The Current State of the Economy

Matthew Taibbi, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, and Gillian Tett, the U.S. managing editor of Financial Times, will talk about the causes and possible outcomes of the current financial crisis. Taibbi, a 1991 graduate of Bard College who finished his studies at Leningrad Polytechnical University, has worked as a freelance reporter in the Soviet Union and Uzbekistan. In 1997 he and writer Mark Ames founded a Moscow-based, English-language newspaper, the Exile, which reported on corruption in the Russian government and in American aid organizations. Returning to the United States in 2002 he founded a Buffalo newspaper, The Beast, before leaving to work for the New York Press, and then Rolling Stone. He is the author of The Great Derangement (Spiegel and Grau, 2008) about corruption and absurdity in modern American politics, and two collections of essays. The recipient of the 2008 National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, he was named in 2004 by the New York Observer one of the most influential young New Yorkers. More recently he has received attention for a March 2009 article in Rolling Stone, “The Big Takeover,” in which he examines the close connections between Washington lawmakers and Wall Street. Tett is the author of Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe (Simon and Schuster, 2009), which won the Spear’s Book Award for the financial book of 2009. Tett joined the Financial Times in 1993 after receiving a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University. Before her appointment as U.S. managing editor in 2010 she served as assistant editor for the FT’s markets coverage as well as capital markets editor, deputy editor of the Lex column, Tokyo bureau chief and correspondent, the London-based economics reporter, and a reporter in Russia and Brussels. British Press Awards named her Journalist of the Year in 2009 and Business Journalist of the Year in 2008. In addition to Fool’s Gold, she is the author of Saving the Sun: A Wall Street Gamble to Rescue Japan from Its Trillion Dollar Meltdown (Harper Collins, 2003).