Lessons from the Global Financial Crisis of 2008

This is a revised version of a lecture presented at Seoul National University on October 27, 2009. The author is indebted to Jill Blackford and Eamon Kircher-Allen for preparing the lecture for publication. The author is University Professor at Columbia University, Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester University, and co-president of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. This lecture is based on research supported in part by the Ford and Hewlett Foundations. A fuller articulation of many of these ideas (and references to the research on which they are based) is contained in Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the Global Economy, New York: WW Norton, 2009.