Dr. Catherine Weaver, Research Coordinator for the Strauss Center welcomed Dr. Mark Blyth, Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, on November 16, 2009, to present lessons learned from his research on the global financial crisis.
Dr. Blyth discussed the American housing bubble from 1999 to 2007 and its relation to the global stock market and commodities systems. He shed light on the reasons that led to the bubble bursting and described the impact of bank behavior and falling asset prices. Dr. Blyth explained the changes in consumption pattern, government policies, and compared the characteristics of markets in the U.S., France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and Japan. Finally, he made policy suggestions and also discussed the opportunities and problems related to those suggestions.
Dr. Blyth responded to the audience’s questions on stressed assets and benchmarks, pros and cons of senior debt, issues of transparency in the market, Islamic financial institutions and the status of U.S. dollar. He used graphs to further explain the systemic risks and regulatory responses.
Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University. His research interests fall into three main areas: how ideas get into policy; how we understand change in complex systems, especially financial systems; and the politics of global finance more generally. He is the author or editor of several books including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and most recently Constructing the International Economy (with Rawi Abdelal and Craig Parsons, Cornell University Press 2010). His academic articles have appeared in such journals as The American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Politics, World Politics, Perspectives on Politics and Revue de la Régulation.