Nov 12

Nov 12 Tell Me What You're Reading No. 35: Tom Vartanian - “200 Years of American Financial Panics - Crashes, Recessions, Depressions, and the Technology That Will Change It All”.

My guest for this episode is an old friend and one of the leading financial institutions lawyers in the country over the last several decades, Tom Vartanian. Tom discusses his recent book, “200 Years of American Financial Panics - Crashes, Recessions, Depressions, and the Technology That Will Change It All”.

Tom is the former head of the financial institutions practice at two major law firms; the former General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation; and the former executive director and professor of law at George Mason University's Scalia Law School Program on Financial Regulation & Technology.

Tom was present at the scene of many of the financial crises or financial panics faced in the U.S. over the last several decades. With that perspective Tom issues a call for a regulatory even playing field for banks and nonbanks. Tom also discusses the rise of crypto currencies with no intrinsic value, the absence of prudential regulation and the resultant risk of “currency confusion”. Lack of confidence in the currency of the country was a factor in a number of the financial panics discussed in Tom’s book. Tom also discusses the need for regulators to be as technically proficient as the financial institutions they regulate, and for the regulators to be more predictive and less reactive. “If we continue to regulate financial institutions, whoever they are ,only looking in the rear view mirror traveling 60 miles an hour we are going to have another accident. We have to look forward.” Finally, Tom discusses cybersecurity, “the most existential threat we face today”.

What Tom is Reading

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to do About It, by Richard Clarke and Robert Knake

Reviews The New York Times | Georgetown Security Studies Review | Wired Interview: NPR

Future Crimes - Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It, by Marc Goodman

Reviews The Washington Post | The New York Times | The Times of India

This is How They Tell Me the World Ends - The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Peroth

Reviews The New York Times | The Washington Post

Click Here to Kill Everybody, by Bruce Schneier

Reviews The Financial Times | Kirkus Reviews | Publishers Weekly

The Digital Silk Road: China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future, by Jonathan Hillman

Reviews Kirkus Reviews

Cyberspace Solarium Commission