Event:  January 2011 Meeting

Topic:  Regulating Wall Street – Dodd-Frank Act and Other Regulatory Responses

On July 21, President Obama signed into law the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This far-reaching legislation contains a great many provisions affecting the banking industry but gives relatively little attention to the insurance industry, and that is mostly in one section of the act. Included is the creation of a Federal Insurance Office (FIO) within the Department of the Treasury, and state-based insurance reform. Our speaker will discuss the events leading up to the financial meltdown of 2007-09, highlight some of the regulatory responses to avoid a repeat of this in the future, and attempt to draw some implications for the future of the financial services industry..

Speaker:   Elijah Brewer III, Ph.D.
Elijah Brewer is currently a professor of finance at DePaul University where he teaches courses in commercial banking, money and banking, international finance, financial management, and business conditions.  He was a senior economist and assistant vice president in the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for over 25 years. His responsibilities were to oversee the antitrust analyses of bank holding company applications in the seventh Federal Reserve district and conduct economic research. His current research includes bank merger activity, deregulation, and corporate governance structure; derivatives activity, bank risk taking propensity, and portfolio choice; executive compensation, expanded powers, and performance in the banking industry; the wealth effects of financial institutions’ bankruptcy announcements; mutual to stock conversions of financial services firms; and the role of small business investment companies in financing the activities of small businesses.  Professor Brewer has written on deposit insurance and bank stability, risk management, expanding banks’ permissible non-banking activities, the trade off between risk and return, the relationship between risk and capital, and the effects of derivative usage on the performance of depository institutions.
 
Date:  Wednesday, January 26, 2011 
3:30 Registration  /  4:00 Speaker  /  5:00 Hors d’oeuvres reception 
Location:  Blue Cross & Blue Shield of IL
              300 E. Randolph St., Chicago, IL 60601
              Columbus Room C