U.S. and Japanese Financial Experts to Meet

Post date: September 14, 2000

United States Under Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner and Haruhiko Kuroda, Japanese Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs, will be keynote speakers at the third annual Symposium on Building the Financial System of the 21st Century: An Agenda for Japan and the United States. The Symposium, to be held in Bretton Woods, NH on Sept. 15-17, 2000, will be attended by 80 senior government policy makers, academics, and bankers.

“This symposium will address key issues relating to Japanese and U.S. financial markets, official multilateral organizations, and finance for the new economy,” said Hal S. Scott, Nomura Professor and Director of the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School, the U.S. organizer of the Symposium.

Key participants joining Geithner and Kuroda will include, from Japan, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, Member of the House of Representatives, Toyoo Gyohten, President of the Institute for International Monetary Affairs, and Masayuki Matsushima, Executive Director, Bank of Japan.

In addition to Geithner, participants from the United States will include Marshall Carter, Chairman, State Street Corporation, Isaac Hunt, Commissioner, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and Timothy Collins, CEO, Ripplewood Holdings.

Topics to be covered during the two day symposium will be (1) the interdependence of Japanese and U.S. financial markets, (2) Bretton Woods revisited”the role of official multilateral organizations, and (3) financing the new economy in Japan and the United States. “It is fitting that participants returning to this Symposium for the third time, having built a strong base of frank and informed discussion over the years, would come to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,” said Robin Radin, Associate Director of Harvard Law School’s Program on International Financial Systems, and a key Symposium organizer. “We will confront issues that will define domestic and international finance for decades, even if we do not resolve them as officials did in Bretton Woods in 1944.”

The Symposium is jointly organized by the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School and the Japan Forum on International Relations.