Tag: Global master of finance

You weren’t dreaming when you saw students in full Commencement regalia taking selfies earlier this month. Olin holds graduation ceremonies several times throughout the year for programs that operate on a schedule outside the traditional academic year. The grads you saw lining up in Emerson Auditorium on Aug. 7 were members of the Global Masters of Finance (GMF) program who have circled the planet over the past 18 months in pursuit of their degrees.

The 18-month GMF program offered in partnership with Singapore Management University (SMU) begins with a mini semester in St. Louis; the cohort spends the winter in Singapore; and returns to the US in early summer for a week-long immersion in New York City and a week-long immersion in Washington, D.C. at the Brookings Institution. The final session of the program is held in St. Louis on the Danforth Campus.

This was the fourth class to complete the GMF program. There were 42 graduates who selected Alexander Roberts as their class speaker at graduation. Classmate Lingfeng Zhu translated Alex’s speech into Mandarin; they are pictured above.

Link to video of ceremony.

Link to photos  available for purchase from Grad Images.

To earn a Global Master of Finance (GMF), degree from Olin requires hard work and lots of travel. Students spend half of the 18-month program in St. Louis and the other half in one of three partner schools. GMF students who have studied at Singapore Management University and Yonsei University School of Business in Seoul, South Korea will receive their degrees in a ceremony at 10:30 a.m., Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016 in Emerson Auditorium, Knight Hall.

The ceremony will be live streamed and the recording will be available for viewing at this site: http://stream.nts.wustl.edu/OlinGMF_AUG2016

Students at partner school IDC Herzliya in Israel are unable to attend the ceremony in St. Louis.

GMF Class of 2016 will be the first to receive the Centennial souvenir zipper pull on their graduation gowns in honor of the school’s 100th anniversary.

The Outstanding Finance Student Award will be presented to Victor Riady and Mengchuan Kitty Wang. The award goes to the students who, in the judgment of the faculty, exhibit the strongest academic achievement and the most potential in the field of finance.

Prerna Gulati has been selected as student speaker. Todd Milbourn, Senior Associate Dean and the Hubert C. and Dorothy R. Moog Professor of Finance will be the master of ceremonies.

Tweet your graduation wishes with the hashtag: #Olin100

Visit the Olin100 Centennial website.

The second day of the Washington, D.C. immersion primarily consisted of three parts: heading to the World Bank Group to learn the basic working process of this multinational financial institution, the Export-Import Bank to study the government’s role and function to help its corporations, and a lecture regarding the Dodd-Frank Act, to gain a more specific view of one of the most influential legislative acts on financial institutions.

Our first stop today was at the World Bank Group (WBG), one of the most important financial institutions fighting against poverty. The speaker, Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, gave us a comprehensive overview of the institution. The mission of WBG is ending poverty—moral and spiritual. We were very intrigued by its history. WBG was created in 1944 after World War II, and initially aimed to provide loans for European countries to rebuild their homes. Currently, it focuses on providing loans to poor countries in the world. The class was shocked when Adam showed us pictures of people who have no food, no clean water, or no shelter. The entire speech was very inspiring and educational.

We returned to the Brookings Institution and prepared for a lecture in the afternoon. The first speaker was Amy Shinkman, Director of the Trade Finance Division at the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EX-IM). Interestingly, in the US, EX-IM has a nickname called “Bank of Boeing,” because of its huge engagement in supporting Boeing exports. As an independent government agency, directly reporting to President Obama, EX-IM is primarily responsible for providing loans and guarantees for the purchase of goods from U.S. companies. Amy compared the difference between the commercial banks and EX-IM, and stated that EX-IM commonly does what commercial banks motivated by maximizing profits are unwilling to do. In a way, EX-IM sounds like a hero, busy with helping small businesses and picking the hard nuts to crack. Thus, Amy mentioned that the target of EX-IM is not to earn profit, but to make sure not to lose money. Their job is to “save the world”!

We ended the day with a speech from Aaron Klein, who serves as Director of the Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center. His lecture topic was the Dodd-Frank Act, as he previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Department of the Treasury, and part of his job was to work on the crafting of the Dodd-Frank Act. His speech was very insightful. He began by discussing the two main issues that could lead to financial crisis, and then proceeded to the main topic of his speech, focusing on the context in which the Dodd-Frank Act was created, and the problems that the act was intended to address. What is quite interesting about his speech is that he shared his perspective that there is too much regulation on the financial system, and explained why this can be both a good and bad thing for the system. We all enjoyed the speech very much because Mr. Klein is very knowledgeable on the subject and extremely passionate about it.

Guest Bloggers: Jie (Zoe) Zhou, Sijia (Tina) Guo, Bingzhang Shan, Huihui Zhang (GMF 2016)

This is a series of blogs chronicling the experiences of 41 Global Master of Finance (GMF)dual degree students during their two week immersion course in New York and Washington, DC. Each blog will be written by a small subset of students during their experience.

After a whirlwind week in New York, we headed south to Washington, D.C. to immerse ourselves in the workings of government and financial regulation with Olin’s Brookings Executive Education (BEE) team as our guide. The day started with welcoming remarks and introductions from Ian Dubin, Associate Director, and Chris Mancini, Program Coordinator. They explained the general agenda for the week, and the long and special history between the Brookings Institution and Washington University in St. Louis.

After the brief introduction, Mr. Dubin gave us an overview about the basic structures of U.S. government and legislative processes to set the stage for the week. He explained the unique roles of the Executive Branch, Senate and House of Representatives, and the complexity of the legislative process.

We also learned about the Brookings think tank and how it contributes to making public policy. The Brookings Institution is one of the most important and influential public policy research think tanks in the world.

The rest of the day was spent learning more about the various key financial sector regulators as well as learning directly from current and former regulators from both the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

First, we learned from David Wessel, who is the Director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. He briefly explained the function of the United States Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), and also introduced 10 micro-prudential regulators in the system, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and The Federal Reserve, to name a few. Although the FSOC provided the chairperson of each of the 10 agencies with the opportunity to communicate with each other, he stated that those 10 chairs have different missions and have issued regulations on financial institutions (banks) that are conflicting. This resulted in banks having a hard time fulfilling the requirements outlined by different regulators. He also touched upon the importance of Macro-Prudential Regulation (FSOC role), and highlighted the differences between finance and other industries, especially in terms of contagion risk. Last but not the least, he compared the FSOC structure with that of the Bank of England.

Winthrop Hambley speaks to Olin students during their visit with Brookings Executive Education.

Our last speaker of the day was Winthrop Hambley, former Senior Advisor, Board of Governors, The Federal Reserve. He first introduced the structure of the Federal Reserve and its key monetary policy-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).

He then proceeded to explain to us both traditional monetary policies as well as non-traditional monetary policies, which were introduced after the financial crisis–namely, large scale asset purchases, forward guidance, and maturity extension.

Last but not least, to address the popular topic of the Fed rate hike expectation, he spent some time explaining to us the rate normalization process and considerations during Q&A.

This is part of a series of blogs chronicling the experiences of 41 Global Master of Finance (GMF) dual degree students during their two week long immersion course in New York and Washington, DC. Each blog will be written by a small subset of students during their experience.

On the first day of the immersion course in New York City, we started our morning by traveling to the Federal Reserve using the subway system. After a short break, we headed to Brown Brothers Harriman to get a deeper look at the 200-year-old private bank. At the end of the day, we went to J.P. Morgan to meet with seven bankers, who shared their experiences in and knowledge of the banking system.

We went to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the morning. It was a great tour for us to understand the U.S. financial system, and we had the privilege to enter the vault to see some of its gold reserves. From the tour, we know that the Federal Reserve system consists of 12 regional Reserve Banks and a Board of Governors in Washington, D.C.  The creation of Federal Reserve System was not easy: it took the government three attempts to finally establish the system in 1913. The major responsibilities of the New York branch are implementing monetary policy, supervision and regulation, international operation, and to provide financial services. The system has evolved over time; for example, after the financial crisis in 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank started to tighten regulations. Today, large financial institutions like Goldman Sachs are also subject to the regulation of the Federal Reserve.

Welcomed by Mr. W. Carter Sullivan, Partner of the Private Banking department, we arrived at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH), the only partnership bank in the US. Mr. Sullivan reviewed the history of the firm and introduced us to the major business lines of the company, which are investor services, investment management, and private banking. He emphasized their investment strategy of focusing on downside risk, which was derived as a result of their investors’ high requirement of liquidity and safety. Following him, Mr. Win Thin, Senior Vice President of Investor Services, presented an inspiring discussion on issues including the new normal of the world economy, reasons emerging markets remain under pressure, and the primary risks for the world economy in the near future. After a macro view of the world, we moved on to the Private Banking department. Mr. Michael L. Vellucci and Mr. Lewis Hart, both vice presidents in the Corporate Lending Department, talked about their customers’ borrowing needs and the application of their investment strategy: by focusing on companies with strong financial statements, excellent earning records, good collateral, risk hedging, and not sharing the profits of their investors, in order to avoid overaggressive investing behaviors. Another thing worth mentioning is the reason the bank puts capital financing and wealth management under the same roof: They believe that excellent capital financing services will result in good relationships with their customers, and leads to demand for more services, such as advisory services and wealth management.

Being able to spend a few hours at the JP Morgan office was extremely insightful. The visit offered us insight into the investment bank from various angles, such as the career path of sales and trading, the working life of a corporate treasury, and the authoritative data for the industries. Mr. Chad Parson, Managing Director of ABS Special Opportunities, gave us a brief introduction of JP Morgan and the general overview about early investment banks. In the round table discussion, seven professionals from JP Morgan shared first-hand industry experience with us.

These three visits helped us to build a general perspective of how the relationship between the federal government and financial markets has evolved over time. The speakers in each visit helped us to construct a comprehensive understanding of various sectors in the banking system during their lectures. This is an unforgettable experience, and we are looking forward to learning more from the remaining visits.

Guest Bloggers: Yi (Neo) Li, Mengxiao Fan, Zhipeng Liu, Wanxing (Vera) Wang (GMF 2016)

This is a series of blogs chronicling the experiences of 41 Global Master of Finance (GMF) dual degree students during their two week immersion course in New York and Washington, DC. Each blog will be written by a small subset of students during their experience.