Global Strategic Finance Initiative

Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of this committee for the honor of addressing you today.  Mr. Chairman, it is a tribute to your leadership that this roundtable is being convened in recognition of the centrality of economic and financial issues to American foreign policy. 

The inauguration of Barack Obama has been greeted by seemingly universal words of welcome and great expectations.

When future historians look back at the major shift in power that came in the fall of 2008, they will focus not just on the election of Barack Obama. Less than two weeks after Obama's historic election, finance ministers and central bank governors from the G-20 nations convened in Washington at the height of a global panic to discuss the future of global finance.

You know the financial crisis is bad when investment bankers are grumpy at Christmastime. That's because in investment banking, Christmastime is bonus time, and bonus time is what it's all about.

Bonus time is when all the deals you crafted and all the money you made for the bank gets toted up and you get your fair share.

Usually, in the world of Wall Street and its international counterparts, that "fair share" can reach 10 or 15 times your annual salary. That usually makes year-end a time of great joy in investment banking land.

Wall Street's and Washington's largest financial institutions are fighting for survival. The environment grows more hostile every day. Only those that evolve will prevail.

Leo Tilman, author of "Financial Darwinism", president of strategic advisory firm L.M. Tilman & Co. and former Chief Institutional Strategist at Bear Stearns, discusses the origins of the financial crisis and how to radically redesign the financial system to make it fit to survive.

One would be "hard-pressed to find a senator or congressman who wants to convene a hearing right now to make it harder for foreign capital to invest in the United States. There are bigger issues going on with the financial sector," said Doug Rediker, co-director of the Global Strategic Finance Initiative at the New America Foundation. Original article (subscription required)

Washington, DC -- President-elect Barack Obama has called for an ambitious program of public investment in infrastructure, including but not limited to short-term stimulus spending. Proposals for rebuilding America have received broad bipartisan support.

“The risk is that the US will have a different agenda than many if not all the other countries participating because many of them have already publicly announced that they are hoping to leave the summit with specific reforms, as well as specific plans for how to implement to those reforms,” says Heidi Crebo-Rediker, a former investment banker in Europe, and now a scholar at the New America Foundation. LINK

"There was this incredible liquidity" flooding onto Wall Street from oil exporters, China and other emerging nations during the years when revenues were booming earlier this decade, said Doug Rediker, co-director of the Global Strategic Finance Initiative at the New America Foundation.

A post-election discussion with the New America Foundation.