Imagination before hubris
Don’t just do better, be better. That was the exhortation that students attending the 2013 Finance Conference at Harvard Business School received Sunday from economist Lawrence H. Summers. Summers, a former U.S. secretary of the Treasury, was sharply critical of the financial system’s flaws and excesses of the last 30 years and laid out his view of the fundamental changes that the next generation of financiers should make if substantive reform is to occur. From 1946 to 1980, there were relatively few crises and few victims at the hands of the U.S. financial system, he said. Since then, the system has been routinely fraught with casualties, culminating in the 2007–08 economic meltdown. “The financial system has not produced obvious benefit in terms an improved allocation of capital. It seems again and again to have been a source of instability and disruption for the lives of huge numbers of people outside of it. And...