In a recent panel conversation at Wharton, Finance Professor Franklin Allen discussed the causes of our current financial maelstrom. His sense of it was that there was still more to come and that it could all feed on itself. And with all of the problems that confront U.S. companies, city governments, state governments, the federal government, and--yes--the individual American homeowner, there are still unanswered questions, including:

• What are the longer-term impacts for the international players--companies, governments, and people--outside the U.S.? How bad can things get there?
• What exactly went wrong, and do we have problems with the way we regulate?
• How appropriate is the comparison between our real estate and financial bubbles and Japan own twin bubbles in the 1980's? (Short answer: "perhaps much more appropriate than it appeared just a year or two ago....")
• What lessons can and should we take away from Japan's Lost Decade?
• If we had the years 2000 and 2001 as "do-over" years, what should we have done differently?
• How important are globally-coordinated responses to the problems many countries are now facing?

Join us for the next in a series of Faculty Conference Calls and a lively discussion as we continue to wrap our intellectual arms around these issues facing our country and the world.

Register Online
When: Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
Time: 12:00pm west coast time
Where: Via Conference Call (Dial-in and pass code to be provided the day before the event by e-mail.)
Registration: No charge for current WCNC members--WCNC members only. Registration closes at 6:00pm PDT Monday, October 27th. (Note: although there is no event registration fee for WCNC members, "seating" will be limited at this event--please register only if you are confident you'll be able to attend.)

Prof. Franklin Allen
Franklin Allen is the Nippon Life Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics at The Wharton School. His research areas include corporate finance, asset pricing, and economics of information, and his current projects include financial crises and the comparison of different countries' financial systems. He has been winning teaching awards at Wharton for almost 25 years (since 1984!), and he is well-known to alumni from the undergraduate, the MBA, and the Executive MBA programs. His publications include the just-published Mark-to-Market Accounting and Liquidity Pricing paper in the Journal of Accounting and Economics. Prof. Allen is co-author of Understanding Financial Crises (2007).