Major Gift Funds Expansion of Yale Program on Financial Stability

May 9, 2017—Yale School of Management (SOM) announced that $10 million has been raised to expand the Yale Program on Financial Stability (YPFS) and launch the “Crisis-Response Project.” This effort to codify best practices and provide training that can help governments fight financial crises is being supported by a group of esteemed business leaders and prominent philanthropies, including Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bill Gates, and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

To help guide this initiative, YPFS has expanded its Advisory Board, bringing in some of the most respected experts on the financial system. The Advisory Board is chaired by Timothy F. Geithner, and the full list of members is available at: som.yale.edu/ypfs-advisory-board. The new members are:

• Ben S. Bernanke, Distinguished Fellow in Residence, Economic Studies, Brookings Institution; Former Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
• Agustín Carstens, Governor, Bank of Mexico
• Arminio Fraga, Founding Partner, Gavea Investimentos
• Hank Paulson, Chairman, Paulson Institute; Former U.S. Treasury Secretary
• Kenneth Rogoff ’75 B.A., ’75 M.A., Professor of Economics and Thomas D. Cabot Professor Public Policy, Harvard University; Former Chief Economist, International Monetary Fund
• Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies, Singapore
• Masaaki Shirakawa, Special Professor of International Politics, Economics, and Communication, Aoyama-Gakuin University; Former Governor, Bank of Japan
• Dr. Zeti Aziz, Former Governor, Bank Negara Malaysia; Co-chair Board of Governors of Asia School of Business

Advisory Board chair Timothy F. Geithner said, “Our goal is to improve the quality of decision making by governments and central banks in financial crises. With a master class designed and led by practitioners and a full curriculum of cases from crises around the world, we hope this program will become a model for how to train the next generation of policy makers.”

With the Crisis-Response Project, the YPFS is creating an online platform to provide real-time decision support in financial crises. The project will synthesize the lessons from hundreds of interventions from past crises. The online platform will include individual case studies on every major intervention of the last century, with analysis of both best practices and common mistakes made by policymakers.

“Making sure the decision-makers are armed with the information they need is the first step toward ensuring an effective response to any crisis,” said Michael R. Bloomberg founder of Bloomberg LP, philanthropist and three-term Mayor of New York City. “By comprehensively studying what went right—and what went wrong—in the financial crises of the past, the Crisis-Response Project will give economists, central bankers, and policymakers essential tools to respond to the financial crises of the future.”

“Financial crises have enormous effects on the fiscal and economic health of a nation. It is critical to advance this research that integrates academic theory and policy practice in order learn about the prevention and management of financial crisis for the future,” said Pete Peterson, Chairman and Founder of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Andrew Metrick, Program Director of the Yale Program on Financial Stability and the Michael H. Jordan Professor of Finance and Management at Yale SOM, said, “The first time you contemplate a potential solution to a crisis shouldn’t be when you’re in the middle of one. Collectively, we must be better prepared for the next crisis. The Crisis-Response Project will do that.”

Peter Salovey, Yale University president and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, said, “We are grateful to Jeff Bezos, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bill Gates, and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation for supporting YPFS and the launch of the Crisis-Response Project. Their generosity will strengthen and extend the reach of YPFS programs, which will equip an influential community of scholars and practitioners with the knowledge to effectively manage financial crises.”

The Yale Program on Financial Stability was founded in 2013 by Professor Metrick. In its first three years, a generous series of grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation allowed YFPS to build a portfolio of projects and meetings to serve its mission to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge about financial crises. With this new support, YPFS will increase its focus on crisis management.

“In just a few years, YPFS has become the organization where regulators, policymakers, and central bankers go to learn about dealing with financial crises,” said Daniel Goroff, Vice President and Program Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The Sloan Foundation is proud to support this important work.”

The YPFS has become a hub of information and communication for economists employed in macroprudential roles in regulatory agencies and central banks. Through the Financial Crisis Forum, an annual meeting held as part of the Systemic Risk Institute, YPFS convenes senior officials from major central banks and regulatory agencies. The Forum presents a series of panels led by the major architects of crisis response in the Global Financial Crisis and in some of the previous major crises. Previous participants have included Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer; Agustín Carstens, governor of the Bank of Mexico; and Sir Paul Tucker, former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

Building upon these critical activities, Yale SOM announced in 2016 the launch of a new one-year degree program—the Master of Management Studies in Systemic Risk. This first-of-its-kind, specialized program is designed for early- and mid-career employees of central banks and other major regulatory agencies with a mandate to manage systemic risk. It will leverage the deep expertise of Yale SOM’s finance faculty in capital markets and their influential academic work about the origins of the crisis.

Edward Snyder, the Indra K. Nooyi Dean of Yale SOM, said, “With this significant support, we will expand our work on how the global financial system and individual central banks can effectively and efficiently respond to the next financial crisis. We are grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that provided initial support for the program. With Yale SOM’s distinguished faculty experts as well as our global and cross-campus reach, Yale SOM excels at this kind of inquiry.”