Last week I had the opportunity to opine on this question at a lively conference on the financial crisis sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the World Bank. Since I spoke about things I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time, I decided to post the transcript here. Apologies that the tone is more Fed-esque than the usual posting, but here goes…
Where do we go from here?
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Rahm Emanuel, Feb. 2009
I would like to touch briefly on two issues in answer to the question posed for this session: first, the integration of housing finance into the financial and regulatory mainstream; and second, the need to modernize budgetary and regulatory accounting. I chose these topics for several reasons: they are important; they get less attention than is deserved; and I have thought quite a bit about them from both an academic and policy perspective. (more…)