The web site, The Baseline Scenario, provides resources to understand the current global financial and economic crisis.
The first item on the web site, Global Crisis Orientation, suggests four ways for getting the most out of the site.
Today there was a webcast of Simon Johnson’s class on the global crisis at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. A recording will be available to download later in the week, probably on Thursday.
There was some tutorial information at the beginning of the class to explain some of the issues in the crisis. In particular, I learned some facts about CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) that I wish I had understood months ago.
The members of the class had diverse backgrounds in industry, finance, real-estate, and government from many countries around the world. The information and points of view that they contributed to the discussion was most enlightening.
Thanks to RichardH for letting me know about the webcast in time for me to view it live.
19-Nov-2008 Update
In the description for the Senate Budget Committee hearing at which he was supposed to testify today, the listing is Dr. Simon Johnson — Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
According to the book Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency by Robert Kuttner,
Peter G. Peterson, the onetime secretary of commerce under Richard Nixon and billionaire former partner of the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, has written four books over the past two decades bemoaning the cost of entitlements and forecasting disaster. Peterson recently endowed the Peter G. Peterson Foundation with a personal gift of a billion dollars, about half of his windfall from his sale of Blackstone just before the markets crashed
Kuttner finds Peterson’s view on entitlements profoundly naive and misleading.
I do not know how this association affects the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
As I was posting this, I was imagining my feelings if the discussion had been about a think tank funded by George Soros. Maybe I am over-reacting to Pete Peterson.