The shadow banking sector has performed a minor séance, and conjured a shadow economist sector. We now have a better idea just who the Americans are who currently inhabit this shadow economist finance sector. Charles Ferguson, in his book Predator Nation, describes many of the key players by name: he covers Glenn Hubbard, Larry Summers, Fredric Mishkin, Richard Portes, Laura Tyson, Martin Feldstein, Hal Scott, and John Campbell. The University of Massachusetts economist Gerry Epstein has taken a different tack, with a somewhat different roster. Epstein and his collaborators have collated two data sets linked to economists regularly summoned to pronounce upon financial regulation during the crisis, comparing the positions taken in their academic work and their “outside” positions and consultancies (derived entirely from public sources). Since it would be a daunting task to subject the entire profession to audit, he chose to pursue the prosopography of the manageable subset of financial economists who had presented themselves as “faceless” representatives of the orthodox economics discipline, either through the Squam Lake group (covered above) or the Pew Economic Policy Group Financial Reform Project. By keeping the target group limited to nineteen prominent economists, his team was able to explore the nature of ties to financial firms in somewhat greater depth than one encounters in the news media. However, working only from open sources, the report depends entirely upon some manifestation of self-disclosure turning up in some public context; therefore, it necessarily underrepresents the true nature of financial connections. … We find that 15 of 19 economists had private financial affiliations over 2005–09. The norm for economists was to not identify their private financial affiliations, establishing the need for a code of ethics prescribing disclosure guidelines.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 577