The Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was holding its fifth annual plenary conference in Toronto on April 10-12, 2014.  The conference topic was the economics of innovation and the impact of innovation on society. Speakers included a roster of newsmakers, including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and James Heckman, former co-CEO of Research In Motion Jim Balsillie, Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane, former head of the U.K. Financial Services Authority Adair Lord Turner, Harvard University professor and best-selling author Michael Sandel, and author, essayist and President of PEN International, John Ralston Saul.

Here you can watch some of the speeches and panels:

Finance and the Real economy

Not all innovation in finance is valuable. Not all trading is useful. And a bigger financial system isn’t necessarily a better one. Parts of the financial services industry have a unique ability to attract outsized returns and create instability that harms the rest of society. Can financial innovation be harnessed so finance can benefit the economy rather than serve as its destructive master?

This panel, featuring Joseph Stiglitz, Adair Turner, Axel Leijonhufvud, and Ed Clark, moderated by former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, seeks to address these critical issues.

In this short video Lord Turner discusses the importance of exploring all facets of innovation. And he addresses his panel which speaks to the different ways we must reform our financial markets.

“If you look at the description in most economic textbooks of what banks do, it is so far removed from what banks actually do in the real world that it doesn’t tell us much. So I think there are some quite deep issues about economic theory, which are about the connection between the financial system and the real economy.”

Have We Repaired Financial Regulations Since Lehman?

The 2008 financial crisis led to the worst recession in the developed world since the Great Depression. Governments had to respond decisively on a large scale to contain the destructive impact of massive debt deflation. Still, several large financial institutions and thousands of small-to-medium-sized institutions collapsed or had to be rescued, numerous non-financial businesses closed, and millions of households lost their savings, jobs, and homes. Five years later, we are still feeling these effects. Will the financial reforms introduced since the onset of the crisis prevent another catastrophe?

This keynote panel with featured speakers Anat Admati, Richard Bookstaber, Andy Haldane, and Edward Kane, moderated by Martin Wolf, addresses these questions and more.