Stakeholder Symposium
Our first stakeholder symposium "The Untold Stories of the Financial Crisis: the Challenge of Credit Availability” was held at Durham University Law School on 26 September 2016. The full programme for the symposium is available here.
Keynote address
The Keynote Address, titled 'The Financial Crisis and Credit Availability: Cause or Effect' was delivered by Professor Steven Schwarcz, Duke University Law School. The full text of the keynote address was published in 72 The Business Lawyer 409 (Spring 2017). A working paper based on the address, including Professor Schwarcz's responses to questions that were posed by the audience, can be downloaded here.
Steven L. Schwarcz is the Stanley A. Star Professor of Law & Business at Duke University and founding director of Duke’s interdisciplinary Global Capital Markets Center (renamed the Global Financial Markets Center). His areas of research and scholarship include insolvency and bankruptcy law, international finance, capital markets, systemic risk, corporate governance, and commercial law. He holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering (summa cum laude) and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School. Prior to joining Duke, he was a partner at two leading international law firms. He also helped to pioneer the field of asset securitization, and his book Structured Finance: A Guide to the Principles of Asset Securitization is one of the most widely used texts in that field. Schwarcz has been the Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford, visiting professor at the University of Geneva Faculty of Law, senior fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School, and an advisor to the United Nations. He has given numerous university- and government-sponsored lectures worldwide. He also has testified before the U.S. Congress on topics including systemic risk, securitization, credit rating agencies, and financial regulation, and has advised several U.S. and foreign governmental agencies on the financial crisis and shadow banking. His article titled “Systemic Risk” (Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 97, No. 1) was the second-most-cited law review article of 2008. Schwarcz is a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy and the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers, a founding member of the International Insolvency Institute, Business Law Advisor to the American Bar Association, and Senior Fellow of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).
Stakeholder perspectives
Stakeholders from three organisations attended the symposium to discuss the impact of the financial crisis on the individuals, businesses, and organisations with which they worked. Shona Alexander, chief executive of Citizens Advice Newcastle, gave a presentation discussing the problem of high-cost credit, and the impact of the crisis on the demand for high cost-credit, as well as the new forms of high-cost credit that have begun to proliferate since the crisis. Annie Murphy, Community Development Officer at Moneywise, a credit union serving Tyne & Wear and County Durham, discussed the role credit unions play, the lending practices they seek to combat, and the work that needs to be done to support credit unions in their mission of playing a bigger role. Simon Hanson, North-East Development Manager for the Federation of Small Businesses, gave a presentation discussing the range of ways in which changes to lending practices after the crisis had affected small business, the reasons why government policies had failed to address the needs of small businesses, and the ways forward to create more resilient policies that recognised the role of small businesses.
A fuller report and summary will be available on this site very shortly.