Restoring the Balance: Financial Regulation and the Real Economy

Sponsored by: Americans for Financial Reform, AFL-CIO, Alliance for a Just Society, Demos, Main Street Alliance, Public Citizen, US P.I.R.G.

Tuesday, June 28th from 9:30 AM – 12:30

Join us for a discussion of the outsized influence of Wall Street on our economy and what can be done about it. Speakers will include Thomas Hoenig, President of the Kansas City Federal Reserve; Scott Paul, Alliance for American Manufacturing; Rob Atkinson, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation; Margaret Blair of Vanderbilt University, Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO, and others. This will be the first of a series of policy conferences to be presented by Americans for Financial Reform.

Since 1980, finance as a share of the economy has grown by over 60 percent. Even after the crisis, financial sector profits are still a quarter of all corporate profits, a level that would have been unprecedented before the 1990s. Beyond the financial sector, economic growth has been increasingly fueled by leverage-driven asset bubbles created by financial sector innovations.

Some of the questions we’ll discuss include:

• What are the factors driving the increasing prominence of finance?

• What influence has it had on economic growth and stability, the distribution of income, and innovation and investment in the non-financial “real economy”?

• Has the growth in financial sector influence distorted the political process?

• Can the new regulations under the Dodd-Frank Act change the balance between finance and other areas of the economy?

• If not, are further steps needed