Greg Tully
Recent Activity
Greg Tully commented on Paul Krugman on Deregulation on April 11, 2009, 10:04 AM
Of course, the key question is: What is the appropriate degree of regulation, or, more broadly, government involvement in economic activity?—not literally whether NO regulation is advisable. The dominant approaches to examining the appropriate degree of involvement seem to be ideological and absolutist, e.g. liberal vs. conservative. Lately, I’ve come to believe that when these approaches are based on absolutist, ideological worldviews, they frequently result in the inquiry being wrongly and unproductively framed. Neither liberal nor conservative analyses are always either right or wrong, but at certain times and under certain circumstances, one or the other may provide the key insights that should be used as a basis for policy. Currently, it is the liberal approach to government involvement that is providing the key policy insights, but not because of any inherent superiority. Rather, the dominance of the conservative ideology for the past twenty-five plus years has resulted in key social policies, problems, and investments being underemphasized, underfunded, or ignored—to include the organization and funding of healthcare, environmental, educational, and science policies. This persistent, ideologically driven inattention over a very long period of time has brought us to the current array of crises each of which requires substantial governmental involvement and investment even if only to assure our future competitiveness. Once this is accomplished, there may again come a time when the hand of government is judged to be too heavy and oppressive and a correction in the opposite direction may be recommended. In my view, this is highly unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. It would not surprise me if the effects of the investments and involvements now being proposed by the administration take the better part of a generation for their palliative effects to be realized.
Greg Tully commented on Moby on Growing Up Poor on April 10, 2009, 10:13 AM
I love the idea of making your job your art -- or vice versa -- and to pursue it for its aesthetic rewards, whether your job is academic, commercial, a craft, or a traditional art form. I tried this many years ago as a grad student against the advice of many. I did not have the dedication or doggedness or self-confidence or whatever to follow through come what may. I'd like to recapture that spirit.
Greg is an Associate Professor at Marist College’s School of Management in Poughkeepsie, NY. He specializes in the development, analysis, and use of information to support strategic and operational planning, decision-making, control systems, and performance evaluation. His published papers and presentations address these areas, as well as the measurement of intellectual capital and innovation, and the integration of ethics with strategy and financial performance, which is his main area of research currently. He has designed and taught courses for undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students. Greg received an B.A. in Economics from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Haas School of Business, at the University of California, Berkeley.
Greg Tully commented on Joseph Stiglitz on Transparency in Government on June 5, 2009, 8:24 AM
The problem as a whole is clearly complex and multifaceted. I would dare to make once concrete suggestion that appears to be correct, although I am not an economist and I have not analyzed this suggestion rigorously. That said, I think that an important part of the problem are the huge information asymmetries arising out of the underwriting function -- in bonds, in equity securities, and in mortgages. The underwriters are the agents that are the closest to the recipients of capital and other than the recipients themselves have the most information about the current economic position and future prospects of these capital recipients. I believe that inadequate disclosure of all the information possessed by the underwriters was a material factor both in the dotcom bubble and the mortgage bubble. The information available to market participants will almost never be as valuable as that possessed by the original underwriters, who frequently have inadequate (or no) incentives for truly full disclosure. to me, this is clearly true for mortgage underwriting when the payoffs to that function are disconnected from the performance of the mortgagee such as with securitization. Even when prospectuses are required, these documents are so full of generic boilerplate disclaimers with respect to prospects and risk pertaining to future performance as to be essentially worthless to an investor far removed from the transaction. So, I believe that redesigning the regulations governing the underwriting function's information gathering and disclosure responsibilities is very likely to be an important component of improving our capital accumulation and allocation systems going forward.