Conference Grant Reports: William Morgan and Financial Rationalities
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. William Morgan traveled to Brussels to participate in the Intersetions of Finance and Society Conference.
Thanks in part to a generous grant from the Berkeley Center for New Media, I was able to attend and present at the Intersections of Finance and Society Conference in Brussels. The conference was a two-day event hosted by the Finance and Society Network and Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The conference featured a keynote address by Daniela Gabor who spoke in part about different green macrofinancial regimes in terms of desrisking. Gabor highlighted how the Fed and the ECB had backed away from strong climate leadership to instead let the demands of capital dictate policy. Gabor's published work on financial repo markets was already quite interesting to me; her research on repo markets' systemic fragility and their influence on greenwashing and credit creation is especially relevant to my own thinking about cybernetic finance.
During the conference, I presented a paper as part of the Financial Rationalities panel. On that panel was also Timo Walter who gave a paper on the subject of economic futures and predictions that I found quite useful. Timo and I have continued to converse about predictions and have a shared interest in the work of Karl Deutsch. Similarly, Kristian Hansen was another speaker on our panel. I learned that Kristian had had as one of his doctoral mentors a close friend of mine with whom I had just published on a similar subject as his talk, which was titled "Deep hedging: The adoption of deep learning and synthetic data in derivatives markets." Overall the conference was a rousing success and I am thankful to BCNM for the help making my attending possible.