Wall Street Journal's David Wessel, Author of New Book on Bernanke and Financial Panic, to Speak at UB Oct. 14
September 23, 2009
Contact: University Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
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David Wessel, economics editor and columnist at The Wall Street Journal and author of the newly released In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic, will discuss the impact of ongoing moves by the Federal Reserve to blunt the impact of the recession, as the Merrick School of Business Dean's Speakers Series continues on Wednesday, Oct. 14 at 6:30 p.m. The event will take place in the University of Baltimore School of Law's Moot Court Room, 1415 Maryland Ave. (Ticket information listed below.)
Wessel, who has shared in two Pulitzer Prizes (one for Boston Globe stories on racial unrest in Boston, and the other for a Wall Street Journal series on corporate wrongdoing) and now writes a weekly Journal column on the global economy's impact on living standards here and abroad, is concerned that the Fed and its chair, Benjamin Bernanke, have taken on too much responsibility-not to mention ownership-as the world moves through the current economic crisis.
Wessel's book, subtitled How the Federal Reserve Became the Fourth Branch of Government, asks hard questions about many of the major decisions that have been taken in the past year:
- What did Bernanke and his team at the Fed know-and what took them by surprise? Which of their actions stretched-or even ripped through-the Fed's legal authority? Which chilling numbers and indicators made them feel they had no choice?
- What were they thinking at pivotal moments during the race to sell Bear Stearns, the unsuccessful quest to save Lehman Brothers, and the virtual nationalization of AIG, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac? What were they saying to one another when, as Bernanke put it to Wessel: "We came very close to Depression 2.0"?
- How well did Bernanke, former treasury secretary Hank Paulson, and then New York Fed president Tim Geithner perform under intense pressure?
Reviews of the book, which was published in August, are near universal in their praise:
David Brooks of The New York Times said In Fed We Trust "gives a revealing blow-by-blow account of the recent financial crisis."
"Wessel delivers an engrossing account of Bernanke's improvisational responses to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression," said Fortune.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics and author of Globalization and its Discontents, said, "David Wessel brings his deep knowledge of the Federal Reserve and U.S. politics and economics to a topic that will be studied by historians for decades to come.... No one can understand what happened and what did not happen without reading this book."
Those attending this Dean's Speaker Series event will have an opportunity to attend an exclusive booksigning with Wessel immediately following his talk.
This event celebrates the Merrick School of Business's commitment to the financial services industry. The school's industry-focused graduate and undergraduate business programs are helping to enhance the skills and competencies of accounting and finance professionals in Baltimore and beyond:
- M.S. in Accounting and Business Advisory Services
- M.S. in Taxation
- M.S. in Business-Finance
- UB/Towson M.B.A's finance specialization
- B.S. in Business Administration, with accounting and finance specializations
- B.S.in Real Estate and Economic Development
Tickets for the Wessel event are $10 each, and available by registering online here. Additional information about the event is available here.
This is the second event in the Dean’s Speaker Series. It debuted last April with a talk by Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank. On Sept. 24, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, author of the new SuperCorp and the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School, will speak.
The University of Baltimore is a member of the University System of Maryland and comprises the School of Law, the Yale Gordon College of Liberal Arts and the Merrick School of Business.