Grossman Chairs Session at Banking Conference in Munich

On Sept. 14 and 15, Professor of Economics Richard Grossman attended a conference in Munich jointly sponsored by the Bundesbank (the German central bank) and a Munich-based research institute called CESifo. Grossman chaired a session and acted as a discussant at the conference, whose focus was, “The Banking Sector and the State.” According to the conference website: “The current financial and sovereign debt crisis has shown once again that the banking sector and the state are intertwined in many ways: On the one hand, the state lends support to distressed banks and accepts risks from the private sector; in this way banks quite often fall under public ownership. On the other hand, banks are important lenders and thus an indirect source of funding for the state in that they hold large amounts of government bonds. The conference will analyse the resulting interactions, the risks and the potential impact on the stability of the financial system.”

More information on the conference is available here.

In addition, on Aug. 29, The Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Grossman on the Republican Party platform’s call for a commission to study restoring the link between the dollar and gold. Grossman writes that as an academic, he’s all for scientific study—but actually re-establishing the gold standard would be disastrous.

Grossman explains, “History provides ample evidence that the gold standard is a bad idea. After World War I, the major industrialized nations established the gold standard, which is widely seen as having contributed to the spread and intensification of the Great Depression. The gold standard tied the hands of monetary policymakers, forcing them to maintain high interest rates in order to maintain the price of gold, thereby making a bad economic situation even worse.

Had we been on the gold standard when the subprime crisis broke, the Federal Reserve would have had to raise interest rates instead of lowering them. Given that our economy was — and still is — struggling despite historically low interest rates, higher interest rates would have been devastating.”