Why Won’t Regulators Rein in Big Banks?

In this week’s Global Thinkers podcast (recorded October 12), economist Anat Admati and financial reporter Pedro da Costa explain why the 2008 financial crisis was not the “Hundred-Year Flood” big bankers like to pretend it is. FP story editor Amanda Silverman hosts.

About the participants:

Anat Admati is a 2014 FP Global Thinker. A professor of finance and economics at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, she’s written extensively on financial markets, regulation, corporate governance, and banking. In 2013, she co-authored, with Martin Hellwig, The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, a book that refutes the widespread myth that more safety measures for banks would inhibit growth. The Financial Times’ Martin Wolf hailed it as “The most important [book] to emerge from the crisis.” Follow her on Twitter: @anatadmati.

Pedro Nicolaci da Costa is an editorial fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Previously, he was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and, before that, an economics correspondent for Reuters. He’s been covering financial markets since 2001. In 2010, he co-authored the Reuters article, “Club Fed: The Ties That Bind at the Federal Reserve,” which helped lead to a more open communications policy at the Fed. Read his latest for FP here. Follow him on Twitter: @pdacosta.

Amanda Silverman is a story editor at Foreign Policy. Follow her on Twitter: @apsilverman.

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