Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Greetings from Sea Island

I’m in Sea Island, Georgia, for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s 2008 Financial Markets Conference.

We arrived late last night and apparently missed some serious weather excitement. In fact, the weather was so exciting yesterday that it made the WSJ’s economics blog:

On the eve of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s conference on reforms to financial markets in Sea Island, Ga., it wasn’t bad economic data attendees were dodging — it was the weather.

A unconfirmed tornado touched down a few miles from the conference hotel, according to hotel workers, knocking out power in pockets across the island. While one hotel passed out glow sticks to guests and warned that power might not be restored until midnight, it doesn’t appear that the conference will suffer. The Cloister at Sea Island, which hosted the Group of 8 industrialized nations four years ago and is the scene of this year’s Fed gathering, is operating on back-up power.

This year’s conference, held as credit crisis still rages, examines the financial regulatory reforms that followed the last crisis in 2001-2002, notably the Sarbanes Oxley Act. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke addresses the conference by satellite Tuesday morning.

Today, it’s gorgeous. Cool, breezy, pleasant. Can’t wait for the day’s conference to be done so we can get in a quick sail.

Whenever I’m at a beautiful golf resort like this, I always kick myself for not having learned how to play golf when I was a kid. Unfortunately, my guess is that it’s probably too late for an out of shape 50 year old guy to learn now. Sigh.