Engineering a Financial Bloodbath
QUT Faculty of Law Free Public Lecture Series 2009 presents
Professor Justin O’Brien, Research Professor Faculty of Law & Faculty of Business
Engineering a Financial Bloodbath: How Securitisation Destroyed the Legitimacy of Financial Capitalism
When: Monday 3 August 2009, 5.30pm refreshments for 6-7pm lecture
Where: The Owen J Wordsworth Room, Level 12 S Block, QUT Gardens Point Campus
The Speaker
Initially embarking on a career in news and current affairs journalism with the BBC, in 2002 Professor O’Brien moved into the academic arena as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Governance, Queens University, Belfast. Two years later he was appointed Course Director of the LLM Corporate Governance and Public Policy program at the Queen’s University School of Law. In August 2006, he accepted a position as Professor of Corporate Governance in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (an Australian Research Council Special Research Centre). Professor O’Brien has just relocated to Brisbane to embark on a joint QUT research position with the Faculty of Business and the Faculty of Law. He is the author of a number of books on capital market regulation, including Wall Street on Trial (2003) and Redesigning Financial Regulation (2007). This public lecture is a platform to launch his latest monograph, Engineering a Financial Bloodbath (2009).
The Topic
The global financial crisis is the latest, if most catastrophic, in a series of financial crises linked both with ‘boom-bust’ phases in the economic cycle and ‘regulate-deregulate’ swings in government policy. As the impact moves progressively and decisively from the financial into the real economy, the enormous political and socio-economic costs associated with a failure to address the question of the role of financial markets and institutions more generally in society comes into clear view. The design of effective and flexible regulatory and corporate governance rules, principles and norms to address these interlinked and intractable problems becomes a global policy imperative. Addressing the accountability and integrity deficit requires an expansion of focus beyond legal restraints, irrespective of whether they are formulated as generalised principles or more detailed rules. It is argued that only by embedding integrity through design that the inevitable gaps in any regulatory framework can be adequately resolved.
Registration
Register by 31 July 2009 at qutlawpubliclectures@qut.edu.au
Registered attendees may claim 1 CPD point for the Queensland Bar Association and Queensland Law Society.
“It is argued that only by embedding integrity through design that the inevitable gaps in any regulatory framework can be adequately resolved.”
There’s a practical question about how you could embed integerity through design, and how you know whether you’ve done it adequately.
Maybe there’s no why to be absolutely sure.
When I saw the headline I presumed the article would be about the proposed ETS.
Got a complete surprise when I clicked the article and found it was something else.
Ultimately it’s individuals who make risk decisions and invent credit. Ultimately the integrity is sourced from these people, but the design of the system is (as always in capitalism) an attempt to use the worst in people to bring out the best for people. In other words, how to rig the rules and the credit market so that fair evaluations are reinforced by lender profitability. Transparency of risk evaluations would allow outsiders to judge who is scamming and who is dealing fairly, thus permitting fairness and conservatism to become a competitive advantage in the financial sector.
So in that sense, the design of the regulations may lead to longer term survival of players who already had integrity to begin with.