Q&A with Simon Johnson
Over the last two years, Simon Johnson has become America’s most outspoken critic of the banking industry. Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has consistently argued that the United States has the same problem today that he encountered in smaller countries as former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund: The political “capture” of government by the financial lobby. In Johnson’s view, this means the U.S. government has, among other things, spent large sums of bailout money on financial institutions they deemed “too big to fail,” but without getting banks to lend the capital that could help kick-start the economy. Today, with financial-reform legislation a leading topic on Capitol Hill, Johnson is testifying before the Senate Banking Committee about the state of the industry — a topic he also dissects further, with co-author James Kwak, in his forthcoming book “13...