Video - Simon Johnson at INET's Bretton Woods conference - April 9, 2011

In the clip above, MIT professor and former IMF Chief Economist, Simon Johnson, speaks at the "Bretton Woods" conference Saturday on the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. In a brisk, to-the-point talk, Johnson reminds his fellow panelists that Dodd-Frank does NOTHING about Too Big To Fail, that banks are bigger now than they were before the crisis, and that everyone from Tim Geithner to Jamie Dimon just wants to stick his head in the sand and pretend that everything is fine. In fact, Dodd-Frank has simply reinforced the notion that when banks get into trouble, they will be bailed out by taxpayers. And in the meantime, their executives will collect huge bonuses, just like they have been for the last decade or more (excepting that little hiccup in 2008).

Johnson also has an interesting discussion of Basel III and how the new capital requirements are basically a joke. Even under Basel III, leverage will still be dangerously high and private gains will continue to be collected by bank insiders (until the next blow-up), while losses will be borne by the public.

Crucially, Johnson also reminds us that the TARP money has nothing to do with the total costs of the crisis, which include 8 million jobs lost, long-term unemployment, a huge increase in public debt, and further consolidation of the banks' control over the political process.

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More on the conference...

INSIDE GEORGE SOROS’S “MONSTROUS MONKEY HOUSE”



Snow-capped peaks; nightcaps with Larry Summers; discussions of complexity theory over breakfast; Tennyson quotations from Gordon Brown at lunch. No it’s not Davos—it’s Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where over the weekend the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which George Soros set up in the wake of the financial crisis, held its second annual conference. Last year’s inaugural get-together was held at King’s College, Cambridge, the home of Keynes. This year’s location also had a strong link to J.M.K. It was the grand old Mount Washington Hotel, which in the summer of 1944 played host to a famous international conference about the post-war monetary system.



http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2011/04/george-soros-bretton-woods.html#ixzz1JRipyqOd