Finance

News

Speakers: Recovery towards what? Finance, justice, sustainability

24 August 2009 | Events

Recovery towards what?
Finance, justice, sustainability

6 November 2009 in London, UK

Introduction
Summary
Agenda
Speakers
Logistics

Barber, Brendan

Brendan Barber has been the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress since 2003, after serving as deputy general secretary for 10 years. He is also a non-executive director of the Court of the Bank of England and was a member of the ACAS Council from 1995 until 2004. He has worked in various roles at the TUC since 1975, including in policy, media relations, and industrial relations. Since becoming General Secretary he has been a driving force in the United Against Racism campaign. He has also played a prominent role in the establishment of the TUC Organising Academy – training organisers to help unions boost membership, and the Partnership Institute, whose aim is to promote partnership style relations between employers and unions.

Bayliss, Kate

Kate Bayliss works as a researcher for the Africa Water Project, Department of Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research interests have focused on privatisation and public sector reform of water and energy sectors with particular reference to sub-Saharan Africa. In 2008 she co-edited a book on the subject: Privatisation and Alternative Public Sector Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Ben Fine). She is currently working on urban water policy and successful alternatives to privatisation in the water sector in the region.

Biggeri, Ugo

Ugo Biggeri is president of the cultural foundation Responsabilità Etica.

He holds a Ph.D. in electronic engineering and a postgraduate degree in health physics, spending several years as a researcher and lecturer in physics at the University of Florence, before becoming a sustainability consultant in 2001. He was a member of the Italian delegation to the WTO conferences of Seattle 1999, Cancun 2003, and Hong Kong 2005. From 1996 to 1999 he presided over the Association Finanza Etica, and from 1997 to 2000 over the NGO Mani Tesi. In 1995 he founded the Cooperativa Banca Etica; and from 1998 to 2007 sat on its board. He is also part of the national certification board of ICA and coordinator of the fair “Terrafutura”.

Calaguas, Belinda

Belinda Calaguas joined ActionAid in Jnue 2007, as Director of Policy and Campaigns. She has had over 20 years of development experience, initially gained in the Philippines where she has worked as organiser, campaigner, development journalist, policy researcher and programme manager. She has worked on issues involving student rights and welfare, the urban poor and access to land tenure, farmers’ struggles to lower land rent and against land-grabbing, and women’s issues on reproductive health.

After coming to Britain in 1993, she headed an alliance of migrant and refugee community groups that advocated for refugees’ access to health, HIV-AIDS, immigration and social welfare services. She joined WaterAid as Advocacy Manager, later Head of Policy. She is a member of the International Working Group of The Water Dialogues and a member of the Advisory Panel of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Non-Governmental Public Action programme.

Chowla, Peter

Peter Chowla is Programme Manager on finance at the Bretton Woods Project (BWP), an independent initiative founded by a group of British NGOs. BWP works as a networker, information-provider, media informant and watchdog to scrutinise and influence the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Peter specialises in IMF government and policy issues. Before joining BWP in 2006, he worked with NGOs in India, doing research on urban air pollution and an equity framework for global climate negotiations, and as a financial journalist in South Korea.

Dlamini, Vincent

Vincent Dlamini is currently the General Secretary of National Public Services and Allied Workers Union (NAPSAWU), formerly known as SNACS (Swaziland National Association of Civil Servants). He was recently elected as the Deputy Secretary General of the Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions (SFTU). He began his activism many years ago when still in high school as a member of the then Swaziland National Union of Students (SNUS). From there he proceeded to the University of Swaziland where again he was active in student politics and also served in the executive committee of the Students Representative Council (SRC). Vincent is part of the broader masses of Swaziland who actively yearn for the introduction of multi-party democracy in their country.

Duménil, Gérard

Gérard Duménil is an economist and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He has published extensively in French, and some of his works published in English include the upcoming The Crisis of Neoliberalism: From the Subprime to the Great Contraction and Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution.

Dymski, Gary

Gary Dymski is professor of economics at the University of California, Riverside, and for the past six years has been director of the University of California Center Sacramento. He received his B.A. in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, an MPA from Syracuse University in 1977, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987. Gary’s most recent books are Capture and Exclude: Developing Nations and the Poor in Global Finance (Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2007), co-edited with Amiya Bagchi, and Reimagining Growth: Toward a Renewal of the Idea of Development, co-edited with Silvana DePaula (Zed, London, 2005). Gary has written extensively on banking, financial fragility and crisis, discrimination and redlining, exploitation, and the subprime lending crisis.

Elliot, Larry

Larry Elliot is economics editor at the Guardian, focussing on UK and global economy, trade and development. He is a visiting fellow at Hertfordshire University, and a council member of the Overseas Development Institute. He participated in the group that put together the proposal for a Green New Deal, published by the New Economics Foundation in 2008. He is the co-author of several books including Fantasy Island, in 2007, which warned that Britain’s growth under New Labour was a debt-driven illusion; and The Gods That Failed in 2008, an analysis of the events and forces that brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse.

Evans, Mel

Mel has been part of environmental and social justice art-activist group PLATFORM since July 2008, a horizontally run organization which straddles research, campaigning, art and intervention. When not researching UK banks financing of climate change, she has been know to join others in climbing aboard coal trains destined for Drax power station. Currently she is working hard on the application for a judicial review of the condition-free RBS bail-out and the grassroots mobilisations in Copenhagen, whilst being very excited about PLATFORM’s residency at the Arnolfini in Bristol.

Filomeno III Sta. Ana

Filomeno S. Sta. Ana III is the coordinator of the Manila-based Action for Economic Reforms. He is a contributing columnist for Business World, a Philippine business newspaper, and has been published in several volumes and journals. He is editor of a forthcoming volume on Philippine institutions, growth and prosperity. Development topics that interest him include fiscal policy (especially taxation), exchange-rate policy, and institutional reforms.

Fuller, Jane

Jane Fuller is co-director of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, an independent think-tank that promotes debate on the future of financial services. She is also the director of Fuller Analysis, an independent consultancy that she founded after leaving the Financial Times in 2005. In the financial reporting field, she chairs the Accounting Advocacy Committee of the CFA Society of the UK, part of the international financial analysts’ organisation. She was made a fellow of CFA UK in 2009.

Jane spent more than 18 years on the Financial Times, culminating in the role of Financial Editor, head of the Companies & Markets section. In that post she launched the FTfm fund management supplement and was part of the paper’s senior management team. She has been a Leader writer, a Lex writer and a Lombard columnist. She continues to have a training role at the FT and, with a colleague, is co-editor of Harriman’s Financial Dictionary.

Gao Haihong

Gao Haihong is a senior fellow and director of the research section on international finance at the Institute of World Economy and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Her research interests include international money and finance and regional financial cooperation. She has been a visiting research fellow to the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, World Bank, and a visiting scholar to the University of California., Davis.

Hines, Colin

Colin Hines is convener of the Green New Deal group and co-director of Finance for the Future, an entity set up to encourage investments in local authority bonds to reduce fossil fuel use. Before that he was the Co-ordinator of Greenpeace International’s Economics Unit having worked for the organisation for 10 years. He is an advisor to the Green Member of European Parliament Dr Caroline Lucas, and an Associate of the International Forum on Globalisation, a San Francisco based alliance of activists, academics and economists committed to challenging the adverse effects of globalisation and free trade and in the process to develop alternatives. Colin brought together a group of finance, tax, energy and environmental experts to form the Green New Deal Group, and he wrote the book Localization- A Global Manifesto (Earthscan).

Jomo K. S.

Jomo K. S. has been Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development in the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) since January 2005, and (Honorary) Research Coordinator for the G24 Intergovernmental Group on International Monetary and Financial Affairs since December 2006.

Jomo was Professor in the Applied Economics Department, Faculty of Economics and Administration, University of Malaya until November 2004, and Founder Chair of IDEAs, International Development Economics Associates. He has previously taught at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Cambridge, and the National University of Singapore. Jomo has authored over 35 monographs and edited over 50 books. His recent books include Bail-Outs? Capital Controls, Restructuring & Recovery in Malaysia (with Wong Sook Ching and Chin Kok Fay), The New Development Economics (with Ben Fine), and Flat World, Big Gaps: Economic Liberalization, Globalization, Poverty and Inequality.

Kachingwe, Nancy

Nancy Kachingwe works for ActionAid International as the International Policy Manager based in Johannesburg. She has been working in the African NGO sector on international and regional development policy issues in Brussels, Harare and Accra, covering issues such as trade and regional integration and women’s land rights.

Kennet, Miriam

Miriam Kennet is the co-founder and CEO of the Green Economics Institute, one of the largest Green Research Networks of its kind in the world. She is a member of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute and Mansfield College, Oxford University. She researches at Keele University’s SPIRE Research Centre and has researched into environmental economics at Oxford Brookes University and London University, South Bank. Furthermore, she teaches Sustainable Development to UK Government Departments as part of the National Government School.

She is founder and editor of the International Journal of Green Economics and editor of the Green Economics and Sustainable Growth Series of books by Gower Management Publishers and Ashcroft Academic Publishers. She is also on the editorial board of numerous academic journals including the International Journal of Industrial Ecology based in Finland and the Sindh Journal of Agriculture in Pakistan and several others, including the International Journal of Ecological Economics and Statistics based in India and the International Journal of Economics Philosophy based in Romania.

Lapavitsas, Costas

Costas Lapavitsas is Professor in Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He holds a PhD in Economics.

His research and teaching cover the relationship between finance and development, the structure of financial systems, and Marxist political economy. He has published extensively on the causes and consequences of financial crises and the role of banks.

Lent, Adam

Adam Lent was appointed Head of the Economic and Social Affairs Department at the Trades Union Congress in August 2006 and is responsible for research and the development of policies in a range of areas including public services, quality of work, macro-economic policy and labour markets.

Before joining the TUC, he was Research Director for the Power Inquiry, a Rowntree funded commission exploring how to increase and deepen political participation in the UK, and a freelance researcher, directing major projects for the Fabian Society and the New Local Government Network. Between 1996 and 2001, he was a lecturer and research fellow at the Department of Politics, Sheffield University following the completion of his PhD.

McKinley, Terry

Terry McKinley is professor and director of the Centre for Development Policy and Research at SOAS. His research interests cover growth, human development, employment, inequality and poverty, and he has published extensively in all of these areas.

Before joining the centre, he was director of the International Poverty Centre, UNDP, Brazil and UNDP Advisor on Economic Policies and Poverty Reduction. He has also written extensively in recent years on the issue of global imbalances (particularly US current-account deficits and China’s current-account surpluses), the inequitable distribution of global capital and the factors leading up to the current global crisis.

Melamed, Claire

Claire Melamed is the Head of Policy Coordination at Action Aid UK. Action Aid UK is part of Action Aid International, a unique partnership of people in over 50 countries who work together to end poverty.

Before joining Action Aid, Claire spent eight years working on trade and private sector issues for Christian Aid. Claire has also worked for the United Nations, taught at the Open University and the University of London, and has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Nissan, Sargon

Sargon Nissan is an analyst in the Business, Finance and Economics team at the New Economics Foundation, a London-based think-and-do tank, where his work focuses on alternative finance, regulation and financial reform. He began his career in international finance and in the UK hedge-fund sector focusing upon equity markets and the emerging economies of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Before joining the New Economics Foundation he worked for the UNDP in Damascus, Syria, on a grant-giving environmental program which focused on the well-being and livelihoods of small communities and provided support for microfinance. While at the UNDP Sargon also worked in a supporting role for the local economic development team.

Pettifor, Ann

Ann Pettifor is executive director of Advocacy International Ltd, a consultancy that specialises in working with low-income country governments and with organisations working to promote positive development, investment and environmental sustainability in those countries.

Ann has served on the Board of the United Nation’s Human Development Report on the MDGs (2003); as a member of the high level group of the Helsinki Process; and as Senior Associate of the New Economics Foundation.

As well as campaigning and advocacy, Ann Pettifor has contributed to academic debates about international finance. She is editor of The Real World Economic Outlook published in 2003; and wrote the book The Coming First World Debt Crisis, in 2006. She is the author of numerous articles and has lectured at the United Nations, the London Business School and the London School of Economics.

She has an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle; was awarded the Freedom of the City of Callao in Peru in 1999; the 2000 Pax Christi International Peace Prize; and was made a member of the Order of the Niger by President Obasanjo in 2002.

Phillips, Lauren

Lauren Phillips is lecturer in International Relations at the London School of Economics, specialising in International Political Economy. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the LSE.

From 2005 to 2008, she was a Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute in the International Economic Development Group. Before that, she held jobs at both an international NGO and a major Wall Street investment bank, and worked as a political risk analyst.

Powell, Jeff

Jeff Powell worked as Coordinator of the Bretton Woods Project, a UK NGO which acts as a watchdog of the World Bank and IMF. Jeff has also worked with community economic development initiatives in Southeast Asia and Latin America, with a special focus in community-level responses to financial crisis. He is currently pursuing doctoral research on the role of commercial banking in economic development at the department of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, building on previous academic work at ISS in the Netherlands and a business degree in Canada.

Raffer, Kunibert

Kunibert Raffer is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Vienna and Senior Associate of the New Economics Foundation.

He was a consultant to the UN Industrial Development Organization, the OPEC Fund for International Development, the UNDP, the G-24, Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, lecturer at UNITAR and Honorary Research Fellow of the Department of Commerce, University of Birmingham. His present work focuses on debts and trade, especially reform of debtor-creditor relations.

Rahman, Faisel

Faisel Rahman is Managing Director of Fair Finance. He has a background in international development, including Grameen Bank and the World Bank, where he focused on developing the microfinance sector and expanding it around micro enterprise. He also briefly worked as an underwriter for a syndicate at Lloyds of London and co-authored a number of books on charitable fundraising and trust funds. In 2000 he joined The Environment Trust in East London, where he developed a peer lending microcredit programme and an innovative and sustainable debt advice service. Faisel is currently a board member of the Debt On Our Doorstep Campaign and European Microfinance Network. In 2007 he was elected one of the first UK Ashoka Fellows in recognition of his work in social enterprise and the potential to make system changing impact through Fair Finance and in 2009 was recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He currently writes a monthly column in the Guardian newspaper on financial exclusion.

Rasmussen, Poul Nyrup

Poul Nyrup Rasmussen is one of the most prominent centre-left figures in European politics. He was first elected to the Folketinget (Danish Parliament) in 1988 for the Social Democratic Party, which he went on to chair; before becoming Prime Minister from 1993 to 2001.

He was elected to the European Parliament in 2004, where he sat on the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee. Since 2004, he has been President of the Party of European Socialists. He is also Co-Chair of the Global Progressive Forum.

As President of the PES, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen has been active in calling for better regulation and supervision of financial markets. In 2007 he co-wrote Hedge Funds and Private Equity, a Critical Analysis, a study that included concrete recommendations for reforming Europe’s financial markets. This was the basis for the ‘Rasmussen report’ of the European Parliament, adopted in September 2008. He has since played a leading role in ensuring that the European Commission gives a satisfactory response to the report. In 2009 Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was placed fifth on Financial News’ annual list of the 100 most influential people in European capital markets.

Reddy, Yaga Venugopal

Dr YV Reddy was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from 2003 to 2008. He has previously served as the RBI’s deputy governor and India’s executive director on the board of the International Monetary Fund.

He was Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science, a full-time UGC Visiting Professor in the department of business management, Osmania University; full-time Visiting Faculty, Administrative Staff College of India and continues to be the Honorary Senior Fellow at Centre for Economic and Social Studies at Hyderabad. He has also worked in the government of India and the state government of Andra Pradesh.

Ridpath, Barbara

Barbara Ridpath is Chief Executive of the International Centre for Financial Regulation, a global collaboration between key players in the private and public sector. The centre addesses the critical issue of financial regulation that faces the world’s economies by creating new thought leadership, scholarship and training for the financial industry.

Prior to her current position, from 2004-2008, Barbara was Executive Managing Director and Head of Ratings Services, Europe, for Standard & Poor’s. Barbara joined S&P in 1983 after three years as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She worked in S&P’s European network from 1986, holding a broad range of positions. Barbara spearheaded S&P’s move into international securitisation based in London in the late 1980s, and ran S&P-ADEF in Paris from 1990 to 1993. From 1993 to 1998 Barbara was a Senior Credit Officer at JPMorgan Europe, rejoining S&P in 1998.

Rodríguez-Ferrera, Jean Claude

Jean-Claude Rodriguez-Ferrera set up the Association for Community Development in 2004 from which he launched a program to create communities and networks with immigrants as a priority group. Jean Claude promotes small Self-Managed Financial Communities (CAFs) among low-income immigrants to allow these communities to access financial services such as micro-credit and micro-insurance through a simple, sustainable system of savings and loans. At the same time, CAFs provide a social network to often isolated immigrants.

Ruane, Sally

Sally Ruane is the Deputy Director of the Health Policy Research Unit at De Monfor University. Her research interests include the involvement of private companies in the NHS; PFI; health service reconfiguration; and tax reform. She is an active campaigner on the issue of retaining a publicly provided, publicly funded and democratically accountable health service.

Stichele, Myriam Vander

Myriam Vander Stichele is Senior Researcher at the Amsterdam-based Centre for Research on Multilateral Corporations and a Fellow of the Transnational Institute.

She has been monitoring international trade negotiations and agreements since 1990, both at a global level (WTO/GATT) and at a regional one, focussing in particular on free trade agreements related to the Lome and Cotonou agreements (EPAs). She has been trade coordinator and adviser for many NGOs, speaking extensively about trade and sustainable development. More recently, her research has focussed on the financial, food and supermarkets sectors, and the corporate strategies and services liberalisation related to these. In cooperation with southern organisations, she also researches investment agreements and policies, and private investor strategies in developing countries.

Vaccaro, James

James Vaccaro is Managing Director of Investment Banking (UK) at Triodos Bank, which specialises in ethical investment and was awarded the title Sustainable Bank of the Year in 2009.

He has worked for Triodos since 1998 and is a specialist in environmental and social finance. He is the Managing Director of Triodos Renewables plc (which invests in renewable energy projects), has worked on micorfinance projects in Africa & Asia and has been lead advisor to a number of ethical PLCs for public share issues including Cafedirect and the Ethical Property Company. He has been a non-executive director of several sustainability-led companies in the UK as part of venture capital portfolios. He is also on the Board of UKSIF (the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance association).

Véron, Nicolas

Nicolas Véron is a Research Fellow at Bruegel. He works at Bruegel on capital markets, financial services, and corporate strategies.

Before being involved in Bruegel’s creation and development since late 2002, his experience has been in both public policy, as a French government official, and corporate finance, including as chief financial officer of a listed company in Paris and as an independent consultant. His publications include policy papers, principally on financial supervision, corporate disclosure, and international investment, as well as a book on accounting standards and practices in a changing financial system (Smoke & Mirrors, Inc.: Accounting for Capitalism, Cornell University Press, 2006). He also writes a regular column for La Tribune, France’s second-leading business daily.

Wade, Robert

Robert Wade is Professor of Political Economy at the Development Studies Institute (DESTIN) at the London School of Economics. His research interests lie with trends in world poverty and income and wealth distribution, the functioning of multilateral economic organisations (eg World Bank, IMF, WTO), the US Empire and the developing countries, and industrial and technology policies, especially in developing countries.

Before he joined the LSE, Robert Wade worked at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, Princeton Woodrow Wilson School, MIT Sloan School, Brown University and the World Bank. He is the author of Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asia’s Industrialization (1990, 2003), which won the American Political Science Association’s award of Best Book in Political Economy, 1992. He was awarded the Leontief Prize in Economics, 2008, and is a member of the Financial Time’s Economists’ Forum.

Webster, Robin

Robin Webster – Friends of the Earth. Robin is head of Friends of the Earth’s Climate and Energy team, she has worked in NGOs and the wider environmental movement for nearly a decade has run campaigns on rainforest destruction, trade and food issues before her current role. She now leads Friends of the Earth’s work on renewable energy and low carbon growth.

Wilks, Alex

Alex Wilks is director of Eurodad (European Network on Debt and Development), a netw ork of 59 NGOs from 18 European countries working on issues related to debt, development finance and poverty reduction.

Before he joined Eurodad in June 2004 Alex Wilks established and ran the Bretton Woods Project from late 1995. The Project is a London-based non-government organisation which monitors the World Bank and IMF. Alex has also been a journalist for The Ecologist magazine and worked for an ethical investment company and has established innovative communications initiatives such as the IFIwatchnet and the World Bank president blog. He has written many articles and briefings, and has been active in many campaigns and protests on development and environment issues.

Williamson, Janet

Janet Williamson is a Senior Policy Officer at the TUC with responsibility for the TUC’s work on corporate governance, capital markets, institutional investment and financial regulation. Recent reports include the TUC’s evidence to the Treasury Committee inquiry into the banking crisis, the TUC’s Response to the Financial Market Regulation White paper, the TUC’s submission to the Walker Review of bank governance and the TUC response to the Financial Reporting Council review of the Combined Code.

Xiaoke Zhang

Xiaoke Zhang is Associate Professor in Political Economy and Asian Studies in the School of Politics and International Relations and a co-director of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, the University of Nottingham. His major research interests are in comparative and international political economy, with a regional focus on Asia-Pacific.

Before he joined the University of Nottingham in September 2003, Xiaoke Zhang worked at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the political economy of development, political institutions and economic policy, and global financial governance. His publications include The Changing Politics of Finance in Korea and Thailand (Routledge 2002) and International Financial Governance under Stress (Cambridge University Press 2003).