IMF Conference

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Registration and Continental Breakfast

Welcoming Remarks

Christine Lagarde

Born in Paris in 1956, Christine Lagarde completed high school in Le Havre and attended Holton Arms School in Bethesda (Maryland, USA). She then graduated from law school at University Paris X, and obtained a Master’s degree from the Political Science Institute in Aix en Provence.

After being admitted as a lawyer to the Paris Bar, Christine Lagarde joined the international law firm of Baker & McKenzie as an associate, specializing in Labor, Anti-trust, and Mergers & Acquisitions. A member of the Executive Committee of the Firm in 1995, Christine Lagarde became the Chairman of the Global Executive Committee of Baker & McKenzie in 1999, and subsequently Chairman of the Global Strategic Committee in 2004.

Christine Lagarde joined the French government in June 2005 as Minister for Foreign Trade. After a brief stint as Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, in June 2007 she became the first woman to hold the post of Finance and Economy Minister of a G-7 country. From July to December 2008, she also chaired the ECOFIN Council, which brings together Economics and Finance Ministers of the European Union.

As a member of the G-20, Christine Lagarde was involved in the Group's management of the financial crisis, helping to foster international policies related to financial supervision and regulation and to strengthen global economic governance. As Chairman of the G-20 when France took over its presidency for the year 2011, she launched a wide-ranging work agenda on the reform of the international monetary system.

In July 2011, Christine Lagarde became the eleventh Managing Director of the IMF, and the first woman to hold that position.

Christine Lagarde was named Officier in the Légion d'honneur in April 2012.

A former member of the French national team for synchronized swimming, Christine Lagarde is the mother of two sons.

Watch the video

Session 1: Systemic Risk and Financial Regulation

Chair: Paul Volcker

Paul A. Volcker worked in the United States Federal Government for almost 30 years, culminating in two terms as Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979-1987. For ten years, he served as Chairman of Wolfensohn & Co., as well as Professor Emeritus of International Economic Policy at Princeton. From 1996-1999, he was Chairman of a committee to determine existing dormant accounts and other assets in Swiss banks of victims of Nazi persecution. From 2000-2005, he served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International Accounting Standards Committee. In April 2004, he was asked by was asked by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to chair an inquiry into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program. In 2007, he was asked by the President of the World Bank to chair a panel of experts to review the operations of the Department of Institutional Integrity of World Bank. From November 2008 to 2011, he served as Chairman of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Educated at Princeton, Harvard and the London School of Economics, Mr. Volcker launched the Volcker Alliance in 2013 to address the challenge of effective execution of public policies and to help rebuild trust in government.

Panelists:

Viral Acharya

Viral V. Acharya is the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business (NYU-Stern). He completed Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 1995 and Ph.D. in Finance from NYU-Stern in 2001. Prior to joining Stern, he was a Professor of Finance at the London Business School (2001-2008). His primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk of the financial sector, its regulation and its genesis in government-induced distortions, an inquiry that cuts across several other strands of research – credit risk and liquidity risk, their interactions and agency-theoretic foundations, as well as their general equilibrium consequences. He is the recipient of the inaugural Banque de France – Toulouse School of Economics Junior Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance, 2011. He is the current PhD coordinator in the Finance department at Stern.

Anat Admati

Anat R. Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, trading mechanisms, portfolio management, financial contracting, and, most recently, on corporate governance and banking. In recent years, Admati has been active in the policy debate on financial stability and regulation. In addition to a number of research papers, policy comments and short pieces, she is the author, with Martin Hellwig, of the book The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, March 2013, see bankersnewclothes.com), which Kenneth Rogoff described as “the most important book about banking in a very long time.”

Admati received her BSc from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, her MA, MPhil and PhD from Yale University, and was awarded honorary doctorate from University of Zurich. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the recipient of multiple fellowships, research grants, and paper recognition, and is a past board member of the American Finance Association. She has served on a number of editorial boards and is currently a member of the FDIC Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee and the CFTC Market Risk Advisory Committee.

Philipp Hildebrand

Philipp Hildebrand is Vice Chairman of BlackRock, a member of the firm’s Global Executive Committee, and Chairman of Multi-Asset Strategies (MAS). Philipp also sits on the International Advisory Board of Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. Until January 2012, he served as Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (SNB). In that capacity, he was a Director of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Swiss Governor of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a member of the Financial Stability Board (FSB).

Previously, Mr. Hildebrand served as Chief Investment Officer of a Swiss private bank and as a partner of Moore Capital Management in London. Between 2006 and 2009, he served as a member of the Strategic Committee of the French Debt Management Office. Mr. Hildebrand is a member of the Group of Thirty and an Honorary Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. Mr. Hildebrand earned a BA from the University of Toronto, an MA from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford.

Watch the video

Coffee Break

Session 2: Macro-Prudential Tools: Gathering Evidence

Chair: Stanley Fischer

Stanley Fischer took office as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on May 28, 2014, to fill an unexpired term ending January 31, 2020. He was sworn in as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors on June 16, 2014. His term as Vice Chairman expires on June 12, 2018.

Prior to his appointment to the Board, Dr. Fischer was governor of the Bank of Israel from 2005 through 2013.

From February 2002 to April 2005, Dr. Fischer was vice chairman of Citigroup. Dr. Fischer served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund from September 1994 through August 2001. From January 1988 to August 1990, he was the chief economist of the World Bank.

From 1977 to 1999, Dr. Fischer was a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1992 to 1995, he was the Elizabeth and James Killian Class of 1926 professor. From 1973 to 1977, Dr. Fischer was an associate professor of economics at MIT. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, Dr. Fischer was an assistant professor of economics and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Fischer has published many articles on a wide variety of economic issues, and he is the author and editor of several scholarly books. He has been a fellow at the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society, as well as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an honorary fellow at the London School of Economics.

Dr. Fischer was born in Lusaka, Zambia, in October 1943. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969.

Dr. Fischer is married with three adult children.

Panelists:

Robert Rubin

Robert E. Rubin served as our nation’s 70th Secretary of the Treasury from January 10, 1995 until July 2, 1999. He joined the Clinton Administration in 1993, serving in the White House as Assistant to the President for Economic Policy and as the first Director of the National Economic Council. He joined Goldman, Sachs & Company in 1966 and served as Co-Chairman from 1990 to 1992. From 1999 to 2009, Mr. Rubin served as a member of the Board of Directors at Citigroup and as a senior advisor to the company. In 2010, he joined Centerview Partners as senior counselor of the firm. He is Chairman of the Board of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the nation’s leading community development support organization. He serves on the Boards of Trustees at the Mount Sinai Health System and recently completed a 12-year term as a member of the Harvard Corporation. In June 2007, he was named Co-Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Rubin is one of the founders of The Hamilton Project, an economic policy project housed at the Brookings Institution that offers a strategic vision and innovative policy proposals on how to create a growing economy that benefits more Americans. He is author of In An Uncertain World: Tough Choices from Wall Street to Washington [Random House, 2003, with Jacob Weisberg], a New York Times bestseller and one of Business Week's ten best business books of the year.

Mr. Rubin graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1960 with an A.B. in economics. He received a L.L.B. from Yale Law School in 1964 and attended the London School of Economics. He has received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other universities.

Hyun Song Shin

Hyun Song Shin was appointed BIS Economic Adviser and Head of Research on 1 May 2014. Before joining the BIS, Mr Shin was the Hughes-Rogers Professor of Economics at Princeton University. In 2010, on leave from Princeton, he served as Senior Adviser to the Korean president, taking a leading role in formulating financial stability policy in Korea and developing the agenda for the G20 during Korea's presidency. From 2000 to 2005, he was Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics. He holds a DPhil and MPhil in Economics from Oxford University (Nuffield College) and a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the same university. Mr Shin is author of numerous publications in the fields of monetary policy, banking, finance and issues related to financial stability and further details are available: www.bis.org/author/hyun_song_shin.htm.

Paul Tucker

Sir Paul Tucker is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School. He was Deputy Governor at the Bank of England from 2009 to October 2013, having joined the Bank in 1980. He was a member of all of the Bank of England's statutory policy committees: the Monetary Policy Committee, Financial Policy Committee (vice chair), Prudential Regulatory Authority Board (vice chair), as well as of the Court of Directors. Internationally, he was a member of the steering committee of the G20 Financial Stability Board, and chaired its Committee on the Resolution of Cross-Border Banks in order to solve the “too big to fail” problem. He was a member of the board of directors of the Bank for International Settlements, and was chair of the Basel Committee for Payment and Settlement Systems from April 2012. He is a Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation.

Watch the video

Lunch Break

Session 3: Monetary Policy in the Future

Chair: José Viñals

José Viñals is currently the Financial Counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He is a member of the Financial Stability Board, representing the IMF.

His professional career has been closely tied to the Central Bank of Spain, where he served as the Vice-Governor after holding successive positions. He has also held the positions of Chairman of the European Central Bank International Relations Committee; and Chairman of Spain’s Deposit Guarantee Funds. He has been a member of: the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on the Global Financial System; the European Central Bank Monetary Policy Committee; and the high-level group appointed by the President of the European Commission to examine economic challenges in the European Union. He was also a member of the European Union Economic and Financial Committee and a Board Member of the Spanish Securities Authority.

He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He is a former Faculty Member of the Economics Department at Stanford University.

Panelists:

Ben Bernanke

Dr. Bernanke (1953) received a B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University (summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1979 to 1985, he was a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1985, where he held a number of positions including chair of the Economics Department from 1996 to 2002. In 2002, Bernanke became a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and he served as Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from June 2005 to January 2006. From February 2006 through January 2014, Bernanke served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee. He led the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and to support the ensuing economic recovery. Since February 2014, he has been a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at the Brookings Institution. Bernanke’s research has focused on macroeconomics, monetary economics, and economic history. He has served as editor of the American Economic Review and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, among other distinctions. He is married to Anna Friedmann Bernanke. They have two children, Joel and Alyssa.

Gill Marcus

Gill Marcus was appointed as Governor of the South African Reserve Bank on 9 November 2009 for a five-year term. She was ninth and first female Governor of the South African Reserve Bank. Prior to her appointment at the South African Reserve Bank, Ms Marcus was Professor in Policy, Leadership and Gender Studies at the Gordon Institute of Business Science. She also served as the non-executive chairperson of the Absa Group, non-executive director of Gold Fields Operations Ltd and chaired a number of regulatory and supervisory bodies, including the Financial Services Board and the Standard Committee for the Revision of Banks Act. Ms Marcus served as Deputy Minister of Finance in 1996 and was appointed as Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank in 1999. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce Degree from the University of South Africa and an Honorary Doctorate Degree from the University of Stellenbosch.

John Taylor

John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is also the director of Stanford's Introductory Economics Center. Taylor is known for his economic research on the foundations of monetary theory and policy, which has been applied by central banks and financial market analysts around the world. He also has an active interest in public policy and teaching. He served as senior economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1976 to 1977, as a member of the Council from 1989 to 1991, as a member of the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 2001, and as Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs from 2001 to 2005. In addition he also served as a senior economic adviser on four presidential campaigns. Among many awards, Taylor was awarded the Hoagland Prize and the Rhodes Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He received the Bradley Prize for his economic research and policy achievements, the Adam Smith Award from the National Association for Business Economics, the Alexander Hamilton Award and the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for his policy contributions at the U.S. Treasury, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving the 2002 financial crisis. Taylor received a B.A. in economics summa cum laude from Princeton and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford. He won the 2012 Hayek Prize for his book, First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity.

Watch the video

Session 4: Fiscal Policy in the Future

Chair: Vitor Gaspar

Vitor Gaspar, a Portuguese national, is Director of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. Prior to joining the IMF, he held a variety of senior policy positions in Banco de Portugal, including most recently as Special Adviser. He served as Minister of State and Finance of Portugal during 2011-2013. He was head of the European Commission’s Bureau of European Policy Advisers during 2007-2010 and director-general of research at the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2004. Mr. Gaspar holds a Ph.D. and a post-doctoral agregado in Economics from Universidade Nova de Lisboa; he also studied at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Panelists:

Marco Buti

Marco Buti, educated at the Universities of Florence and Oxford, joined the European Commission in 1987. He was economic advisor of the Commission President until 2003; from September 2003 to August 2006 he was Director of Economies of Member States at the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs where, as from 1 September 2006, he has been appointed Deputy Director General and, since December 2008, Director General. He is the Commission Finance Deputy in the G7, G8 and G20. He has been visiting professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, the University of Florence and at the European University Institute. He has published extensively on EMU, macroeconomic policies, structural reforms, welfare state, and unemployment.

Martin Feldstein

Martin Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as President and CEO of the NBER from 1977-82 and 1984-2008. He continues as a Research Associate of the NBER. 
From 1982 through 1984, Martin Feldstein was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and President Reagan's chief economic adviser. He served as President of the American Economic Association in 2004. In 1977, he received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, a prize awarded every two years to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to economic science. Dr. Feldstein is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society Dr. Feldstein has been a director of several public corporations. He is also an economic adviser to several businesses and government organizations in the United States and abroad. 
Martin Feldstein is a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University.

Brad DeLong

J. Bradford DeLong is Professor of Economics at U.C. Berkeley, and was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy of the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton Administration. He is completing “Slouching Towards Utopia?”, an overly-long economic history of the world in the twentieth century. He is best known for “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets” (JPE, 1989), “Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy” (BPEA, 2012), "Did JP Morgan’s Men Add Value?” (book chapter, 1991), “The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets” (JF, 1991), "America’s Peacetime Inflation: the 1970s” (book chapter, 1997), “Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?” (AER, 1986), “Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow’s Economy” (First Monday, 2000), "Meltdown to Moral Hazard: the International Monetary and Financial Policies of the Clinton Administration” (book chapter, 2001), "Have Productivity Levels Converged? Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare in the Very Long Run” (AER, 1989), and “Should We Fear Deflation?” (BPEA, 1989).

Watch the video

Coffee Break

Session 5: Capital Inflows, Exchange Rate Management and Capital Controls

Chair: David Lipton

Mr. David Lipton assumed the position of First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund on September 1, 2011. Before joining the Fund, he was Special Assistant to the President, and served as Senior Director for International Economic Affairs at the National Economic Council and National Security Council at the White House. Previously, Mr. Lipton was a Managing Director at Citi. Prior to joining Citi in May 2005, he was at Moore Capital Management for five years and, before that he spent a year at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mr. Lipton served in the Clinton administration at the Treasury Department from 1993 to 1998, including as Assistant Secretary and Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs. Before that, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center of Scholars. From 1989 to 1992, he worked as economic adviser to the governments of Russia, Poland and Slovenia. Mr. Lipton began his career with eight years on the IMF staff. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. from Harvard University in 1982 and a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1975.

Panelists:

Agustín Carstens

Agustín Carstens holds a M.A. (1983) and a Ph.D. (1985) in economics from the University of Chicago, and received his B.A. (summa cum laude) from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. Dr. Carstens began his professional career in 1980 at Banco de México, where he has held many positions and serves as Governor since January 1st, 2010. Among other distinguished positions, he has also served as executive director at the IMF (1999-2000), deputy finance minister (2000-2003), deputy managing director at the IMF (2003-2006), minister of finance (2006-2009), member of the Steering Committee of the G-20 Financial Stability Board (2010-), member of the Board of Directors of the BIS (since 2011), Chairman of the BIS Economic Consultative Council and the Global Economy Meeting (since 2013) and Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (since 2015). He was named Central Bank Governor of the Year by the Banker magazine (2012) and Euromoney magazine (2013). In 2013, he received from the University of Chicago the Professional Achievement Award as distinguished alumnae.

Maurice Obstfeld

Maurice Obstfeld is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics. He joined Berkeley in 1989 as a professor, following appointments at Columbia (1979-1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986-1989). He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979. Dr. Obstfeld previously served as an honorary advisor to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Dr. Obstfeld's honors are the American Economic Association’s Ely Lecture, Tilburg University’s Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, and the Kiel Institute’s Bernhard Harms Prize and Lecture. His research focuses on exchange rates, international financial crises, global capital-market integration, and monetary policy in open economies. He is also the co-author of two leading textbooks on international economics.

Luiz A. Pereira da Silva

Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva is currently Deputy-Governor at the Central Bank of Brazil, in charge of International Affairs and of Financial Regulation. Before that, in Brazil, he was Deputy-Finance Minister, in charge of International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance and Chief Economist of the Ministry of Budget and Planning. He was also Regional Country Director and Advisor to the Chief Economist at the World Bank and, in Japan, worked at the Institute of Fiscal and Monetary Policy of the Ministry of Finance and as Country Risk Director at the Export-Import Bank. He has published on development economics, modeling and poverty reduction and is the co-editor of “The Impact of Macroeconomic Policies on Poverty and Income Distribution: Macro-micro Evaluation Techniques and Tools” (Palgrave Macmillan and The World Bank).

Watch the video

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Registration and Continental Breakfast

Session 6: International Monetary and Financial System

Chair: Tharman Shanmugaratnam

Tharman Shanmugaratnam is Deputy Prime Minister in Singapore. He also serves as Minister for Finance, a responsibility he has performed since December 2007.

He was appointed by his peers as Chairman of the IMFC, the policy steering committee of the IMF, from March 2011 to March 2015, and was its first Asian chair. He is a member of the Group of Thirty, also known as "The Consultative Group on International Economic and Monetary Affairs".

Tharman leads the national SkillsFuture Council, which seeks to empower Singaporeans to learn at every age, and develop the skills of the future. He also chairs the International Advisory Council of the Singapore Economic Development Board.

He served for five years as Minister for Education, between 2003 and 2008. Much of his earlier professional life was spent at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore’s central bank and integrated financial regulator, where he was chief executive before entering politics in 2001. He is currently also Chairman of the MAS.

Tharman studied economics at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He later obtained a masters in public administration at Harvard University, where he received the Lucius N Littauer Fellow award for outstanding performance and leadership potential.

Panelists:

Ricardo Caballero

Ricardo J. Caballero is the Ford International Professor of Economics and Director of the World Economic Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an NBER Research Associate, and an advisor of QFR Capital Management LP. Caballero was the Chairman of MIT's Economics Department (2008-2011) and has been a visiting scholar and consultant at most major central banks and international financial institutions. His teaching and research fields are macroeconomics, international economics, and finance. His current research looks at global capital markets, speculative episodes and financial bubbles, systemic crises prevention mechanisms, and dynamic restructuring. His policy work focuses on aggregate risk management and insurance arrangements for emerging markets and developed economies. He has also written about aggregate consumption and investment, exchange rates, externalities, growth, price rigidity, dynamic aggregation, networks and complexity. Caballero has served on the editorial board of several academic journals and has a very extensive list of publications in all major academic journals.

Jaime Caruana

Jaime Caruana became General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements on 1 April 2009.

Previously, Mr Caruana was Financial Counsellor to the Managing Director and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the International Monetary Fund.

From 2000 to 2006, Mr Caruana was the Governor of the Bank of Spain, Spain's central bank, and in that capacity, served on the Governing Council of the European Central Bank. He was also the Chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision from 2003 to 2006 and has been a member of the Financial Stability Forum (now the Financial Stability Board) since 2003.

Prior to joining the Bank of Spain, Mr Caruana worked in the private financial sector for nearly 10 years.

Mr Caruana is also a member of the Group of Thirty.

Zeti Akhtar Aziz

Dr. Zeti Akhtar Aziz, appointed Governor of the Bank Negara Malaysia in 2000, had an important role in the successful management of the repair and resolution of the financial system during the Asian financial crisis and the consequent strong recovery of the Malaysian economy. In the decade that followed, she also had an important role in the financial reform and transformation of the Malaysian financial system including overseeing the enactment of ten new major legislations for the financial sector. This period also saw the progressive liberalisation of the Malaysian financial system. In the Asian region, Dr. Zeti has been actively involved in strengthening cooperation and regional financial integration. In 2006, she chaired the regional taskforce that prepared the report for the future direction of central bank financial cooperation in the region. A founding member of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Asian Consultative Council, she was also the first co-chair of the Financial Stability Board Regional Consultative Group for Asia. She is currently the chair of the BIS Central Bank Governance Group. Dr. Zeti has also had an extensive role in the global development of Islamic finance. Dr. Zeti received her PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Watch the video

Coffee Break

Panel Discussion

Olivier Blanchard

A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent most of his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, with whom he has been affiliated since then. He is the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics, and past Chair of the Economics Department. He has been on leave from MIT since 2008, as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries, and to forces behind the current crisis. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and past council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

Raghuram Rajan

Dr. Raghuram Rajan took charge as 23rd Governor of Reserve Bank of India on September 5, 2013. Prior to that, he was Chief Economic Advisor, Government of India, the Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at University of Chicago’s Booth School, and Chief Economist at IMF (2003-2006).

His work spans a broad range of areas in financial economics, ranging from the central role of banks in creating liquidity and the role of finance in economic growth to the nature of corporations and their financing. He co-authored, “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists” with Luigi Zingales in 2003 and wrote “Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy,” for which he was awarded the Financial Times-Goldman Sachs prize for best business book in 2010.

He is a member of the Group of Thirty. He was President of the American Finance Association in 2011. His awards include the inaugural Fischer Black Prize for the best finance researcher under the age of 40. The global Indian of the year award (NASSCOM in 2011), Infosys prize for Economic Sciences (2012), Center for Financial Studies-Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics (2013), the ‘Central Bank Governor of the Year’ Award by EuroMoney Magazine (2014) and he was named ‘Governor of the Year’ by Central Banking Publications (2015).

Kenneth Rogoff

Kenneth Rogoff is Thomas D. Cabot Professor at Harvard University. From 2001-2003, Rogoff served as Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund. His 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly has been very widely cited by academics, policymakers and journalists. One regularity that Reinhart and Rogoff illustrate is the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the run-up and the aftermath of severe financial crises. In general, they show that for financial crises, the differences between emerging markets and advanced countries are far less pronounced that previously believed. Rogoff is also known for his seminal work on exchange rates and on central bank independence. His treatise Foundations of International Macroeconomics (joint with Maurice Obstfeld) is the standard graduate text in the field worldwide. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries. He serves on the Economic Advisory Panel of the New York Federal Reserve. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Rogoff is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Group of Thirty. He is also an international grandmaster of chess, He was the 2011 winner of the biennial Center for Financial Studies Deutschebank Prize.

For more on Professor Rogoff’s research, opinion pieces, and bio, see http://scholar.harvard.edu/rogoff

Lawrence Summers

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus of Harvard University. During the past two decades, he has served in a series of senior policy positions in Washington, D.C., including the 71st Secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton, Director of the National Economic Council for President Obama and Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank.

He received a bachelor of science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982. In 1983, he became one of the youngest individuals in recent history to be named as a tenured member of the Harvard University faculty. In 1987, Mr. Summers became the first social scientist ever to receive the annual Alan T. Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and in 1993 he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40.

He is currently the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University and the Weil Director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business & Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, reside in Brookline with their six children.

Watch the video