HWS News
19 September 2025 Rethinking the Rules: Banking, Oversight and the Illusion of Inevitability
Stanford Professor and Economist Anat R. Admati will be on campus to explain why banks face too little scrutiny, how they conceal risk and why the cycle of financial booms and busts is not a law of nature but a failure of regulation.
When Anat R. Admati speaks, leaders pay attention. Her research is cited by finance, economics and corporate governance scholars; her voice has been heard in forums from the Federal Reserve to the European Central Bank. She has even been consulted by former President Barack Obama. Today, Admati stands among the most influential figures in the movement for banking reform.
Following her keynote speech this month at a World Bank conference in Washington D.C., Admati will share her work as a guest of the Anderton Economic Policy Symposium at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 25, in the Vandervort Room of Scandling Campus Center. The lecture titled “Towards a Better Financial System: Facts and Myths about Banking and Beyond” is free and open to the public.
The George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Admati is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the founder and director of the business school’s highly regarded Corporations and Society Initiative. Since 2010, she has been traveling the globe debating policy around financial regulations and corporate accountability. Her insights have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CNN and PBS.
Among one of the most cited economists worldwide, with 4,000 citations for one article alone, Admati in 2014 was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world and by Foreign Policy Magazine as among its 100 global thinkers.
The talk will build off the 2013 book she co-authored The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It -- a Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Bloomberg Businessweek Book of the Year. Early last year, Princeton University Press published an expanded version of the book, adding four chapters and a new preface. HWS will give away free copies of the book to the first 25 students to attend the Anderton Symposium lecture.
The work exposes why banks are dangerous, the shortcomings of current policies and reveals how the dominance of the banking industry presents dangers not only to the rule of law but to democracy itself. With dogged determination and unimpeachable logic, Admati confronts false economic assumptions, public complacency with the status quo and multiple other inconvenient truths, to ask why is the financial system rigged for the benefit of the few?
Professor of Economics Feisal Khan, who serves as host of the symposium, explains that since 1980, the U.S. banking industry has undergone increasing deregulation. With the freedom to take bigger risks, banks have consequently experienced massive growth, the result of which is a cycle of financial expansions and contractions, i.e., booms and busts. “When big banks run into trouble they go to Uncle Sam for a bailout. In the U.S. these companies are considered to be Globally Systemically Important Banks, aka they’re ‘too big to fail,’ meaning they are so interconnected with the global financial system that if one of them goes down, it’s a domino effect that will take down more and more.”
Since the 2008 financial crisis, Admati has worked to uncover why Western banks are subject to so little regulation and transparency, how they conceal risks that endanger the public and why financial crises should not be treated as unavoidable “natural disasters.” Her mission is to convince the public to question the system that gives banks the freedom to keep crashing the economy.
For too long, financial crises have been treated like earthquakes or hurricanes — sudden shocks we simply endure, Admati explains. Yet, financial crashes are far from inevitable. Banks, she says, just need to behave more like other companies, which get money to operate and expand operations by selling shares or reinvesting profits. Banks, by contrast, rely on other people’s money, and as such take bigger risks that make us all vulnerable, Admati explains in one 2014 New York Times article, “When She Talks, Banks Shudder.”
During the Anderton Economic Policy Symposium, Admati will make the case that stronger rules and genuine accountability are essential to break the cycle of boom, bust and bailout, and to build a financial system worthy of public trust.
Admati holds a bachelor of science in mathematics and statistics from the Hebrew University, a master of philosophy and doctoral degree in operations research and management science from Yale University. She is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the recipient of multiple fellowships, research grants and is a past board member of the American Finance Association.
She has served on numerous editorial boards and is a former member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission's Market Risk Advisory Committee and visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund.
The Anderton Economic Policy Symposium is one of two series established in 2022 by former Trustee James F. Anderton IV ’65. The event brings a range of expertise and insight to campus and the broader HWS community.
