耶鲁大学金融市场英文文本fi师nancialmarketslecture03transcript.docVIP

Financial Markets: Lecture 3 Transcript Professor Robert Shiller: I thought I would just remember a couple of highlights from the first two lectures to consolidate what we said then. In the first lecture, I talked about a lot of things, but one theme that comes to my mind is the theme of the moral purpose and mission of the finance community. We talked about the sense that, I think, young people have a sort of prejudice against the field and they think that finance is a field that you go into if you really value money rather than people. I want to reiterate again that thats not the way I view the field at all. I was just yesterday--I gave a talk in Montreal at the Caisse de Dép?t,et Placement du Québec, which is the big wealth management fund for the Province of Quebec. I met a lot of people there and I never once got the idea that anyone there was evil or grasping. I think they have a moral purpose, which is to preserve the livelihoods of the people of the Anyway, you have to overcome these--you have to think that if you go into the field you would probably--If youre successful--you would probably end up as a philanthropist; but no movie will be made about your life and you may encounter hostility the whole way. Its especially true right now with the subprime crisis. People are blaming the financial community for our troubles now. It is true that were seeing some people thrown out of their houses, in some cases, because of some rather questionable financial practices that got people into mortgages that they shouldnt have gotten into. But overall, I think that the people in this field are good people. In the last lecture, I talked about–In the second lecture, I talked about the pooling of risks and the basic theme of that lecture was that we now have a mathematical theory, probability theory. When you look at this theory, you realize that it suggests a very important technology for improving human welfare and that is: by spreading risks. The economy, and technolo