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The text below is the comment I offered on Mr. Soros’ opening speech at INET’s Berlin Conference April 12, 2012. The text of Mr. Soros’ own speech is here. Video of the entire session is below—my bit starts at 55:00.

A suprisingly large number of talks refer to the issue of human decision making.

Dinner has already rolled around on what has been a quick day.

Discussion of the results of the ECB’s LTRO2 has revolved around the question of hoarding, specifically whether banks are using the newly-created reserves to fund new lending.

The title is the same as that of Maury Obstfeld’s Ely Lecture, delivered Jan 6 at the AEA meetings in Chicago. Yours truly was at the meetings mainly to deliver a paper on “Three Principles for Market-Based Credit Regulation”, about which more in a later post. And for most of the rest of the time I was locked in a hotel room interviewing candidates for an assistant professor slot at Barnard College (which gave me a good overview of the current state of macroeconomics, again fodder for a later post).

So with a suitably provocative title I think we can declare 2012 open.

My friend read somewhere that the experience of death makes people think in philosophical terms. He might have thought of religion rather than philosophy, I replied. We agreed, and wandered off talking about our crypto-religious experiences in good old secular Europe.

Bloomberg’s reporters continue their diligent work looking back on the Fed’s lending in the subprime crisis.

Professors Roger Backhouse and Brad Bateman wrote an op-ed for the New York Times a few days ago, arguing that “thanks to decades of academic training in the “dentistry” approach to economics, today’s Keynes or Friedman is nowhere to be found” - we have stopped thinking big they say.