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Financial Services: Prospects for Your Future

Lawrence K. Fish Simon Johnson PhD '89: September 24, 2009; Running Time: 53:17

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

In a lively discussion with Simon Johnson,
Lawrence Fish deconstructs the near collapse of the banking system and points out the multiple factors that have contributed to the financial crisis.

Topics in the discussion include the banks that did not fail, how Canadian and other countries' banking systems also did not fail, the political landscape of banking regulation, ethics, bonuses in the banking industry and the ethics oath signed by 50% of the students at the Harvard Business School.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“There are no B pluses in ethics.
It's pass/fail.”

Lawrence K. Fish

About the Speakers

Lawrence K. Fish

Former Chairman and CEO, Citizens Financial Group
Member, MIT Corporation

Larry Fish is the Former Chairman and CEO of Citizens Financial Group, Inc., a multi-state commercial bank holding company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. Under Fish's leadership, CFG has grown 30-fold since he joined the company in 1992. It is one of the 10 largest commercial bank holding companies in the United States in total assets and deposits. Fish has over 35 years of experience in the financial industry and has served as a leader on several federal and international financial advisory boards including the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Advisory Council.

Simon Johnson PhD '89

Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management

Simon Johnson is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of a website on the global economic and financial crisis, BaselineScenario.com. He is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research project on Africa and President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (term of office 2008-09).

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Professor Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. In 2000-2001 Professor Johnson was a member of the US Securities and Exchange Commissions Advisory Committee on Market Information. Johnson is an expert on financial and economic crises. As an academic, in policy roles, and with the private sector, over the past 20 years he has worked on crisis prevention, amelioration, and recovery around the world, in both relatively rich and relatively poor countries.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and Cliometrica (a new Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History). In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor. Johnson earned his B.A. from the University of Oxford, his M.A. from the University of Manchester, and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Sloan School of Management

The MIT Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the world’s leading business schools — conducting cutting-edge research and providing management education to top students from more than 60 countries. The School is part of MIT’s rich intellectual tradition of education and research.

MIT Sloan began in 1914 as engineering administration curriculum in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today’s broad-based management school.

A program offering a master’s degree in management was established in 1925. The world’s first university-based executive education program — the MIT Sloan Fellows — was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., an 1895 MIT graduate who was then chairman of General Motors. A MIT Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with a charge of educating the “ideal manager.”