A Fistful of dollars - IMF report on role of lobbying in financial crash

I attended earlier in the week a very good workshop run by the University of Kingston in London on the financial crisis and the developing political and economic agendas for future financial market regulation.  I went to get additional context for a Financial PR course we are running on the new Masters PR programme at Greenwich starting in September.

The role of media and the influence of lobbying during the crisis was an interesting sub-text in the workshop.  In particular a recent report by the IMF titled A Fistful of dollars on the relationship between lobbying and risk taking by the sub-prime mortgage financial institutions on Wall St was explored.   Essentially the report highlighted that those financial institutions which lobbied most actively against any tightening of regulation in the sub-prime area by the authorities were also those who took the most risks, suffered the worst returns over time and were major recipients of the US government bailouts.

No PR or communication academics are quoted in the IMF report but they could have done as lobbying draws on PR frameworks in its approach to communications although particularly in the US has developed its own route of professionalisation.   Lobbying needs to consider the question raised by Larissa Grunig on the role of PR and quoted by Dejan Vercic "Are we in the business of persuasion? of information? of negotiation? of co-optation? of co-operation".   Perhaps it was better put by both Grunigs later (1992) as framed by two extremes; compliance gaining (asymmetry) and problem solving (symmetry).  Does lobbying do problem solving?  The IMF report is a damning indictment of the destructive role which lobbying can play when seeking compliance not to solve problems.   But the PR profession cannot ignore the wider lessons which the report raises.