capacity, he serves on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Federal Reserve System’s monetary policymaking body.

Before becoming president in September of 2007, Evans served as director of research and senior vice president, supervising the Bank’s research on monetary policy, banking, financial markets, and regional economic conditions. His personal research has focused on measuring the effects of monetary policy on US economic activity, inflation, and financial market prices and has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Evans is active in the civic community. He is a trustee at Rush University Medical Center, a director of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a member of the Economic Club of Chicago board of directors, and a member of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and Civic Consulting Alliance board. Evans has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the University of South Carolina. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Jason Furman is the Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy jointly at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He is also nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. This followed eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama, including serving as the 28th chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from August 2013 to January 2017, acting as both President Obama’s chief economist and a member of the cabinet. During this time Furman played a major role in most of the major economic policies of the Obama administration. Previously Furman held a variety of posts in public policy and research.

In public policy, Furman worked at both the Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council during the Clinton administration and at the World Bank. In research, Furman was a director of the Hamilton Project and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and also has served in visiting positions at various universities, including NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. Furman has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, technology policy, and domestic and international macroeconomics. In addition to articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is the editor of two books on economic policy. Furman holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Charles Goodhart was appointed to the Norman Sosnow Chair of Banking and Finance at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1985 until his retirement in 2002 when he became Emeritus Professor of Banking and Finance. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and awarded the CBE in 1997 for services to monetary economics. During 1986, he helped to found the Financial Markets Group at LSE. For the previous 17 years he served as a monetary economist at the Bank of England, becoming a chief adviser in 1980. Following his advice on overcoming the financial crisis in Hong Kong in 1983, he subsequently served on the HK Exchange Fund Advisory Committee until 1997. Later in 1997 he was appointed for three years, until May 2000, as one of the four independent outside members of the newly formed Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee. He became an economic consultant to Morgan Stanley in 2009 where he remained until he resigned at the age of 80 in 2016. It was during this period that he began work on the subject matter of his recent book, The Great Demographic Reversal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), with his colleague there, Manoj Pradhan. He has written widely on matters relating to monetary policy, especially central banking, and macroeconomics.

Charles is the author of Goodhart’s Law, stating “that any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”

Michael Greenberger is a law school professor at the University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law, where he teaches a seminar entitled “Futures, Options, and Derivatives.”

Professor Greenberger was actively involved in working with members of Congress on the passage of Dodd–Frank and in oversight proceedings concerning the implementation of that statute.

Under the sponsorship of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), Professor Greenberger published a paper entitled “Too Big to Fail U.S. Banks’ Regulatory Alchemy: Converting an Obscure Agency Footnote into an ‘At Will’ Nullification of Dodd–Frank’s Regulation of the Multi-Trillion Dollar Financial Swaps Market” (INET Working Paper, June 2018). A revision of that paper was published by the University of Maryland Carey School of Law’s Journal of Business and Technology.

Professor Greenberger was previously the director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) where he served under CFTC Chair Brooksley Born. In that capacity, he supervised exchange-traded futures and derivatives. He also served on the steering committee of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, and as a member of the International Organization of Securities Commission’s Hedge Fund Task Force. His and Ms. Born’s work during that period on the regulation of swaps was featured in the Peabody Award–winning Frontline documentary, “The Warning.”

Bruce C. N. Greenwald holds the Robert Heilbrunn Professorship of Finance and Asset Management at Columbia Business School and is the academic director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing. Described by The New York Times as “a guru to Wall Street’s gurus,” Greenwald is an authority on value investing, with additional expertise in productivity and the economics of information. Greenwald has been recognized for his outstanding teaching abilities. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Columbia University Presidential Teaching Award, which honors the best of Columbia’s teachers for maintaining the university’s longstanding reputation for educational excellence.

His classes are consistently oversubscribed, with more than 650 students taking his courses every year in subjects such as value investing, economics of strategic behavior, globalization of markets, and strategic management of media.

Jan Hatzius is head of the Global Investment Research Division and the firm’s chief economist.

He is a member of the Firmwide Client and Business Standards Committee. Previously, he was head of Global Economics and Markets Research. Hatzius joined Goldman Sachs in the Frankfurt office in 1997 and transferred to New York in 1999; he was named managing director in 2004 and partner in 2008. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he was a research officer at the London School of Economics. Hatzius is the number-one ranked economist in the annual Institutional Investor All-America Fixed-Income Research Team, a position he has held for the past nine years. He is a member of the economic advisory panels of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the Congressional Budget Office. Hatzius earned a D.Phil. in economics from Oxford University, as well as degrees from the University of WisconsinMadison and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

David P. Henry is a reporter at Reuters. He has covered finance, banks, and markets in New York since 1984 and has also worked for BusinessWeek, USA Today, Newsday, and Forbes. His first memory of encountering Hyman Minsky’s work was while writing a Wall Street column for USA Today as the dot-com bubble inflated. He won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2002 for accounting stories at BusinessWeek.

Lex Hoogduin is professor of complexity and uncertainty in financial markets and financial institutions at Groningen University, the Netherlands. He is also the founder of GloComNet, the network for social complexity and uncertainty (www.glocomnet.com). He is chairman of the supervisory board of CIR (Center for Integral Revalidation), chairman of the Dutch Payment Association, member of the supervisory board of Amsterdam Trade Bank and chair of its risk and compliance committee, chairman of the supervisory board of Wilgenhaege (asset management), and a member of the board of Inphykem (endowment fund for art,

culture, and science). Hoogduin is also a member of the investment advisory committees of the Ubbo Emmius Fund (Groningen University’s endowment fund) and KWF (Dutch NGO for cancer research).

In the period from 2012 through 2020 he was, among other positions, chairman of LCH Group, Ltd. and SA, and also a nonexecutive director of the London Stock Exchange Group (majority shareholder of LCH Group). In the first years of this period, he chaired the risk committees of LCH Ltd. and LCH SA. He spent several periods at the Dutch Central Bank, in the last period from 2009–11 as a member of the executive board. He was also head of the research department and monetary and economic policy department. From 1997–2001 Hoogduin was advisor to Wim Duisenberg, the first president of the European Central Bank (ECB). From 2005–9, he was chief economist of Robeco (an asset manager) and head of IRIS, the Robeco/Rabobank investment research company at that time.

Robert K. Huebscher is the founder and CEO of Advisor Perspectives. Huebscher founded Advisor Perspectives in 2007, following a 25-year career in the financial services and information technology industry. In 1982, he founded the Investment Software Division of Thomson Financial, and oversaw the introduction and development of its flagship product, PORTIA, currently the leading portfolio management system for buy side investors. In 1990 he founded Hub Data, a redistributor of market data and corporate action information. He sold Hub Data to Advent Software in 1998, and this business continues today as Advent Market Data. He was an officer of Advent until 2002. Beginning in 2003, he served as a consultant to a number of businesses in the wealth management industry.

Kathryn Judge is the Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.

Professor Judge is an expert on financial markets, financial regulation, and regulatory architecture. She is an editor of the Journal of Financial Regulation, a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute, and a member of the Financial Stability Task Force sponsored by the Brookings Institute and Chicago Booth. Prior to joining Columbia, Judge clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court.

Robert Steven Kaplan has served as the 13th president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas since September 8, 2015. He represents the Eleventh Federal Reserve District on the Federal Open Market Committee in the formulation of US monetary policy and oversees the 1,200 employees of the Dallas Fed. Kaplan was previously the Martin Marshall Professor of Management Practice and a senior associate dean at Harvard Business School.

He is the author of several books, including What You Really Need to Lead: The Power of Thinking and Acting Like an Owner; What You’re Really Meant To Do: A Road Map for Reaching Your Unique Potential; and What to Ask the Person in the Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential.

Prior to joining Harvard in 2006, Kaplan was vice chairman of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. with global responsibility for the firm’s Investment Banking and Investment Management Divisions. He became a partner in 1990 and served as cochairman of the firm’s Partnership Committee. He was also a member of the Management Committee. Following his 23-year career at Goldman Sachs, Kaplan became a senior director of the firm.

He serves as chairman of Project A.L.S. and cochairman of the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, a global venture philanthropy firm that invests in developing nonprofit enterprises dedicated to addressing social issues. He is also a board member of Harvard Medical School.

Kaplan previously served on the boards of State Street Corporation, Harvard Management Company, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. He was also a trustee of the Ford Foundation, cofounding board chair of the TEAK Fellowship, cofounder and chairman of Indaba Capital Management, LP, and chairman of the Investment Advisory Committee at Google, Inc. Kaplan was appointed by the governor of Kansas as a member of the Kansas Health Policy Authority Board.

Born and raised in Prairie Village, Kansas, Kaplan received a bachelor of science degree in business administration from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School.

Bruce Kasman is a managing director and the chief economist for J.P. Morgan. He serves as global head of economic research, where he is responsible for leading a team of thirty economists worldwide that set the firm’s economic and policy views. Kasman and his team integrate detailed individual-country analysis with a top-down approach that views the global economy as a whole. J.P. Morgan’s global economics team has consistently received high rankings in investor polls and was ranked number one in the Institutional Investor global fixed income poll in both 2019 and 2020. Kasman joined J.P. Morgan in 1994 and was head of European economic research from 1996 to 1999. Prior to J.P. Morgan, he was senior

international economist at Morgan Stanley. Kasman started his career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the International Research Department. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.

Jan Kregel is director of research at the Levy Economics Institute, director of the Levy Institute master’s program in economic theory and policy, and head of the Institute’s Monetary Policy and Financial Structure program. He also holds the position of professor of development finance at Tallinn University of Technology. In 2009, Kregel served as Rapporteur of the President of the UN General Assembly’s Commission on Reform of the International Financial System. He previously directed the Policy Analysis and Development Branch of the UN Financing for Development Office and was deputy secretary of the UN Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters. His major works include a series of books on economic theory, among them, Rate of Profit, Distribution and Growth: Two Views (1971); The Theory of Economic Growth (1972); Theory of Capital (1976); and Origini e sviluppo dei mercati finanziari (1996).

In 2011, Kregel was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, also known as the Lincean Academy, the oldest honorific scientific organization in the world. He studied under Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor at the University of Cambridge, and received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University under the chairmanship of Paul Davidson. He is a life fellow of the Royal Economic Society (UK) and an elected member of the Società Italiana degli Economisti.

In 2010, he was awarded the prestigious Veblen–Commons Award by the Association for Evolutionary Economics for his many contributions to the economics field.

Denis MacShane is recognized as one of Europe’s experts on the economic and geopolitical impact of Brexit and the evolution of European political processes. He was Minister for Europe in the Tony Blair government and writes regularly for UK, US, and European press on European political development. He has advised governments, businesses, and NGOs on European Union policy and processes, and has written several books on European politics.

He speaks French, German, and Spanish and travels regularly to European capitals to stay in close touch with his wide network of European political and journalist contacts. He first used the word “Brexit” in 2012 and in 2014 wrote a book, Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe (I. B. Tauris, 2015), that predicted the outcome of the 2016 UK referendum on Europe. His latest book, published in 2019, is called Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain (Bloomsbury) and argues the impact of Brexit on Britain and Europe will last many years.

He started life as BBC journalist and was the youngest-ever president of the National Union of Journalists. In 1975 he led the first and last strike by BBC journalists, which took BBC News off air for 24 hours.

Patricia A. McCoy is the Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor at Boston College Law School.

Her research interests focus on the nexus among financial services, consumer welfare, and systemic risk. In 2010–11, she was appointed the first Assistant Director of Mortgage Markets at the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, DC, where she oversaw all of the Bureau’s mortgage policy initiatives. She has also served on the Consumer Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Board and the Advisory Council on Economic Inclusion of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Currently, she sits on the Federal Reserve’s Insurance Policy Advisory Council.

Professor McCoy received her J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and served as editor-in-chief of the Industrial Relations Law Journal. Later, she clerked for the late Hon. Robert S. Vance on the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Before entering academe, Professor McCoy was a partner at the law firm of Mayer, Brown in Washington, DC. Later, she spent the 2002–3 school year as a visiting scholar at the MIT economics department. Professor McCoy has three books to her credit, including The Subprime Virus, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2011 and written with Kathleen C. Engel.

Michalis Nikiforos is an associate professor of political economy in the Department of History, Economics and Society of the University of Geneva and a research scholar at the Levy Institute. His research interests include macroeconomic theory and policy, the relation between the distribution of income and economic growth, and political and economic fluctuations, as well as the political economy of the eurozone.

At the Levy Institute, he works on their stock-flow consistent macroeconomic model for the US economy; he contributed to the construction of a similar model for Greece. He is the coauthor of several policy reports on the prospects for US and European economies. Nikiforos holds a BA in economics and an M.Sc. in economic theory from the Athens University of Economics and Business, and an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research.

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou is president of the Levy Institute, and Jerome Levy Professor of Economics and executive vice president emeritus at Bard College. He served as Minister of Economy and Development for the Hellenic Republic from 2016 to 2018. He has testified on a number of occasions in hearings of Senate and House of Representatives Committees of the US Congress, was vice-chairman of the Trade Deficit Review Commission of the US Congress, and was a member of the Competitiveness Policy Council’s Subcouncil on Capital Allocation. He was a distinguished scholar at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (PRC) in fall 2002. Papadimitriou has edited and contributed to 13 books published by Palgrave Macmillan, Edward Elgar, and McGraw-Hill, and is a member of the editorial boards of

the Journal of Economic Analysis, Challenge, and the Bulletin of Political Economy. He is a graduate of Columbia University and received a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research.

Papadimitriou’s research includes financial structure reform, fiscal and monetary policy, community development banking, employment policy, and distribution of income, wealth, and well-being. He heads the Levy Institute’s macroeconomic modeling team studying and simulating the US and world economies. In addition, he has authored or coauthored many articles in academic journals and Levy Institute publications relating to Federal Reserve policy, fiscal policy, financial structure and stability, employment growth, and Social Security reform.

In 2008, he was instrumental in the republication of Hyman P. Minsky’s seminal Stabilizing an Unstable Economy and John Maynard Keynes by McGraw-Hill.

James Paulsen is chief investment strategist of The Leuthold Group, LLC. He is a member of the investment committee, authors market, and economic commentary, and works with the Leuthold investment team in serving institutional, financial advisor, and investment professional clients. He is the author of a long-running newsletter published and distributed alongside Leuthold’s premier monthly research product, Perception for the Professional.

Paulsen has been an investment industry professional since 1983, most recently as chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management where he worked for 20 years. Prior to that, he was the senior managing director and chief investment strategist for Investors Management Group in Des Moines, Iowa. He also served as president of SCI Capital Management in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For more than 30 years, Paulsen has published commentary assessing economic and market trends. He is nationally recognized for his views on the economy, frequently appears on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, and is invited to speaking engagements across the country. He has been named a top economic forecaster by Business Week, and Money Magazine called his newsletter one of “101 Things Every Investor Should Know.” Paulsen earned a bachelor’s degree and doctoral degree in economics from Iowa State University.

Paolo Savona is chairman of CONSOB (Companies and Stock Exchange Commission of Italy) and emeritus professor of political economy at the LUISS–Guido Carli University, Rome. He graduated cum laude in economics and began his career at the Bank of Italy (1963–76) where he became the research department’s director of the financial market office.

He undertook special studies of monetary economics and econometrics at MIT under the tutorship of Charles P. Kindleberger and Franco Modigliani. He also carried out research under Franck De Leeuw at the Board of Governor’s Special Studies Section at the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC.

In 1976, Savona won a national competition to teach political economy as a full professor in the Italian universities. He is one of the founders of the LUISS University in Rome and of the Open Economy Review. His various public and private sector positions include chairman of the Sardinian Investment Banks (1980–89), minister for Industry, Commerce and Handicraft under Premier Ciampi (1993–94) and minister for European Affairs under Premier Conte (2018–19), as well as other top positions in several leading private Italian companies and banks (Capitalia and Unicredit-Banco di Roma).

He is author of the first econometric model of the Italian economy (M1B1) and of many publications on monetary and financial economics, the working of eurodollars, the macroeconomic effects of derivatives contracts, and the impact of the structural differences in productivity in the working of the eurosystem. Savona’s most recent book in English is Democracy, State and Market. Irreconcilability or Equilibration between Institutions? (Cambridge Publishing, 2019).

Jeanna Smialek reports on the Federal Reserve and economy at The New York Times and is writing a book (Knopf, forthcoming) on how the Fed has evolved in the 21st century. She previously covered central banking at Bloomberg News.

Deborah B. Solomon is economics editor in the Washington, DC bureau of The New York Times where she oversees a team of reporters covering economic policy issues including taxes, trade, Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and financial regulation. She is also a contributor to special sections at The New York Times.

Prior to joining The Times Solomon was a director at Brunswick Group in Washington, where she provided strategic advice to senior executives on crisis situations, litigation, and regulatory matters.

From 2000 to 2015, Solomon was an editor and reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She most recently oversaw the financial regulatory and law enforcement teams as a news editor in the paper’s Washington bureau. As a reporter, Solomon led The Journal’s coverage of Washington’s response to the 2008 financial crisis and was a finalist, along with several colleagues, for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. She was also part of a team that won the 2009 Gerald Loeb Award for “The Day That Changed Wall Street.”

In 2003, Solomon was a member of a team of Wall Street Journal reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for the paper’s coverage of the WorldCom scandal, as well as a 2003 Gerald Loeb Award.

Solomon has worked at a range of media outlets, including Bloomberg View, USA Today, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

L. Randall Wray is a senior scholar at the Levy Institute and professor of economics at Bard College. His current research focuses on providing a critique of orthodox monetary theory and policy, and the development of an alternative approach. He also publishes extensively in the areas of full employment policy and, more generally, fiscal policy. With President Papadimitriou, he is working to publish, or republish, the work of the late Hyman P. Minsky, and is using Minsky’s approach to analyze the current global financial crisis.

Wray is the author of Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies: The Endogenous Money Approach (Edward Elgar, 1990), Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Edward Elgar, 1998), The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism: Minsky’s Half Century from World War Two to the Great Recession (with É. Tymoigne; Routledge, 2013), Modern Money Theory: A Primer on Macroeconomics for Sovereign Monetary Systems (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; 2nd rev. ed., 2015), Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist (Princeton University Press, 2016), Macroeconomics (with William Mitchell and Martin Watts; Red Globe Press, 2019), and A Great Leap Forward: Heterodox Economic Policy for the 21st Century (Academic Press, 2020). He is also coeditor of, and a contributor to, Money, Financial Instability, and Stabilization Policy (Edward Elgar, 2006) and Keynes for the 21st Century: The Continuing Relevance of The General Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

Wray taught at the University of Missouri–Kansas City from 1999 to 2016 and at the University of Denver from 1987 to 1999, and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris and Rome (La Sapienza). He holds a BA from the University of the Pacific and an MA and a Ph.D. from Washington University, where he was a student of Minsky. He has recently completed a Fulbright Specialist Grant at the Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia.

Frank Veneroso founded Veneroso Associates in 1995. Veneroso Associates has long provided global investment strategy to money managers including hedge funds, long only global investment funds, and sovereign wealth funds and continues to do so.

From the late 1990s to recently Veneroso was a global investment strategist for Dresdner Asset Management, Allianz, and Allianz Global Investors. Veneroso served from 1992 to 1994 as partner in charge of global investment policy formulation at Omega, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Prior to that he provided investment strategy to the world’s largest private equity firm. In 1988 he was an advisor to PHIBRO on commodities, then the leading global commodity trading firm.

In prior years Veneroso also wore a public policy hat. He worked as a financial sector policy analyst and advisor to several of the major multinational agencies responsible for economic development as well as to governments of emerging economies, either through these agencies or directly. He also contributed to policy papers on agricultural credit and financial instability for these institutions.

Veneroso’s policy clients included the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the US State Department, and the Organization of American States. He advised on capital market development in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Korea, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, Thailand, UAE, and Venezuela. He was an on-the-ground advisor on financial crisis in Argentina, Chile, Korea, and Mexico, and was asked to evaluate stock market bubble conditions in Mexico, Bahrain, and the UAE. In his public policy role Veneroso published numerous papers on finance and development and financial instability issues. After the Asian financial crisis he coauthored several papers and articles on emerging Asian financial structure with Robert Wade. In the course of his business activities he published a book on the gold market in 1998 when gold was $282 an ounce and was perhaps the most discredited of all asset classes. Applying classic principles of microeconomics to the gold market, he forecasted a gold price of $1,200 in the year 2010. The price of gold reached $1,200 for the first time ever in 2010.

Veneroso graduated cum laude from Harvard University.

Gennaro Zezza is a research scholar at the Levy Institute and an associate professor of economics at the University of Cassino, Italy. He is a member of the Institute’s MacroModeling Team and a coauthor of its Strategic Analysis reports. Zezza worked with the late Levy Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley in the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Italy, as well as at the Levy Institute, specializing in applied heterodox macroeconometric models. His other teaching and research interests include international monetary economics and applied econometrics. His recent publications include: “Wynne Godley,” in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; coauthored with A. Shipman); “On the design of empirical stock-flow-consistent models,” in European Journal of Economics and Economic Policy: Intervention, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2019; coauthored with F. Zezza); and “Stock-flow-consistent macroeconomic models: A survey,” in Journal of Economic Surveys, Vol. 31, No. 5 (2017; coauthored with M. Nikiforos). Zezza holds a degree in economics from the University of Naples, Italy.

Recent Institute Publications Summary, Vol. 30, Issue 1 | May 2021 Strategic Analysis | December 2020 What’s Ahead for the Greek Economy?

Strategic Analysis | October 2020 When Will Italy Recover?

Strategic Analysis | January 2020 Prospects and Challenges for the US Economy: 2020 and Beyond One-Pager No. 66 | April 2021 Anatomy of a Stock Market Bubble Working Paper No. 987 | March 2021 The Souk Al-Manakh: The Anatomy of a Pure Price-Chasing Bubble One-Pager No. 65 | February 2021 COVID Relief and the Inflation Warriors Working Paper No. 985 | February 2021 Has Japan Been Following Modern Money Theory Without Recognizing It? No! And Yes. Public Policy Brief No. 154 | February 2021 Another Bretton Woods Reform Moment: Let Us Look Seriously at the Clearing Union Working Paper No. 982 | January 2021 The Economic Problem: From Barter to Commodity Money to Electronic Money Policy Note 2021/1 | January 2021 Keynes’s Clearing Union Is Alive and Well and Living in Your Mobile Phone Working Paper No. 979 | November 2020 Is It Time to Eliminate Federal Corporate Income Taxes?

Policy Note 2020/6 | October 2020 Alternative Macro Policy Response for a Pandemic Recession Working Paper No. 961 | July 2020 The “Kansas City” Approach to Modern Money Theory Public Policy Brief No. 151 | June 2020 Crisis, Austerity, and Fiscal Expenditure in Greece: Recent Experience and Future Prospects in the Post-COVID-19 Era Public Policy Brief No. 150 | June 2020 The Impact of Technological Innovations on Money and Financial Markets Working Paper No. 958 | June 2020 A Stock-Flow Consistent Quarterly Model of the Italian Economy One-Pager No. 63 | April 2020 Are We All MMTers Now? Not so Fast Policy Note 2020/1 | March 2020 When Two Minskyan Processes Meet a Large Shock: The Economic Implications of the Pandemic One-Pager No. 62 | March 2020 The Economic Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic One-Pager No. 61 | March 2020 A Global Slowdown Will Test US Corporate Fragility Public Policy Brief No. 148 | January 2020 Can We Afford the Green New Deal?