"Global Financial Crises: Danger and Opportunities" will be the topic of a panel discussion by four internationally recognized economists at this year's Catherine N. Stratton Lecture on Critical Issues, scheduled for 10am-noon on Monday, October 19 in the Wong Auditorium (Building E51). The event is free and open to the public.
Institute Professor Emeritus Robert Solow will moderate and participate. Joining him will be Rudiger W. Dornbusch, Ford International Professor of Economics; Marina Whitman, professor of business administration and public policy at the University of Michigan; and Janet L. Yellen, current chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (CEA).
The panelists will discuss such issues as the sources of the financial crises that hit Mexico a few years ago and are hitting Asia today, the appropriate response of the International Monetary Fund and the major economies, the likely effects of the Asia meltdown on the United States and Europe, and the outlook for Japan and other Asian economies.
They will also discuss broader issues such as why these crises occur, their consequences and how the rest of the world should respond to them.
Professor Solow has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1950 and an Institute Professor since 1973. He writes and lectures widely on economic theory, primarily theory of capital and economic growth, macroeconomics, land use and economics of exhaustible resources.
Professor Dornbusch is an expert in exchange rate and currency problems, inflation, stabilization and trade policy. He writes and speaks widely on these topics and contributes a monthly "Economic Viewpoint" column to BusinessWeek. He joined the MIT faculty in 1975 and has been Ford International Professor of Economics since 1984.
Marina Whitman will speak from her experience as an economist, a corporate executive and a member of the board of directors of five NYSE-traded corporations. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including New World, New Rules: The Changing Role of the American Corporation (Harvard Business School Press, early 1999). She comments regularly on TV and writes op-ed pieces for the Detroit News, primarily on international economics. She is a a member of the Board of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Institute for International Economics, and a former member of the boards of Harvard and Princeton Universities, the CEA and the President's Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.
Janet Yellen is a recognized scholar in international economics, recently focusing on the determination of the trade balance as well as the course of economic reform in Eastern Europe. Before she joined the CEA in 1997, she was a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve System. Earlier she was the Bernard T. Rocca, Jr. Professor of International Business and Trade at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1980.
The Catherine N. Stratton Lecture Series on Critical Issues honors Kay Stratton, wife of the late MIT President Julius A. Stratton, whose more than 50 years of commitment to the Institute include not only these annual lectures, but also the "Aging Successfully" seminars held every spring.
The series is supported by an endowed fund initially seeded by the MIT Women's League, an organization founded at MIT in 1913 to enrich the lives of women in the MIT community. The League continues to sponsor the Critical Issues series and co-sponsors the "Aging Successfully" seminars with the MIT Medical Department.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on October 7, 1998.
