Economic Impact of Covid-19: The Role of Banks and Financial Markets

The talk focused on the U.S. monetary economic policy as a response to Covid-19, and how banks and financial markets made this policy to affect other economies, including Greece.

Summary of the talk: The Fed (FOMC) has recently announced an unprecedented, simultaneous use of all three policy tools. This is combined with widespread use of algorithms by hedge funds and investment banks that manipulate prices of US assets upward and other prices downward – especially the US dollar and traditional `safe-haven’ assets, such as, gold and bitcoin. To understand the impact of these extreme monetarist policies and manipulative trading, we trace their development under Roosevelt, Nixon, Clinton, Bush before focusing on Trump’s re-election strategies.

Speaker: Carol Alexander is an expert in FinTech, data analysis, blockchains, crypto asset and derivatives markets, pricing and hedging financial instruments, volatility analysis, investment strategy, market risk analysis and portfolio management. She is currently Professor of Finance at the University of Sussex, Visiting Professor at Peking University HSBC Business School, and a Fellow at IFFR. She has also edited the Journal of Banking and Finance since 2013.

Throughout her corporate and academic careers, Carol has designed and implemented mathematical models for pricing, trading, hedging and risk assessment for a wide range of asset management, stock exchange and banking clients. Carol is the author of the best-selling textbook “Market Models” and of the four-volume textbook series Market Risk Analysis. Her latest textbook is “Corruption and Fraud in Financial Markets”, edited with Douglas Cumming.