If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’d like to rant.  Why is it that it’s impossible to find suits that fit males who are tall, slim, and broad shouldered?  I find it absolutely insane that we can visit twenty different stores and only find one or two suits that fit. What do all the models wear?  Why is every suit cut for short men with copious belly fat and slanted shoulders?  I just don’t understand this.  My body shape is just like the mannequins in most store windows… except that when you walk behind the mannequin, you see that the slim-fitting suit is actually pinned up with a giant clamp!  Ahhhh!!!

In a Vintage 3pc Vest

Ok, so… I eventually did find two suits that I like.  One was a Prada suit from Barney’s New York (I think).  The other was a Neil Barrett from Louis Boston.  Both of them fit me relatively well… but were in the $1,400 range.  Ouch.  In better (?) news, I did end up ordering a $1,000 suit from a traveling Hong Kong tailor who came to HBS a few weeks ago.  It should be arriving in December, so we’ll have to see how it fits.  I don’t think it’ll be quite as fashion forward as Neil Barrett, but it might make a good interview staple.

• Robert Merton: Nobel Prize in Economics
• Nicholas Retsinas: Former Director at both Freddie Mac & HUD
• Clayton Rose: Former Director of JP Morgan, Chair of a $27 B hedge fund
• David Moss: Author of several books on economic history

Even our dean, who chaired the discussion, is a director of Harvard’s $40 B fund (that saw double-digit returns this past year).  It was a standing-room audience in Burden auditorium:

Turmoil in Markets Panel

For those of you who don’t follow the markets, let me briefly summarize.  On a very basic level, the chaos we’ve seen recently followed this timeline:

1. Housing values were increasing rapidly.
2. A new way of packaging mortgages into tradeable financial instruments is created.
3. Investment banks buy & sell these instruments.
4. Housing values collapse as the bubble finally bursts (not a surprise).
5. Investment banks realize they made lots of really bad investments (surprise!).
6. Because they’re so highly leveraged (that is, they invested with borrowed money), they quickly try to sell everything.
7. Everyone’s selling and no one’s buying.  The market loses liquidity and banks are stuck with “worthless” assets that can’t be sold.

Anyway, that’s the gist of it.  A lot of the current proposals on the table have the goal of “re-liquifying” the markets.  In other words, getting people to start buying & selling again.

The panel was strongly divided on the best way to handle this process.  Rose and Retsinas were strongly in the “we should’ve had more regulations, and we better create some more ASAP” camp.  Merton and Moss were more of the regulations may be needed, yes, but they might do more harm than good.  Moss emphasized that by bailing-out these banks, we may be incentivizing future increased risk-taking — the exact opposite of our goal.  Merton noted that there’s a trade-off between innovation and stability, with the implicit conclusion that we might be giving up too many benefits of innovation out of a political desire for stability.

All of it very interesting… I would like to have seen more back-and-forth between the panelists, but it definitely clarified a few things I haven’t picked up from the news and ‘net.  There’s another panel on Thursday with Dean Light, Greg Mankiw, and others… I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it, but it sounds amazing.  So many opportunities!