Teaching and research distractions have again kept me from blogging for a while. I guess my defense is that learning the facts is always an important precursor to writing about them. This morning, however, I decided to divert from class…
Author Archive for lawrence baxter
Lawrence Baxter is a professor of the practice of law at Duke University in Durham, NC. In his varied career Lawrence has taught law in the United States, South Africa, Australia, Belgium and Hong Kong, consulted for agencies of the federal government and worked on the staff of the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs during the period of reform after the Savings & Loan Crisis of the late 1980s, and has gained extensive experience in the business of financial services and e-commerce as a corporate executive vice president with one of the largest financial companies in the US. He was educated in law and business at the University of Cambridge, England, and University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) in South Africa. Lawrence currently teaches, researches and writes in the fields of domestic and international banking regulation and its reform, regulatory reform and the ethics of financial business. Lawrence is married to a pediatrician and has three daughters and a son.
you can’t fight complexity with complexity
by lawrence baxter • • 0 Comments
Andy Haldane’s speech at Jackson Hole today, The Dog and the Frisbee, is the single best speech by a regulator or financier anywhere in 2012. It is a splendid application of complexity science to the field of financial regulation. It…
so why is no one in jail?
by lawrence baxter • • 0 Comments
In the aftermath of the Savings & Loan (S&L) crisis of the 1980s, there were over 1800 criminal prosecutions and more than a thousand financial executives went to prison. So far the financiers who have met a similar fate in the…
the proverbial really does happen
by lawrence baxter • • 6 Comments
Less than a month ago I discussed the disaster being experienced by the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its Irish subsidiary as a result of a software installation screwup. For RBS the nightmare continues as it now calculates the…
the operational hazards of everyday banking
by lawrence baxter • • 1 Comment
The Irish Times is running a story today that provides a perfect example of why large, highly interconnected financial institutions can unexpectedly become very dangerous. Titled “Ulster Bank counts the cost of catastophic IT meltdown,” the report describes the misery…
has the great big bank die off begun?
by lawrence baxter • • 0 Comments
Bob Diamond and Jamie Dimon are two of the best bankers America has ever produced, and JP Morgan Chase and Barclays are among the great banks of the world. These facts might be lost in the current cacophony of public…
pareto redux
by lawrence baxter • • 0 Comments
To anyone who has noticed that theParetoCommons has been dormant during the past six months I owe an explanation for the hiatus and my thanks for bothering to read this post after so much time. (Indeed, were it not for…
the widening financial gyre
by lawrence baxter • • 0 Comments
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, (from William Butler Yeats’ The Second Coming (1919))…
rogue traders and stormy weather
by lawrence baxter • • 0 Comments
I tell my class that a crisis can spring from the most unexpected sources. You never see the lightning that strikes you. Now we focus on some of the most obvious risks, such as a sovereign debt default. As Howard…
complexity theory going mainstream
by lawrence baxter • • 1 Comment
I am one of those who believes that we cannot possibly meet the challenges presented by the modern financial system, whether global or domestic (it’s almost all the same now), by using the traditional precepts of regulation. These precepts presuppose…
