Today begins the Jackson Hole Symposium, an annual and somewhat under-the-radar get-together of the world’s top economists and central bankers. The Washington Post provides detail on “the biggest event of the year for Federal Reserve insiders”:
The topic this year is “Financial Stability and Macroeconomic Policy,” appropriate for a conference that comes two years after the outbreak of a financial crisis and almost one year after that crisis deepened.
The event that will likely receive the most attention is a speech by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on Friday morning. Bernanke’s talk is titled “Lessons from a Year of Crisis,” and should include his recounting of the events of the last year and lessons from the experience for policy in the future. In contrast to his recent, highly visible appearances, this speech is not scheduled to be televised (a text will be published on the Fed’s Web site, however).
-111 years ago today, Vilhelm Moberg, one of Sweden’s greatest writers, was born. University of Minnesota Press has published his magnificent and popular two-volume “A History of the Swedish People,” translated by Paul Britten Austin and with a foreword by Nobel Prize-winner Gunnar Myrdal. You can find more info here and here.
-On this date in 1958, Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution alongside a similar theory from Alfred Russell Wallace in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society of London. As a small token of commemoration, here’s a recent article that backs up Darwin’s theory about the human eye.