Central Bank Governor, Professor Patrick Honohan, Delivers Opening Address at TCD Conference on International Finance

Posted on: 15 June 2010

Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, Professor Patrick Honohan, delivered the opening address at the 8th INFINITI Conference on International Finance at Trinity College Dublin on Monday June 14th last.  The two day conference, which is Ireland’s largest gathering of international finance experts and organised by TCD’s School of Business, featured 140 international finance experts who talked on issues including the global economic crisis, the emergence of government bond markets, and real estate finance to name but a few.

Highlights included a keynote address on Monday by Professor Bill Megginson, Rainbolt Chair in Finance at the University of Oklahoma’s Michael F Price College of Business.  His paper titled ‘The Value of Investment Banking Relationships: Evidence from the Collapse of Lehman Brothers’ investigates whether existing investment banking relationships have value for clients by examining the severe losses that companies sustained following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  Another keynote, presented on Tuesday by Professor Edward Kane, Professor of Finance at Boston College, focuses on ‘Post-Crisis Financial Reform as Denial and Cover-up’ and examines the conflicts that exist between national safety nets in the US which encourage hard-to-monitor risks, potentially undermining financial stability in the economy.

In addition to keynote sessions, a number of special roundtable discussions also took place including a discussion on ‘Property and Real Estate Investment’ featuring the Director of the Centre for Real Estate Studies at City University Business School in London, Professor Simon Stevenson.  A discussion on Tuesday on ‘Investment in a Post Crisis World’, sponsored by CFA Institute Ireland, featured topics such as pension fund trusts, the latest trends in fund offerings, and the challenges in allocations to Irish and emerging markets.  Final roundtable discussions focused on the ‘Structure of the Emerging Bond Market’.

Some of the topics that were covered by international finance experts during the two day conference included:

– The politics of financial development: The role of interest groups and government capabilities.

– Do trading volumes explain the persistence of volatility effects?

– Sudden Stops: Are global and local investors alike?

– Investing in local currency bond markets.

– Remapping credit ratings.

– A tale of two strategies: Cash flow, accruals and the role of investor sentiment.