Finance

Yale SOM finance professors Frank Fabozzi, Gary Gorton, and Will Goetzmann discuss what caused the financial crisis, what we have learned since then, likely impacts of the financial reform legislation, and proposals to address unresolved issues in the housing and securitization markets.

Mary Houghton is the president and co-founder of the ShoreBank Corporation, the largest and oldest community development bank in the country. She talks with Qn about how banking can be a powerful for-profit social venture.

Misunderstanding of risk was a major factor in the subprime crisis and ensuing recession. Andrew Lo argues that one has to look at both logical and emotional parts of the brain to grasp how people respond to financial risk.

Iceland may have been a forerunner of 21st century financial trends. First it profited from increasing integration with the global financial system. Then ties to the world economy helped pull it into fiscal ruin. What can an island with less than .005% of the world’s population teach us about globalization?

Sovereign wealth funds have become a source of controversy. They have the size — several trillion dollars and growing — to swing or stabilize markets. Meanwhile, their sometimes secretive strategies have invited worries that they could be used as tools of government policy. Jeffrey E. Garten, former SOM dean and former undersecretary of commerce for international trade, talked to Ng Kok Song, the managing director and group chief investment officer at the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, about how one of the world’s largest SWFs is run.

Catherine Labio, an associate professor of comparative literature and French at Yale, studies the relationship between economics, fiction, and art. She teaches a course called Fictions of Capital, which explores the depiction of money and the economy from the 17th century to the present.

By 2006, the subprime market had grown to 20% of the total U.S. mortgage market, and 75% of these loans were securitized and sold off to investors around the world, facilitating an influx of capital. With credit easily available, more people than ever before were able to buy homes — but then the market seized up.

From 2005 through the middle of 2007, one public company after another was bought out and went private. The size of the deals escalated — Hertz for $15 billion, HCA for $33 billion, Equity Office Properties for $39 billion, TXU Energy for $44 billion. Then the megadeals stopped. Andrew Metrick explains what happened.

A document from 1787 Holland lists the names of girls whose income from government annuities was pooled and securitized, allowing investors to essentially bet that the girls would live a long time. Yale SOM Professors Will Goetzmann and Geert Rouwenhorst discuss how this novel financial device functioned and how it fits in the story of the development of more and more sophisticated securities.

Professor Zhiwu Chen has been watching what’s happened as China adopts such financial instruments as mortgages and mutual funds. He was born in a rural village in China, and when he goes back, he says, he sees a country that’s being remade by markets.