A recent topic of debate in the U.S. budget community centers on how the federal government should estimate the cost of providing loans to various borrowers such as students and homebuyers. Currently costs are assessed assuming that the government’s cost of capital is equal to the Treasury rate. Pro...

It is the rare journalist who tackles the topic of government credit programs and their ills. Rarer still is a popular account that accurately brings these complicated issues to life. Kudos to Michael Grunwald, who writing for Politico, did just that. I highly recommend his article. (Note that to ge...

Last week Bob Pozen, a Visiting Senior Lecturer here at MIT Sloan with a distinguished background in government, business and education gave an eye-opening lunch talk. The topic was “Other Post-Employment Benefits” or OPEBs—which is accounting jargon for the liabilities governments incur for retiree...

CFP Director Deborah Lucas posted this guest blogpost on the Center for Economic Policy Research portal VOX: “Putting an accurate price tag on government credit support.”

A heated debate is raging in Congress over whether to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank. The Ex-Im Bank, as it is commonly known, is an independent federal agency charged with providing credit assistance for U.S. exporters. Beneficiaries include large corporations (in 2012, over 80% of the guarante...

What will people say 1,000 years from now when they look back at the conventional wisdom about financial policy today? Peter Fisher of the Tuck School at Dartmouth College reflected on that question in his keynote speech at the Inaugural Conference on Finance and Policy held at MIT Sloan on Septembe...

Ask most finance experts about the “world’s largest financial institutions,” and you’ll hear names like Citigroup, ICBC (China’s largest bank) and HSBC. However, governments top the list of large financial institutions, with investment and insurance operations that dwarf those of any private enterpr...

Visiting Scholar Xun Wu, a PhD student at Tsinghua University, is in residence at the CFP for the 2014-15 academic year to pursue his dissertation research on “Chinese Local Government Indebtedness: Systemic Risk and Financial Cost.”

MIT panel talks fiscal, global, and legal consequences of the government’s near-default. When MIT Sloan professor Deborah Lucas scheduled a panel discussion titled “U.S. Fiscal Crisis: Causes and Consequences,” the government was shut down, no compromise seemed imminent, and what the state of affair...

Nearly 250 MIT Sloan alumni and guests gathered in Shanghai on July 19, 2013 for the third MIT Sloan Finance Forum (the first was held in New York in April 2012 and the second was held in London in June 2013).