The idea was to find an environment that fostered learning for learning’s sake. So, in a small act of rebellion—after all, it was the early 1970s and I was a teenager—I decided to transfer to New College in Sarasota, Florida. New College provided a strong liberal arts, cross-disciplinary, and flexible education program that relied—as it does today —on an unstructured format of evaluations, study programs with individual professors, and contracts rather than grades. I like to call it “graduate school for undergraduates,” because it really is a place that encourages students to engage intellectually, read and think critically, and communicate effectively. This experience made me a strong advocate of a liberal arts education, which I believe is now more valuable than ever, given the greater importance of synthesizing and evaluating the vast array of information we have at our fingertips. The cross-disciplinary approach of a liberal arts program is also vital to understanding and solving complex problems. I believe that training— combined with the excellent education in economics I got at Berkeley—helped me to better diagnose what was going wrong in 2007 and 2008, and how the Federal Reserve could be most effective in our response to the crisis. Economic and monetary policy outlook Turning to the economic outlook, the damage wrought by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria has imposed immeasurable hardship on many. And, the damage will undoubtedly disrupt commerce for some time. However, these effects are likely to be relatively modest in the context of the national economy.
Andrew G Haldane: Control rights (and wrongs) Text of the Wincott Annual Memorial Lecture by Mr Andrew G Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, of the Bank of England, Westminster, London, 24 October 2011. *  *  *  The views are not necessarily those of the Bank of England or the Financial Policy Committee. I would like to thank Evangelos Benos, Fergus Cumming, Jonathan Grant, Sam Harrington, John Lane, Iryna Kaminska, Priya Kothari, Fiona Mann, Vasileios Madouros, Roland Meeks, Joseph Noss, Peter Richardson, Victoria Saporta, Rhiannon Sowerbutts, Mervyn Tang, Matthew Willison and Peter Zimmerman for comments and contributions. Introduction It is a great pleasure and privilege to be presenting this year’s Wincott lecture. Banks are special. That has long been recognised in the design of their ownership, governance and regulation. This special status can have strange consequences. The historical distribution of risks and returns in banking is one. For a century, both risks and returns have been high. But while the risks have typically been borne by wider society, the returns have been harvested by bank shareholders and managers. The experience of the past two decades illustrates well this imbalance. In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest banks in the United States earned on average $ million. That was almost 100 times the median US household income. By 2007, at the height of the boom, CEO compensation among the largest US banks had risen almost tenfold to $ million.