The Next Stage:
Financial Reforms, Jobs and Housing, the Dollar and the International System

Ronald Reagan International Trade Center
Washington, DC
November 13, 2009

Jamie Galbraith:
       Good morning.  I’m James Galbraith, chair of Economists for Peace and Security, and behalf of EPS and our partners, especially the New America Foundation and the Initiative for Re-thinking the Economy, I would like to welcome you to the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center for this morning’s event.  I want to say first off a special word of thanks to Bernard Schwartz, without whose faithful support much of what we do would not be possible.  Bernard could not be here this morning but I know he is watching this event and I want to say, “Bernard, thank you very much.” 

I want to say thank you also to the Foundation for Human Progress, which has provided particular support to the discussion of the issues that we will be addressing this morning, and to Pierre Calame who is here from the foundation and will be speaking.  Pierre, thank you.  I should also say thanks to the International Trade Center for its cooperation and sponsorship of this event.   And thank you above all to the very efficient and dedicated staff of EPS and particularly our director, Thea Harvey. 

There are those who say the recession is over and that the financial crisis is past.  Not many of them are to be found out in the country where unemployment has passed ten percent for only the second time in my professional life; where millions are threatened with foreclosure; and where the wealth of the American middle class built up over six or seven decades has been lost to a very large extent.  To be fair, we all know this.  Larry Summers said, not long ago, that unemployment is likely to remain unacceptably high for unacceptably long.  The question is, What are we going to do about it?  Are we going to wait and hope that the slow processes of economic recuperation pull us out in four or five years’ time?  Are we going to reverse course and decide that that which was done so far was the wrong policy? That what we need to do is pull back and stop doing whatever it was we had been doing?    Or are we going to move forward from the first emergency reaction to the crisis and to the economic slump and set a new strategic direction, a sustainable course?  An effort that we can both use to generate more rapid results and sustain over the years ahead. 

If that is the path to take, then what should that course consist of?  It’s an important and complex question, and to come to grips with it EPS has since the spring of this year convened working groups in four areas:

• financial reform and related immediate economic policy measures
• security, broadly defined
• a program for investment in infrastructure and energy and dealing with the larger challenge of climate change
• and the technical macro-economic area of appropriate strategy for economic forecasting and budgeting.  

Three of these working groups have already met and this symposium is the first fruit of this larger effort.  It is based in part on meetings that were held last June and on a white paper that was published in August.  But it also responds to events as they have developed since then and to the increasing sense of urgency that we have to develop a plausible and effective response to the rising crisis of joblessness and foreclosures. 

We have this morning – and we are following here the rigorous model and format of our partner the New America Foundation – a program that is very much a forced march.  It will consist of three panels and two keynote speakers.  It will proceed without interruption until we are done, which should be shortly before 1 o’clock in the afternoon.  I have asked the speakers on the panels to make very short very focused interventions and to emphasize for us the concrete policy steps that they believe we as a country, and in the larger world because there is an international dimension to this, should be considering.  We’ve organized this into three areas: financial reform; the problem of jobs and housing; and the question of international monetary arrangements and the future of the dollar. 

I am also pleased to say that we have two very distinguished, well-informed keynote speakers scheduled.  They are Damon Silvers of the Congressional Oversight Panel and Phil Angelides, the chair of the newly-formed Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.  We are looking forward to hear what they have to say.  I do not know whether Damon is yet arrived; if he hasn’t we will make a small change of schedule and put him after rather than before the first panel.  But for the moment, I would like to invite Andrew Gelfuso, the director of International Trade of the Trade Center to say a word of welcome, and meanwhile I will just say again, thank you all for coming and I look forward with you to a very useful and enlightening morning.