Steve Hanke Lecture on “Money, Banking and Markets”

Steve Hanke Lecture on Money, Banking and Markets | Almost exactly 10 years ago, amid the rapidly worsening ‘subprime mortgage crisis’, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., was forced to file for bankruptcy. Shortly thereafter, actually within hours AIG collapsed, triggered a run on most money-market funds, which accelerated a cash crunch and ultimately not only wrecked the economy by abolishing millions of jobs. It also caused catastrophic material, social and moral damage. Ever since, countless biased statements and false explanations dominate the political debates.

Prof. Steve H. Hanke will be talking at Liechtenstein University in Vaduz (Sep. 27) and at the LGT Global Investment Seminar in Zurich (Sep. 28). The ‘first Steve Hanke Lecture on Money, Banking and Markets’ thus was timely titled: “A Postmortem on the Policy Blunders that Caused and Extended the Great Recession”.

Steve H. Hanke (Johns Hopkins University and recently appointed as ‘G. v. Haberler Professor, ECAEF’) ranks among the world’s leading and most influential monetary economists. Backed by persuasive arguments, plain facts and a host of charts he not only proved that in sharp contrast to the official narrative, the US monetary policy since 2002 acted pro-cyclical. These policies triggered the notorious bubbles, let them pop up and lead to the “Great Recession” of 2008/2009.

Among other examples, Hanke also exposed H. Paulson’s role and clearly showed that in spite of his given authority to rescue Lehman Brothers and contrary to the distorted public account, Ben Bernanke (then chair of the FED) in a politically motivated panic reaction failed to act appropriately, and thus unleashed the most terrifying moment for the US economy since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

According to Prof. Hanke, we should be more careful of what we read, take for granted and use for investment planning, as 95% of all published financial and monetary reports on policy matters are either ‘false or irrelevant’. After all, there is nothing more practical than a good theory!

Initiated as a co-operation of the ‘European Center of Austrian Economics Foundation, ECAEF’ and the ‘Liechtenstein Academy, LAF’, the ‘Steve Hanke Lecture on Money, Banking and Markets’ is intended as an annual public lecture series at the Liechtenstein Academy (Schloss Freudenfels Campus) and at the University in Vaduz.

*Steve H. Hanke is an American applied economist at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is also a Senior Fellow and Director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, DC, and Co-Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise in Baltimore.