How am I bringing an educationally entrepreneurial spirit into higher education?

The originality of my research lies in clarifying and explaining what it means for me to have an educational entrepreneurial spirit and the values I hold that demonstrate this spirit in an explanation of educational influence in learning. This explanation includes a responsibility for students and acknowledging my values of passion and care (‘love’ of what I do), safety, creativity and excellence within my practice. The unit of appraisal in a living theory methodology is the explanation of the influence in my own learning, the learning of others and in the learning of social formations. The methodological inventiveness, particular to the Living Educational Theory methodology, has afforded me an opportunity to express who I really am; body, mind and spirit. I use multimodal forms to communicate and express of the nature of the knowledge that I am generating. I can now claim that my values have become living standards of judgement. Music plays an integral part of my life and has been a source of enjoyment and inspiration for me over the years. I have shown its importance by embedding it within my doctoral research to express and represent the meaning of emotion. I explain the importance of addressing emotion in education and the merits of reflecting on our experiences in order to become more educationally entrepreneurial, by taking risks, awakening our creativity and bringing ideas into action. Within these safe educational spaces I connect the head with the heart, marry the ‘sense and soul’ (Wilber, 1988) to combine a constructivist, behaviourist, cognitive pedagogical approach that avoids a fragmented learning experience as I inspire others to bring their ideas to fruition

Structural Causes of the Global Financial Crisis: A Critical Assessment of the ‘New Financial Architecture’

This PERI Working Paper argues that the ultimate cause of the current global financial crisis is to be found in the deeply flawed institutions and practices of what is often referred to as the New Financial Architecture (NFA) – a globally integrated system of giant bank conglomerates and the so-called ‘shadow banking system’ of investment banks, hedge funds and bank-created Special Investment Vehicles. These institutions are either lightly and badly regulated or not regulated at all, an arrangement defended by and celebrated in the dominant financial economics theoretical paradigm – the theory of efficient capital markets. The NFA has generated a series of ever-bigger financial crises that have been met by larger and larger government bailouts. After a brief review of the historical evolution of the NFA, this paper analyses its structural flaws: 1) the theoretical foundation of the NFA – the theory of efficient capital markets – is very weak and the celebratory narrative of the NFA accepted by regulators is seriously misleading; 2) widespread perverse incentives embedded in the NFA generated excessive risk-taking throughout financial markets; 3) mortgage-backed securities central to the boom were so complex and nontransparent that they could not possibly be priced correctly; their prices were bound to collapse once the excessive optimism of the boom faded; 4) contrary to the narrative, excessive risk built up in giant banks during the boom; and 5) the NFA generated high leverage and high systemic risk, with channels of contagion that transmitted problems in the US subprime mortgage market around the world. Understanding the profound problems of the NFA is a necessary step toward the creation of a new and improved set of financial institutions and practices likely to achieve core policy objectives such as faster real sector growth with lower inequality.

Structural Causes of the Global Financial Crisis: A Critical Assessment of the ‘New Financial Architecture’

The main thesis of this paper is that the ultimate cause of the current global financial crisis is to be found in the deeply flawed institutions and practices of what is often referred to as the New Financial Architecture (NFA) – a globally integrated system of giant bank conglomerates and the so-called ‘shadow banking system’ of investment banks, hedge funds and bank-created Special Investment Vehicles. The institutions are either lightly and badly regulated or not regulated at all, an arrangement defended by and celebrated in the dominant financial economics theoretical paradigm – the theory of efficient capital markets. The NFA has generated a series of ever-bigger financial crises that have been met by larger and larger government bailouts. After a brief review of the historical evolution of the NFA, the paper analyses its structural flaws. The problems discussed in order are: 1) the theoretical foundation of the NFA – the theory of efficient capital markets – is very weak and the celebratory narrative of the NFA accepted by regulators is seriously misleading; 2) widespread perverse incentives embedded in the NFA generated excessive risk-taking throughout financial markets; 3) mortgage-backed securities central to the boom were so complex and nontransparent that they could not possibly be priced correctly; their prices were bound to collapse once the excessive optimism of the boom faded; 4) contrary to the narrative, excessive risk built up in giant banks during the boom; and 5) the NFA generated high leverage and high systemic risk, with channels of contagion that transmitted problems in the US subprime mortgage market around the world. Understanding the profound problems of the NFA is a necessary step toward the creation of a new and improved set of financial institutions and practices likely to achieve core policy objectives such as faster real sector growth with lower inequality. JEL Categories:

Structural Contradictions of the Global Neoliberal Regime

A revised version of this paper is published in the Review of Radical Political Economics, September 2000

The Case for Capital Controls

A revised version of this essay appears in Unconventional Wisdom, (Twentieth Century Fund Press: New York, 2000), edited by Jeff Madrick.

Trading State-Led Prosperity for Market-Led Stagnation: From the Golden Age to Global Neoliberalism

In Dymski, Gary, and Dorene Isenberg, eds., Housing Finance Futures: Housing Policies, Gender Inequality, and Financial Globalization on the Pacific Rim, M.E. Sharpe, Inc. 2000.