V
ery interesting new book concept that might impact the coming regulatory changes: The Squam Lake Report.
The original group’s report can be found at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Here is the NYT on this:
“Rather than setting pay levels, the government should require banks and other critical financial institutions to withhold a share of each senior manager’s total pay for several years, a group of leading economists is urging in a new book. The money would be forfeited if the company went bankrupt or had to be bailed out.
The pay proposal is one of the main suggestions in “The Squam Lake Report,” to be released on Wednesday by Princeton University Press. In a sign of the seriousness with which the recommendations are being examined, the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, will help introduce the book at a conference at Columbia University.
The book, a consensus of 15 academics, including former advisers to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is coming out as Congress works toward completing the biggest changes in financial regulation since the Depression.
About half of the group’s eight core recommendations — though not the pay proposal — are strongly reflected in the two bills that are now being merged by a conference committee. But the scholars also say the legislation contains flaws that have resulted from political imperatives rather than sound economic thinking.
That ambition is reflected even in the book’s cover, whose design resembles that of the 9/11 Commission report, a surprise best seller of 2004.
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Source:
Fifteen Economists Issue Crisis-Prevention Manual
By SEWELL CHAN
NYT, June 16, 2010
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/fifteen-economists-issue-crisis-prevention-manual/
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