We simply have to face the fact that banking is fundamentally risky. As I decided long ago when working in banks, the reason we needed to wear dark suits and have classic buildings was to look conservative in order to offset the real riskiness of what we were doing. 

Instead of placing undue reliance on all-too-fallible bank supervisors and regulators, should we not now be considering doing something serious about the perverse incentives to overly risky bank lending, as well as to the ‘too big to fail’ problem in the US and global banking systems.

Can the current post-Bretton Woods international monetary system prevent a return to the beggar-thy-neighbor policies and competitive devaluations that so harmed international prosperity in the 1930s? What are the system's flaws? Can they be corrected, and if so, how? An expert panel will address these and related issues.

Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee (SFRC) is a group of publicly recognized independent experts on the financial services industry--including banking, insurance and securities--who meet regularly to study and critique regulatory policies affecting this sector of the economy.

A potential European banking crisis would spill over to the US financial system, which has very close links to the European banking system.

Financial markets around the world experienced tumultuous swings following Standard & Poor's first-ever downgrade of the U.S. credit rating on Aug. 5. An ongoing European debt crisis and forecasts for sluggish economic growth worldwide are also rattling investors.

A banking crisis in Europe, coupled with a renewed European economic downturn, will have serious implications for the global economic recovery.