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Jong Nam Oh: Oh Goodmorning everyone, good evening to New York. Welcome to the session, Live on Wallstreet. I’m Jong Nam Oh, professor at Seoul University and advisor to . I worked for Korean government for 30 years as an economic bureaucrat during Korea’s financial crisis. I’m the chairman of and another as an IMF executive board member. This morning I am honored to be moderator for this session.

This session will be live video conference. We’ll get a live view from Wallstreet in New York financial center of current financial crisis. Let me briefly introduce the distinguished panel members. From New York, we have James Wolfensohn, chairman of Wolfensohn & Company LLC. As you may know, Mr. Wolfensohn was the 9th president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, including the Asian Financial Crisis. Mr. Wolfenson, we welcome you.

Next person from NY is Mr. Alexander, chief economist of Citi group, he joined Citigroup in 1999. He is one of the most popular economists. Let’s welcome Mr. Alexander.

Another economist from New York he is Professor Ken Noble, former Chief Economist to the IMF and professor of Economy and Public Policy at Harvard University. Professor Noble has been widely published including international finance, open economy, policy, budget factors, and development. Professor Noble, we welcome you.

Now we have another panel member with us here in Seoul – Mr Jeffrey Shafer, Vice President of he is also for Citigroup. Before joining Citigroup in 1997, he was the assistant secretary and undersecretary from 1993-1997.

This session will be run live between the New York and Seoul. I’d like to take advantage of this Live at Wall Street solutions on the financial crisis. Now that we have distinct members from New York, I’d like to start by this question. We have seen so many ups and downs, what happened there in New York? Today here in Korea, our stock market also experiences the same and our exchange rate also experiences the same. Mr. Wolfensohn, I’d like to seek your advice. What happened there? And what are the backgrounds of this

Jong Nam Oh: What happened there in New York, today in Korea, are stock markets are also facing the same problems. Mr. Wolfensohn, I’d like to start with you. What’s happening there? What’s the background?

James Wolfensohn: Well, thank you very much, professor, can you hear me alright? Oh good. The first thing I want to say is that I’m extremely sorry that I’m not able to keep my promise to be there in person, but as you all know, because of what is happening with the stock market, there’s every reason why I had to stay in New York with my colleagues.

The situation is of course very difficult at the moment and it is the result of things that have been happening over the last twelve months. All of the financial markets in our country became very complicated for those who participated in terms of the instruments being traded and used in the U.S. market place is the substantial increase in consumer borrowing, 130%, an enormously high figure, so we were very significantly extended. The negative saving rate combined with overspending, and the tendency to spend more than you earned, puts us into this most difficult situation, which led, first and foremost, to the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, thereafter the collapse of financial institutions, such as the Lehman Brothers, and of course, now companies in your part of the world, such as AIG. And so this led, after a period of three to four months to a critical situation, in which the government sought to intervened to calm the markets, with the emergency economic bailout and the government indicated it would put up $700 billion. And so then many governments and companies came forward with financial programs that would deal wit the crisis.

In recent days the program has been expanded from $700 billion by another $250 billion, a 125 billion of which has gone to 9 banks

This has received favorable comments and yesterday financial leaders were making a speech in new york describing the strength of the intervention and saying that this was a forthright statement by the government to make sure the commercial paper market and other instruments will be supported

They also spoke of the economic activity being restored, and said that it will not happen right away. While you were sleeping, there was a drop of 730 points in the index. I think, one of the largest, if not the largest drop in recent times.

And so for the marketplace, where it is day for you, and now night for us. This is a serious fall where there is already the appearance of the steps that will be taken by our government, and there have already been indications that the market has yet to be convinced about the futility of the intervention.

What we need of course is to restore confidence after the stock market fall today, and this depends on the results of the rest of this week. Of course we are hoping that things will modulate and things will turn around, but as the chairman of the Fed said today, it will probably not happen today.

Jong Nam Oh: Thank you, Mr. Wolfensohn. Next I’d like to ask Mr. Alexander how do you diagnose the current crisis from an economic perspective?

Mr. Alexander: Well this current crisis started with a housing bubble in the United States. It reached its peak by the end of 2005, the beginning of 2006. This generated losses in the core institutions in the financial sector. Those loses in turn forced those core institutions to retrench, so they reduced their lending, they tried to shrink their balance sheets, pretty much across the system. That meant higher risk premiums, lower equity prices, higher mortgage rates, things like that. Now, the current financial condition, which really began over a year ago, has had two sets of effects.

First of all, it revealed weaknesses of our financial system, which I think were underappreciated. Our system was more dependent on liquidity and leverage, but I think that most of us have recognized. And that has meant that this adjustment has proven to be more difficult to correct and longer lasting than I think was originally expected. Now the US economy was dealing with the correction for the housing for several years before the crisis. But now we’re sort of dealing with the consequences of the tighter financial conditions.

Clearly the wealth of housing sector has been diminished and is deteriorating. You’re also seeing credit being tightened. Most recently in the last four weeks or so with this extreme turmoil, we also started to see a sharp loss in confidence and a sharp increase in risk aversion across the economy. Jong Nam Oh: Thank you Mr. Alexander. Let’s move on to Seoul this time. Mr. Shafer, do you have any additional comments on reversing the current financial crisis?

Jeffrey Shafer: OK, do you want to move on to “how do we get out?” That’s probably right. Mr. Wolfensohn and Mr. Alexander have given you a great picture of what happened and how we got here. I’d just want to emphasize something Jim said; this is not just U.S. crisis anymore, and it’s not just a spillover of what happened in the U.S., especially in Europe – you look back in many of the same condition we have had in the market in America, and I think, before we think about how we get out, its important to step back from what Jim said and identify three areas of failures that contributed to this. One, in the US, very serious failures of consumer protection, and business practices were allowed to go on unchecked by the authorities. More generally, in mortgage market, buyers were systematically encouraged to take mortgages that were inappropriate; they were often encouraged by mistaken data. The fact is, it would not have created a major crisis, if the buyers have been doing their job. There are also major failures with risk management. There are many elements to that – loss of information when debt and mortgage portfolios were made. There were failures of modeling, which ignored well known features of security crisis – more frequent extreme events than the models presumably assumed. The correlation tends to change in time to stress the major failures of risk management areas. Third, I think there was a failure to recognize, and I have to admit, that I did not recognize it myself, the vulnerability of the modern financial system to lose confidence on the loss of liquidity, and that’s the critical problem we’re dealing with now. I must say that it’s building up but I felt there is nothing it could happen in the market that could prevent it. The freezing of the money market has gotten deeper and deeper. To get out, the first thing we need to do is to get the money market working, then get the credit markets working then get the economy moving ahead again. The focus last weekend at the IMF and World Bank meeting was putting together the global approach to deal with getting the markets functioning again. Appropriate responses from the leaders were putting capital back in the bank, providing additional liquidity mechanisms, and to guarantee deposits. I think that is the right response. It is the way to get things started. I think the right thing is continue down this road, and the government has to demonstrate they’re fully committed and restore more confidence. I remember back when I was working with the Korean government in early 1988, the government kept at it, stayed on its course, and companies made returns. Once they returned, there was a wall of money to support the economic recovery.

Jong Nam Oh: So we want to hear your analysis on the current financial process. And also we would like to hear your views including the Korean economy?

You are not in academia only but you have experience in the IMF and Federal Reserve experience so we want to hear your diagnoses on the current financial crisis. And also we’d like to hear your insights on the impact on Global Economy, including the Korean economy.

Ken Noble: It’s a pleasure to speak again for the World Knowledge Forum after coming a couple years ago to Seoul and I hope to come again. But I’m happy to participate live from Wall Street. It’s also a pleasure to be with such a distinguished panel including Mr. Shafer, Mr. Noble and especially Mr. Wolfensohn.

I think I’ll pick on a point that Mr. Schafer said moments ago. We built up this elaborate financial edifice with all sorts of rocket science ideas like options and securitization and lots of fancy innovations yet at the end of day, it has proven as vulnerable to good old fashioned banks runs as our system was in the 1930s. And Jeff Shafer described it is a systemic loss of confidence and loss of liquidity and that’s exactly what a bank run is. I think there are some elements of what we’re seeing having to do with the financial edifice that’s grown too big, that is needed to shrink. The financial services sector in the US was accounting for 30% of corporate profits and 10% of wages. This is sector that was supposed to be helping savers get their money to lenders making things more efficient. But it’s not supposed to be taking up that big a chunk of the economy. It’s not supposed to be a tax on the economy. Some of the changes that we are seeing, even though they may be at lightning speed, may possibly ultimately lead to a healthier system despite the painful process. Drawing on my experience at the IMF, it is interesting to look at parallels between what the US has experienced and what many emerging markets have experienced in their crises and what other industrialized countries have experienced. We don’t know how this will play out yet but we can certainly look at what happened in the run-up to the crisis. There are many, many parallels between what has happened in the US and what’s happened in a typical financial crisis. The housing price problem, the rise in indebtedness, the US current accounts, the big trade deficit that I and many others were warning about, and many other aspects of the system. There were a lot of warning lights blinking. And I think it’s important to underscore that during this period, Americans authorities were in denial. You probably listened to Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, we were told this was because US was a great economy and everyone wanted to invest here. But you know when you speak to others before a financial crisis, it’s a very similar tune because money is coming in because we’re so great, things are great, and there’s nothing to worry about because our economy is growing so fast. Indeed another part of the US economy that parallels this is denial. And the denial is more dangerous than the problem itself. When a country’s leaders recognize there is a problem, usually it’s very possible to deal with them but when you deny there’s a problem, you’re not alert or looking. The management of the crisis in the past year, the US has done the right thing but until recently it’s been too little, too late. Some of the problem comes from this political realm of this denial. Everything’s fine, we don’t need to do that much. We’ll just have an interest rate cut and call the doctor in the morning, this nightmare will go away. I hope that that denial passed. I think that the US should talk to emerging markets who have experienced crises like these. I think that if they had done that in the beginning, they would have gotten the advice that you have to stay ahead of the crisis. You can’t be a day late and a dollar short.

Jong Nam Oh: Mr. Wolfenstein, can you share with us your solution?

James Wolfensohn: Well I think that if I was able to solve this before the evening of the election, I’d be very much applauded in this country.

I have nothing dramatic to say, except what clearly needs to be done is to give the consumer in this country a sense of confidence that he can go out and start spending again, but also, hopefully, start saving again.

There is a need in this country into build some stability in the system as well as to getting t the engine pumping again.

We should not forget that the solution is not a spending spree. We need to go back, in our country at least, and get some fundamentals, and try to get saving money to be a worthy activity again, as well as appropriate spending when the consumer becomes more confident. We have a difficult task to do b/c the federal reserve and the treasury have done a great deal to ensure that liquidity gets put back into the system, and that commerce will be established with that liquidity.

But we still have to get through the question of the quality of assets of these institutions, and the overhanging debt of that institution by cleaning it out and by starting again with a base that will allow us to be a leader both in banking quality and economic activity.

And I don’t think I can say more than the chairman said himself today that this will not happen right away. But what I am pleased about it is that both parties, the democrats and the republicans, realize that this an important program that needs to be put together and it will be very surprising to me if – within days of the election - the first thing on the agenda is not addressing this economic crisis with whatever team can be put together. And having some leadership and recollection of confidence which will be essential for the economy to start again. I’m interested to hear what the my fellow panelists have to say because both have government experience in the treasury, or in the federal reserve, so we have people who are much more skilled than I who could answer this question.

Prof. Rogoff: Haha so was Jeff Shaffer.

Jong Nam Oh: Two days ago, the US announced to invest $125B to 9 US banks and to use another $125B to recapitalize other banks. Professor Rogoff, what is your opinion? Would it pump up the US economy? And eventually the global economy?

I’ll start with your second question it won’t pump up the US economy enough to prevent a recession and global economy will also experience recession and as Mr. Alexander said, Europe and Japan are already in recession. Had the US not intervened, it will get a serious situation. All confidence had been lost. If you look at emerging markets like Mexico and Argentina, all confidence is lost. It wasn’t just the money they put in, they guaranteed the banks wouldn’t fail. This was a very important step. US following the leadership of Europeans. Once the Europe backed their banks, we had no choice.

It was good but really only stopped the hemorrhaging. The worst has stopped but many difficult decisions how to recreate the financial system. Will be have diverse structure? How will we deal with American consumer who hasn’t been saving for a decade – has savings rate of 0. See housing prices fall, equity prices fall, they won’t consume at the same rate. If they hadn’t done this bailout plan, we would be looking at another Great Depression.

Jong Nam Oh: Thank you so much. Mr. Alexander. Since the collapse of major banks there have abeen a lot of criticism about the US financial system. Will we see another system to replace the old system?

If yes what are the characteristics of a new or improved system? Mr. Alexander: I think we learned a lot in the last year about how the system evolved. The cause was the global financial system. It wasn’t just a US problem. But there are many things that need to change. One of the first points I’d like to make is that market discipline is doing a lot better already. Many of the practices, many of the world practices that led to his crisis have already been stopped. To some extent, there is a process with market discipline that is growing the transformation.

We also need to have more robust financial institutions. More diverse financial institution. Less dependence on leverage.

Now I want to add that its’ not just the structure of the financial institutions that matter. What of the things we learned is that the how the securities market is run also makes it really vulnerable. So we’ll have to change that. And of course we’re going to have more and different sources of regulation.

All of that will be a major challenge in the near future. And just let me end on two points about that international conflict. First of all, if we don’t do this globally, then it’s not going to work. So this is going to be a real challenge for global cooperation to find a system that works globally The second point is that this is a great opportunity for emerging markets. The changes in our core and system can provide a model for how merging economies should develop their financial systems.

Jong Nam Oh: Thank you, Mr. Alexander.

Jeffrey Shafer: The government funds into major financial institutions, reversing the trend. Is this something we expect to continue, or is it temporary? Currently incomes are declining, and how can we help people, to consume more? These are questions that people in New York should answer.

Jong Nam Oh: Why we work on --- particular retirees due to provide –

James Wolfensohn: I think we have several questions on the table at the moment ---

Louis: -- basically grain or us political system – having said that it is hard at this moment to see how we get ot eh other side of that and I think you know its diff to know how long—sufficiently at odds – basic -??

Prof. Rogoff: I completely concur – which I think is clearly – during this period when the government has cast safety net --- these are much bigger problems to deal with – how we do put the system back on its feet? --- equity possessions – how we can save more –

Jong Nam Oh: I’d like to ask each of you to give us your insight on advice on the Korean—

James Wolfensohn: I’d like to start on that --- and that I must say that when I came out there I had very little advice – taken aback by result of Korean people at that time --- to work together and collect dough --- create dough – something that I had never seen in any other part of the world – absent – so my guess is if you’re confronted with this problem --- impacts of it you will --- with your national intent andi just hope very much that considerable savings rate – great conservatism --- I don’t’ know what your current savings rate is, but it used to be ----

Jong Nam Oh: Thank you Mr. Wolf, thank you for your kind words, Lewis next?

Lewis: ---but I’m struck by the fact that it is a relatively normal – it is not a crisis – I think it speaks --- it’s something I see --- and exchange rates were brutal --- appreciate it --- things are changed, and progress has been made –

Prof. Rogoff: If I might add something – ground zero – in Seoul, or more broadly in Asia, ultimately – that is not to say certainly Korea is facing difficulties – the decline , the remarkable decline --- but I don’t think it’s a situation – we are the ones that --- I think maintain calm discipline – best advice

Jeffrey Shafer: It shouldn’t change, on the other hand, you need to do what I see – recognize global economy has been more volatile --- one strength --- I discovered recently --- I don’t think there is any other economy in the world --- there’s gonna be big differences --- part of the response is -----continuing--- Jong Nam Oh: Thank you very much, another question --- Goldman Sachs, ----

Copyright World Knowledge Forum 2008 All Rights Reserved.

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