Financial Literacy 2010 Study Group

The Financial Literacy Group of The Re:Enlightenment Project at New York University and The New York Public Library

The financial crisis that erupted in 2007 has challenged the practical and intellectual assumptions about how the global economy functions held by global policy makers, regulators, market participants and members of the financial industry. It has also tested the common understanding about how the world works for savers, investors, and workers—employed and unemployed, around the world—who have faced devastating declines in their economic resources.

This crisis, as well as the extensive literature it has already inspired, also presents a rare opportunity for people inside and outside the financial community to observe some of the inner workings of modern financial institutions, which are interconnected to an unprecedented degree, rely on a new digital infrastructure capable of making virtually instantaneous transactions across the world, and belong to an ever more elaborate network of global savers, investors, educators, financial experts, and government agencies.

Eighteenth-century Britain, France, and the United States experimented with many of the financial institutions we live with today: regional and central banks, national debts, new monetary forms, and fiat currencies.  Then, as now, new technologies altered the speed and forms in which national and international transactions were conducted.  Then, as now, national governments struggled to devise workable relationships to financial institutions, which were, like ours, largely private companies, organized to generate profits for shareholders and employees.  Then, as now, financial crises periodically roiled the economy, often reaching beyond the borders of the nation-state to make international linkages visible.  Eighteenth-century writers like Adam Smith, James Stewart, and Alexander Hamilton also formulated theoretical positions that continue to inform modern understandings of finance.  Like the Re:Enlightenment Project more generally, the Financial Literacy Working Group seeks to revisit these formulations to help us understand how our present has emerged from this past.

Members of the 2010 Financial Literacy Study Group
(group in formation)

Dr. Bonnie Buchanan
Albers School of Business, Seattle University
 
Kevin R Brine
Independent Scholar

Dr. Alexander Engel
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

Ghislaine Idabouk
Paris Diderot University/Rehseis (CNRS), France

Dr. Mary Poovey
New York University

Gerald J Russello, Esq.. 
Cardozo School of Law

Nancy Henry
University of Tennessee

Ian Baucom
Duke University

Fall 2010 Meeting of Financial Literacy Study Group
 
Date: October 16, 2010 
Place: New York City

The working group session will begin with a Friday night reception dinner and end with an informal Saturday night dinner for participants and other invited guests from the New York City academic and financial communities. The working group will meet all day Saturday.

Financial Literacy Study Group Conversations October 16, 2010 
(Respondents to each section TBA)

I.  Financial Instruments

“The Way We Live Now: The Benefits and Costs of Securitization to the Global Economy”

Dr. Bonnie Buchanan
Albers School of Business, Seattle University

II. Law and Regulation

“Enlightenment at Odds: Where Finance and Law Meet”

Gerald J Russello, Esq., 
Cardozo School of Law, New York

III. Theory

“Option Pricing Theory and the Construction of Mathematical Finance since the 1970s”

Ghislaine Idabouk
Paris Diderot University/Rehseis (CNRS), France
 
IV.  Institutions

“’Speculation of Competent Men is the Self-adjustment of Society to the Probable’:
How the CBOT Established Futures Trading as an Economic Necessity”

Dr. Alexander Engle
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany

V. Epistemology

“The Present Value of the Future: Irving Fisher’s 1906 The Nature of Capital and Income and the ‘Naturalization’ of Financial Decision-making”

Dr. Mary Poovey and Kevin R.  Brine
New York University, New York