Even Jeb Bush, who comes from one of America’s best-known political families, says he’s trying to avoid political news during these days and months of political upheaval in Washington.
At the Carroll School’s 2017 Finance Conference, the former Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate explained during the Q&A that he’s been watching ESPN rather than news channels. “But even that’s getting political,” he said, drawing laughs. What Bush and others made clear at the June 8 conference is that politics isn’t just unavoidable. It’s increasingly a wild card in today’s financial markets.
Technological disruption is only adding to the challenges ahead for financial professionals, according to industry leaders at the annual conference.
The daylong event brought together more than 200 of those professionals and highlighted speakers including Nicholas Burns ’78, a Harvard professor who has served as a top U.S. foreign policy official, and Alfred F. Kelly Jr., CEO of Visa, Inc. Panels addressed questions such as how public affairs and world events are influencing equity investing and how “FinTech” (financial technology) startups are disrupting the industry.
In his opening talk, Bush called attention to what has traditionally been a Democratic issue while presenting Republican solutions to the problem. He focused on the question of economic stratification, or inequality, in American society.