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B-Schools Respond to Financial Crisis
The media and the public have turned to business schools to make sense of the current financial crisis.
In the Wall Street Journal on October 2, R. Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer—the dean and senior vice dean, respectively, of Columbia Business School—proposed a plan to clean up the mortgage market. Hubbard and Mayer observed that falling housing values caused the credit market to seize up, perpetuating further declines in home prices and contributing significantly to the crisis. To stem this trend, they called on the government to push down residential mortgage rates to 5.25 percent, which they argued would be close to where mortgage rates would have been in a normally functioning market.
"I don't think we want to stand here and play chicken with the Great Depression," Peter Rodriguez, associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, told a packed auditorium at a September 24 panel discussion about the crisis. Rodriguez was one of six Darden professors who shared insights about the financial crisis.
In addition, many universities have reached out to alumni, who may feel the impact of the crisis. At Wake Forest University, for example, President Nathan O. Hatch and Dean of Business Steven S. Reinemund co-signed a letter to business school alumni urging them to tap into the university’s networks of graduates, parents, and friends.
Paul Bates, dean of the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Canada, discussed reasons for the crisis in a column September 27 in The Hamilton Spectator, an Ontario newspaper. Citing his business experiences, Bates opined that one important lesson is that “markets do recover.”
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