Wharton financial professor and author of The Stocks  for the Long Run, Professor Jeremy Siegel predicts the global economy will turn around by the second half of 2009. The most significant cause of the downturn, according to Siegel is that financial firms bought, held and insured large quantities of risky, mortgage-related assets on borrowed money.

Due to deliver a keynote address at the first-ever Wharton Global Alumni Forum to be held in the Middle East from March 11-12, 2009 in Dubai, Professor Siegel is an expert on macroeconomics, financial markets, long-run asset returns and demographics.

“During dot-com IPOs of the early 1990s, the firms that underwrote the stock offerings did not hold on to those stocks,” says Siegel as quoted on Knowledge@Wharton, the Wharton School’s journal of business analysis. “They flipped them. But in the case of mortgage-backed securities, the financial firms decided these were good assets to hold. That was their fatal flaw.” >more

Business and Accounting Litigation Services

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 3:58 am and is filed under Commercial, Financial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.