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Shadow Banking and the Federal Reserve with Cornell Law's own Robert Hockett
Robert C. Hockett is an American lawyer, law professor, and policy advocate. He is Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, Professor of Public Affairs at Cornell University, Senior Counsel at Westwood Capital, LLC, and a Fellow at The Century Foundation.
Contents
- Shadow Banking and the Federal Reserve with Cornell Laws own Robert Hockett
- Career
- Selected publications
- References
Career
Hockett works in the fields of law, philosophy, and finance - especially but not solely in their overlap. His primary research, writing, teaching and transacting specialties include banking and financial institutions, financial and monetary macroeconomics, money and central banking, distributive justice and social choice, enterprise-organizational law and economics, industrial policy and economic development, and international trade and monetary law. He pursues these subjects in both their theoretical and practical, their positive and normative, and their domestic and global dimensions. He frequently publishes, testifies, presents and commentates as an expert on these and related topics in scholarly journals, before courts and legislatures, at academic and related conference venues, and in news publications and programs such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC, National Public Radio Newsweek Barron's The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. He has been a member of the Cornell Law School faculty since 2004, and became the Edward Cornell Professor of Law in 2014. In 2016 he became Cornell University Professor of Public Affairs. His prelegal background is in philosophy, finance, and economics.
Since 2012, Hockett has been a Fellow with the Century Foundation, a progressive public policy think tank. Hockett also is Senior Counsel with Westwood Capital Holdings, a boutique investment bank in New York City, and has previously worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the International Monetary Fund. He is a member of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on Banking Law and a past Chair of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Financial Institutions, as well as a founding Board Member of Samasource International. He is also a member of the World Economic Roundtable / World Policy Institute / Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) collaborative in New York and Washington, a Research Scholar with the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity at Denison University, a past Fellow with the Global Interdependence Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and a regular columnist for both the Huffington Post and The Hill, covering policy issues of concern to lawmakers in Washington DC. During the Presidential primary season of 2015-16, Hockett served as a spokesperson for the Bernie Sanders campaign, debating Clinton spokespersons including Michael Barr and Gene Sperling in a variety of fora including MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell.
Hockett is an originator and long-term advocate of proposals to use eminent domain to purchase underwater mortgages from private label securitization trusts in order to write down mortgage debt for homeowners whose homes are worth less, post-crash, than the debts they owe on them. He has advised municipalities on the plan and testified before Congress on the subject in 2012, and in federal court in 2013. Hockett also advises legislators and regulators on finance-regulatory matters, and has testified before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives on the same. His proposals for post-crisis economic reform, some co-authored with Daniel Alpert and Nouriel Roubini for the New America Foundation and others with Paul McCulley, former Managing Partner and Chief Economist at PIMCO and Robert H. Frank, Professor of Economics at Cornell's Johnson School of Management, have also drawn media and Congressional attention. Much of his recent work has been on interlinkages between economic inequality, private debt, and financial & political fragility. His forthcoming book in this connection, A Republic of Owners, is on capital-spreading policies and programs aimed at increasing the share of average Americans' incomes deriving from business capital rather than labor. It is scheduled for publication by Yale University Press in 2017. Since 2011, Hockett has also been working on a series of articles devoted to debunking what he calls 'the intermediated scarce private capital myth' that dominates most scholarship and policy advocacy where money and finance are concerned. His ultimate aim in this work, some of it coauthored, is to reassess and reconceive the roles of the public and private sectors in constituting modern financial systems; these articles are soon to be brought together into another book.
Hockett earned his B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Kansas where he was also selected as a Rhodes Scholar. While at Oxford he earned a Master's in Philosophy & Economics and later earned LL.M. and J.S.D. degrees from Yale University. Hockett also served as a law clerk for Judge Deanell Reece Tacha, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.