Daniel Berger Daniel Berger graduated with honors from Princeton University and Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone academic scholar.  He is presently a senior member and shareholder of the firm, for which he serves as a Managing Shareholder.  Over the last 25 years, he has been involved in complicated commercial litigation including class action securities, antitrust, and bankruptcy cases.  Mr. Berger has frequently represented public institutional investors in securities litigation, including representing the state pension funds of Pennsylvania and New Jersey in both individual and class action litigation.  He led his firm’s efforts on behalf of the City of Philadelphia in the Ikon securities class action, resulting in a recovery of $111 million.  He has also litigated securities opt-out cases, obtaining large premiums over class recoveries, including on behalf of the state pension funds of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the AOL/Time Warner litigation. He has published law review articles in the Yale Law Journal, the Duke University Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems, the University of San Francisco Law Review and the New York Law School Law Review and worked with the American Law Institute/American Bar Association program on continuing legal education.  He has been affiliated with the Shorenstein Center of Media and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  He is currently a partner of the Democracy Alliance.

Repeated Reg Failures Fuel Calls for Restoring Accountability on Fraud as Senate Nears Debate on FinReg Reform Bill

Paul Krugman recently commented on financial market reform and the problem of regulatory enforcement and follow-up. Acknowledging that the Administration and Congress had at least come up with a framework of re-regulation which could address most of the abuses which led to the recent crisis — if vigorously implemented by vigilant, well funded regulators — he raised the problem of future administrations (read Republican administrations or a Federal Reserve like the Greenspan-led Fed) which would be indifferent, even  hostile, to financial market regulation or totally captured by the financial services industry, and who would either negligently or intentionally jettison regulatory…

The Deficit: Size Doesn’t Matter

Daniel Berger argues that when it comes to economic recovery,  it is not the size of the deficit that matters, but its economic effects.

Criticism of extensive efforts of the national government to address - and overcome - the current economic emergency has taken on essentially three forms: on philosophical grounds (that the stimulus and the bank bail-out represent unwarranted compromises of the free enterprise system), on policy grounds (that they will result in dangerous budget deficits and increases of public debt) and political grounds (that they are sell-out to the banks and special interests). Of the three critiques, the one…

Greed: The Fundamental Flaw of Free Market Fundamentalism

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Daniel Berger wrote an insightful letter to Michael Smerconish in May, 2009, responding to a Philadelphia Inquirer article by Smerconish exploring Hollywood’s possible contribution to the meltdown through films like Wall Street. In July, we ran a short version of the letter, but in honor of today’s bank protest in Chicago, we decided to run the full text of the letter. Berger argues that greed is the fundamental flaw in our financial system.

Michael:

I read the May 10 column in the Inquirer and, while I disagree with the ultimate conclusion which you imply, you, nonetheless, deserve credit for raising a provocative subject: whether people…

Big Media blows it: NPR’s brain cramp on the Fed

For Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Daniel Berger, Dave Davies’ recent Fresh Air interview with WSJ’s David Wessel on his new book about the Fed is typical of how Big Media blows it on economic issues.  Here’s what every reporter should know…

I heard Dave Davies’s interview with David Wessel regarding the financial crisis and the Federal Reserve the other day, and I can only say I found it disheartening.

First of all, I was appalled at the apparent lack of understanding of the financial collapse and the related economic crisis expressed in the interview. Not to single Davies out in particular, but it appears that the…

Failure to assess responsibility for crisis means bad history, bad policy and bad politics

There’s no way to move beyond the economic crisis without accounting–literally and figuratively–for the past. Daniel Berger explains why we need a commission-level inquiry into the financial meltdown, and how to keep it focused and productive.

The time has come to investigate the nature, origins, propagation and effects of the financial crisis. Unless we understand what happened and how it happened, we cannot get proper safeguards in place to prevent a re-occurrence. But an historical review of the events surrounding the crisis and the nature of the crisis is, in my opinion, even more important in terms of judging the validity…

The real Gordon Gekko

 In the 1987 film, which became a cultural touchstone and won actor Michael Douglas an Oscar, Gekko is a ruthless trader who pioneers risk arbitrage and then moves into real estate (check out his fictional biography at Forbes). Daniel Berger looks at the real-life inspiration for Stone’s film–and asks what lessons it still holds in our crisis-gripped world.

The back story to Stone’s movie was not the leveraged buy-out craze of the 1980s but rather the insider trading scandals of that period. Moreover, the model for Stone’s protagonist, Gordon Gekko, was not a reputable figure (like those mentioned as being responsible…