Thursday 21 August 2008

Zurich credit crisis conference assembles researchers from Europe, US and Asia


Lending behaviour, securitization and credit rating practices will be the focus of an upcoming conference organized by the BSI Gamma Foundation in Zurich. "The Credit Crisis: Causes, effects and lessons", September 2nd, is jointly organized with Finrisk and the SFI and will be hosted at the Swiss Exchange convention center.

Researchers from the IMF, University of Chicago, Hong Kong University and the Bank of England will present their findings on the crisis that initially, or at least officially, started in 2007 as a problem in the US subprime mortgage market.

The picture shows the results of a google trends search for the terms "credit crisis" and "easy credit". I offer this picture lightly, of course. But it acts as a nice heuristic for the relatively recent recognition of the crisis, and even suggests a weak anti-correlation between the two terms. For a more substantial SFI posting on the credit crisis click here.

Click here to register for the conference (deadline is next Monday, August 25th). I will post a report shortly after the event. Note that the conference academic director René Stulz will stay on in Switzerland the following week to teach a week-long course in integrated risk management in Geneva.