Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics: The Legacy of the Global Financial Crisis

The first session of the Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics examines the impact of the financial crisis on Europe including Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain, both the financial and political implications, and whether the Eurozone’s vulnerability to crisis has been resolved.

This symposium is presented by the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and is made possible through the generous support of Council Board member Stephen C. Freidheim.

MALLABY: Great. Well, thank you, Richard. Thank you, Steve. And welcome to all of you.

Welcome to the first session of the Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on International Economics. We have three people to discuss the first session, which is going to be “The Risks of a New Crisis in the Eurozone,” and we’re going to discuss the extent to which things have improved in terms of structural stability and where the gaps might still be. We’ve got three people, all of whom have been intimately involved in this debate I think pretty much through the, you know, nine years since Greece first revealed its problems.

We have, at the far end there, Isabelle...

The second session of the Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics looks at how emerging markets (China, Brazil, India, Russia, etc.) have fared over the past decade, the extent to which reserve accumulation and flexible exchange rates have enabled them to manage shocks, and the question of current financial stability.

This symposium is presented by the Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies and is made possible through the generous support of Council Board member Stephen C. Freidheim.

TETT: Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to the second session, “Building Off BRICS: The Future of Emerging Markets.” My name is Gillian Tett. I’m the U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times.

And I should say congratulations to all of you who survived the U.N. traffic this morning—(laughter)—which gets worse and worse every year.

And one of the people who’s going to be at the U.N. today and speaking is President Mauricio Macri from Argentina, who I just had breakfast with. And in many ways he epitomizes what we’re here to discuss this morning because a couple of years ago Argentina was coming back into the...

Panelists examine the lessons learned and the continuing legacy of the global financial crisis.

PORAT: So I’d like to welcome everyone to today’s last session of the Council on Foreign Relations Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics.

We have a panel here today that clearly needs no introduction with Chairman Bernanke, Secretary Paulson and Secretary Geithner.

And I’m Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google.

So the goal of our discussion here today is really to cover the arc of the crisis. What we want to do is talk about the choices made to address the biggest problems they confronted, to assess their choices, and then to look at the risks and the tools that are available today.

And this rock-star trio presided over a time when there were no good options. As we discussed back at the time, they were consistently choosing between least-worst options. And I firmly believe that the United States and the world economies would have been in a much worse place without their leadership and the decisions that they made.

But now here we are ten years later on the reunion tour. (Laughter.) And so they are asked—and you do get...