Taking on the Banks: A Conversation with Anat Admati
Over the weekend, I had an e-mail conversation with Admati about the conference, which has another noteworthy feature: all of the presenters and moderators are going to be women. In addition to Warren, Yellen, and Lagarde, they include Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City; Brooksley Born, the former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; and Claudia Buch, the deputy president of the German Bundesbank. These days, of course, there are other high-level women’s conferences, including one organized by Fortune magazine and another by Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker. But I can’t recall a major economics or finance conference in Washington or New York at which all of the presenters were women. (Of course, there have been plenty of conferences where all of the presenters were men.)
.. We avoided inviting people who work for private, for-profit financial institutions, whose interests are sometimes in direct conflict with those of the rest of society. My experience is that they often make vague, perfunctory, or, worse, misleading statements, which muddle the debate and waste valuable time.