M&A MID-MARKET FORUM

ALBERTO ALESINA

Financial Crisis, Liberism vs. Intervention.
Future prospect?

Friday 21 November 2008, 09:35
Milan, Principe di Savoia Hotel

The US and worldwide financial crisis has generated an anti-market reaction and an even more anti-liberism retort. In certain European countries you can hear talks of end of Capitalism, death of the financial system, return to state intervention, end of globalization and State supremacy over the market. In a few years today's financial crisis will just be a nightmare of the past, but this return to state intervention might cause serious and long lasting costs. Furthermore any excess of intervention could worsen the effects of this crisis on the real economy.

A slow-down - or worse, a stop - of the economic and financial integration that we call globalization, would be a disaster both for the rich countries and the poorer countries. This financial crisis can be cured not with slogans but with rationality and with a strong vision on the role of the state reassuring the markets and the consumers.

Alberto Alesina, born in Italy in 1957, is a Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. He served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2003 - 2006. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1986.

He is a leader in the field of Political Economics and has published extensively in all major academic journals in economics. He has published five books and edited many more. His two most recent books are The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline, published by MIT Press, and Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference, published by Oxford University Press.

He has been a Co-Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for eight years and Associate Editor of many academic journals. He has published columns in many leading newspapers around the world and has worked as visiting professor in several institutions including MIT, Tel Aviv University, University of Stockholm, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.