Financial Markets - Audio Robert Shiller

The exchanges in which stocks and other securities are traded serve an important function in finance. They bring together people interested in buying and selling securities in order to create a universal price. Brokers and dealers are also an important part of the system, their methods and standards are ultimately behind the success of the exchanges. Many information innovations have advanced the functioning of exchanges, going all the way back to the ticker machine, which was created to communicate the price of securities at a point in time to all interested parties. Electronic Communication Networks and automatic exchanges, more generally, have significantly impacted the exchange of securities and few exchanges still have physical trading floors.

Most people are not very good at dealing in financial markets. Professional money managers, such as financial advisors and financial planners, assist individuals in matters of personal finance. FINRA and the SEC monitor the activities of these managers in order to protect individual investors. Mutual funds, exchange traded funds also exist to assist individual investments, and pension funds provide further services. These investment institutions help people to put money in diversified portfolios and, in some cases, reap some tax benefits for funding their retirement income.

Behavioral Finance is a relatively recent revolution in finance that applies insights from all of the social sciences to finance. New decision-making models incorporate psychology and sociology, among other disciplines, to explain economic and financial phenomenon, such as erratic stock price variations. Psychological patterns such as overconfidence and perceived kinks in the value function seem to impact financial decision-making, but are not included in classical theories such as the Expected Utility Theory. Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory addresses such issues and sheds light on irrational deviations from traditional decision-making models.

In the second of his two lectures in honor of Arthur Okun, Professor Summers points out that real interest rates have been very low in the current subprime crisis. This indicates that the shock to the economy was more a financial breakdown shock than a disinflation shock. But financial breakdown shocks are not necessarily very harmful to the economy, so long as financial intermediation capital is not destroyed. In a financial crisis like the present one, financial firms are likely to take the step of decreasing their leverage, often by contracting loans, which creates its own risks for the economy. Regulators should place pressure on financial institutions to raise their capital and should intervene in near foreclosure situations, but should not attempt to support housing prices.

Professor Summers, former U. S. Treasury Secretary and former President of Harvard University, in this the first of two lectures in honor of former Yale Professor and Council of Economic Advisors chairman Arthur Okun, offers thoughts on the role of monetary policy in economic fluctuations, past and present. In the "Okun period," ending about when Okun died in 1980, the monetary authorities were very much involved in actually creating economic contractions. Inflation would repeatedly get out of control, the Fed would hit the brakes, and the economy would slow. But, that is not the story of the economic cycles of the last two decades. Recent economic cycles appear to be connected with factors endogenous to the financial system, such as bubbles or cycles of complacency among lending institutions. Summers argues that to understand the financial markets and the economy, we must consider models of multiple equilibria, such as bank run models, where a change in confidence may shift the economy drastically without any change in fundamentals.

Professor Shiller, in his final lecture, reviews some of the most important tools for individual risk management. Significant inequality in domestic and international communities has created a need for social insurance programs, such as those created in Germany in the late 1800s. The tax system, bankruptcy laws, and government insurance programs are used to manage risk of personal wealth. However, each of these inventions must take account of psychological factors, such as moral hazard, in order to be effective without eliminating incentives to participate in the workforce, or other negative side effects. With regard to careers, including those in finance, young people should frame decisions with morality and purpose in mind, and with a broad perspective of both.