Arnold Brown, chairman of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc.

• Coauthor of FutureThink: How to Think Clearly in a Time of Change (Prentice Hall 2005)
• Former lecturer at Pace University’s Lubin Graduate School of Business, and a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, the Wharton School, and the New School for Social Research

“There is going to be a reevaluation of the whole idea of organizational size. We may begin to think that some organizations are too big not to fail because size in and of itself is not necessarily the benefit that we thought it was. When Darwin talked about survival of the fittest he was not talking about the biggest and the strongest, he was talking about the most adaptable. Big organizations by their nature are not adaptable.”

John Calverley, head of North American research at Standard Chartered Bank

• Former chief economist and strategist for American Express
• Author of When Bubbles Burst: Surviving the Financial Fallout (Nicholas Brealey Publishing 2009)

“One of the things I found is that real estate bubbles are particularly damaging to economies, while a stock bubble, on its own, tends not to cause major problems. There’s evidence that these real estate bubbles occur on average every 18 years, which fits because the last time the US had a real estate bubble it was more commercial and the peak was about 1989. This means we may see another peak in real estate prices about 2025.”

John Caslione, JD, CEO of GCS Business Capital, LLC, a global mergers and acquisitions advisor

• Coauthor of Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence (AMACOM 2009) and Global Manifest Destiny: Growing Your Business in a Borderless Economy (Dearborn Trade Publishing 2001)
• Guest lecturer at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

“Our new economic normality is going to be one that is punctuated by spurts of prosperity and then punctuated by spurts of downturn, which will be much more frequent. We’re all going to have to become much more comfortable with the notion that there will be a tremendous amount of turbulence, and the consequential chaos that will result from this turbulence means a lot more risk and uncertainty.”

Uri Dadush, PhD, director of the International Economics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

• 16-year veteran of the World Bank, where he directed the World Economy Group and the International Trade Department, the latter of which he founded
• Former president and chief executive of the Economist Intelligence Unit

“It’s very difficult to see how you justify a G-7 or G-8. Now, given the economic weights of China, particularly China, but also India, Russia, and Brazil, which are not terribly distant from a $1.5 trillion economy, the size of their populations must account for something. In a world of democracies, the G-7 and G-8 represent a tiny portion of the world’s population, maybe 15% or so. I think it is inevitable that we move toward a group like the G-20.”

Peter Drysdale, PhD, emeritus professor of economics and visiting fellow in policy and governance at Australian National University’s Crawford School of Economics and Government

• Former executive director of the Australia–Japan Research Centre
• Editor of The New Economy in East Asia and the Pacific (Routledge 2007) and coeditor of Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (Routledge 2007)

“What came out of the G-20 meeting is an important change that, if it becomes entrenched, means we’ve got a different kind of dialogue among world leaders on the international economy. That’s important because the big adjustments in the international economy, including the crisis we are going through now, have to be managed in partnership with the big emerging economies, including China, India, and so on.”

William Gamble, JD, LLM, founder of Emerging Markets Strategies

• Author of Freedom: The Competitive Advantage in the Global Market (Praeger Books 2007) and Investing in China: Legal, Financial, and Regulatory Risk (Quorum Books 2002)
• Contributor to Foreign Affairs, Harvard International Review, and International Financial Law Review

“The 20th century was the American century and the 21st century will also be the American century. Unlike China, Europe, and others, we can change. We have very flexible labor laws, flexible political systems, and all sorts of checks and balances. What the US is very good at is changing policies and we’ve always done that. We adapt to different situations.”

Simon Johnson, PhD, Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Business

• Former chief economist, economic counselor, and research director at the International Monetary Fund, 2007–2008
• President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies
• Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

“The legitimacy of the American [economic] model has taken a big blow. Two years ago, you could hear people talking about our financial technology, how we were attracting capital, and that financial capitalism was the way to go, but I don’t think anyone would say any of those things today. I’m not saying a ready alternative has stepped forward, but the American model has taken an extra beating.”

Joseph Joyce, PhD, professor of economics at Wellesley College

• Former visiting scholar at the IMF and Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
• Author of The IMF and Global Financial Crisis (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press)
• Contributor to the Review of International Economics, the Journal of Developmental Economics, Economics and Politics, and Applied Economics

“Clearly one of the biggest changes to come out of this crisis is going to be in the area of international governments, in terms of some sort of transition from the G-7, which will not disappear, to the G-20, which is asserting itself more strongly. This clearly is a process that is happening right in front of us and the question is how far it will affect the IMF, and how it will play out overall.”

David Levy, director and chairman of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center

• Coauthor of Profits and the Future of American Society (Harper & Row 1983)
• Forecasted and coined the phrase “the contained depression,” initially with regard to the early 1990s
• Member of the Clinton administration’s commission to study capital budgeting

“This crisis will tend to move a lot of countries farther to the left. Others may become quite reactionary because when things start to fall apart people want to turn back the clock. In terms of Europe and the US we will likely see more movement to the left and we will probably go too far in terms of overregulation and government involvement. But capitalism is much more resilient than a lot of people give it credit for, and we’ve been through cycles like this before.”

Brian Stanton

Kelly-Kate Pease, PhD, associate professor of history, politics, and international relations at Webster University

• Author of International Organizations: Perspectives on Governance in the 21st Century (Prentice Hall 2000; third edition published 2008) and coauthor of The United Nations and Changing World Politics (Westview Press 2007)

We’re not comfortable with government, we see it as a necessary evil. But given what we’re going through, there has to be more government regulation. It can’t be a free-for-all. There’s going to have to be some sort of regulation at a global level that everyone’s going to agree to. What I suspect will happen is that at the existing organizations—the IMF, the World Bank, the central banks—there will be some coordination, but more of a muddle-through policy.

Walter Schubert, PhD, professor of finance at La Salle University

• Coauthor of The Family Lawyer’s Guide to Stock Options (American Bar Association 2008)
• Contributor to the Journal of Leadership Accountability and Ethics, the Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting, and Financial Management, and the Journal of Applied Business and Economics
• Faculty member of La Salle University’s MBA program in Basel, Switzerland

“I think you need to let the market choose which currency is the world’s reserve currency and the market might choose in the future to make the dollar less dominant. But you can see why the dollar is dominant—the second-largest economy is almost a quarter of our size.”

Michael Szenberg, PhD, distinguished professor of economics at the Lubin School of Business, Pace University

• Winner of the Irving Fisher Monograph Award, 1971
• Editor of Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press 2006) and Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies (Cambridge University Press 1991)

“Why couldn’t [the financial crisis] be prevented? I have a very simple answer. It can never be prevented. Because the schemes that people come up with every time beggar the imagination. Couldn’t the government have prevented it? Maybe yes, maybe no, but probably not. We will survive, even without the recovery of private enterprise. If we need to, we will have another stimulus; and if that doesn’t work, another one after that.”