The Mississippi State University College of Business hosted an expert panel discussion Thursday night with top practitioners in banking and finance answering questions about the recent global financial crisis.
After another losing day for a tumbling Wall Street, the panel gave the audience of over 150 people answers for very difficult and trying times for most Americans.
The panel consisted of five experts including Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis board member and CEO of Cadence Bank, Lewis Mallory and Mitch Grant, executive vice president of Compass Bank in Birmingham, AL who both said this crisis is like nothing they’ve ever seen before.
“The size and complexity of this financial crisis and its global nature differentiates it from anything the financial system of this country and the world has ever experienced,” Mallory said. “You can’t compare it to the Great Depression or the S & L crisis of the nineties, as bad as those situations were.”
Other panelists discussing the issue included local investment advisor Ernie George, C.F.P., C.L.U., Brian Watkins, director of the international business program at MSU and associate professor of finance Wayne Kelly.
Watkins said the international aspect of this crisis represents a coming of age for international capital markets where our unregulated asset-backed securities like collateral debt obligations were sold overseas and our careless risk went with them into European markets.
The audience voiced their concerns about the financial threat closer to home through questions.
“Let’s say I’m just Joe the plumber. What does this crisis mean to me and will I be able to get a job when I graduate and will I be able to get a loan to buy a house,” one audience member asked.
Grant said the economy is not going to die and the country might have a relatively severe recession lasting a couple of quarters, but opportunities for growth and jobs will be there and things will begin to look up again.
“This crisis is in the financial sector right and we have yet to see what the repercussions on the average person economy will be,” Watkins said. “We’ve been here before and like we’ve said up here we will get through this again.”
Recent MSU biological engineering graduate Ferrell Alman said he attended Thursday night’s panel discussion to learn more about the job market and how it is being affected by the crisis.
“I feel that most people graduating from higher education right now is paying close attention to the financial market, which I believe is a good thing because jobs in corporate America are suffering a little bit,” Alman said. “I found the panel discussion very informative and I hope the College of Business organizes more [discussions].”