Bill White made an introductory set of comments at a 21 January conference in Zurich organized by the Council on Economic Policies. Motivated by the recognition that dealing with climate change would prove very costly, the conference examined the issue of whether the governance structure (mandates, instruments  and accountability mechanisms) of central banking and financial regulation needed to be revisited.  White’s comments covered the historical origins of current practices, the underlying assumptions of current practices, the need for review of those basic assumptions and some possible implications of such a review.

ZurichCEPJan2019

On 18 January, Bill White made a presentation to a conference at the University of Toronto organized jointly by the OECD (the NAEC group) and the Fields Institute of Applied Mathematics. Bill concluded that another crisis could by no means be ruled out and that their were serious shortcomings in the official sector’s capacity to both manage and resolve (via debt restructuring) such a crisis.

TorontoFields2019

On 15 November Bill White participated in a charity event in Zurich to support Swiss cancer research. The event consisted of an exchange of views about the economic outlook, between Bill and Paul McNamara, an investment director at GAM in London.

Bill White made  a presentation on 24 November at a conference organized by the Monetative group at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. The conference was directed to analyzing how digitalization might lead to changes in the current monetary system. Bill focusered on shortcomings in the current system, not least recurrent credit driven “booms and busts”, and concluded that these shortcomings provided a prima facie case for thinking about alternative monetary systems.

FrankfurtMonetativeNov2018

http://conference2018.monetative.de/economic-outlook-and-the-need-for-monetary-reform/

Bill White made the keynote presentation at the end of a 19 November conference on macroprudential policies, organized jointly by the IMF, the Danish National Bank and CBS in Copenhagen. Although many commentators seem to feel that such policies will ensure financial stability in the future, Bill noted that policymakers face many difficulties in conducting them properly. Indeed, they might even contribute to financial instability by encouraging the pursuit of “lower for longer” monetary policy with its many unintended consequences.

CopenhagenMacroprudentialNov2018

On 16 November, Bill made a presentation at  a.meeting organized by the Swiss Progress Foundation in Zurich. Hans Werner Sinn also made a presentation.

ZurichProgressFoundationNov162018

Bill presented his comments on a panel at the end of a meeting (August 30-31) in Reykjavik, Iceland, which looked at “The 2008 Global Financial Crisis in Retrospect”. He agreed that much progress has been made in regulating the financial sector, but also drew attention to many remaining shortcomings. The fact that all piecemeal regulatory changes invite evasion, and then still another regulatory response, raises questions as to whether still more radical change to our current financial and monetary system is not required.