This year Raghuram Rajan, the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at Chicago Booth will deliver the Lionel Robbins Lectures. 

Raghuram Rajan was the 23rd Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between September 2013 and September 2016. Between 2003 and 2006, Prof Rajan was the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund.

Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures 2019, Liquidity and leverage

A bank's issuance of short-term demandable or overnight claims in order to finance illiquid loans leads to panic. Since the dawn of banking in Assyria and Sumeria, long before we had central banks, deposit insurance, or a tax advantage to debt, banks have had this structure, and critics have been troubled by it, as they are today. Professor Rajan will argue that this structure of banks - financing illiquid loans with short-term or demandable debt - is not just a bug in the system, it is also a feature.

Lecture 1 - Why banks? 
The first lecture will focus on why banks have the structure they have - long-term illiquid assets financed by short-term runnable liabilities. It will explain why the risk of runs is inherent in the business of banking and cannot be eliminated without impinging on that business.

More details for the first lecture in this year's series are available here.

Lecture 2 - The two faces of liquidity 

The second, and last, of this year's two Lionel Robbins lectures, this talk will focus on why anticipation of high liquidity can be detrimental to the financial system, increasing leverage, the system's dependence on liquidity materializing, and lowering good governance practices.

For more information on this event, visit lse.ac.uk/events.