George Mack ’92, managing director of the Barclays Global Restructuring and Finance Group, recently hosted students from the Hamilton Program in New York City to talk about his experiences in the finance industry as well as encourage some debate about current political and financial issues.
After graduation from Hamilton, Mack worked and studied development in Vietnam. The country’s boarders had just been reopened to students, and Mack was among the first to travel there. Later, after getting his MBA at Columbia, he found that his experience in Vietnam helped him to begin a career in finance. Mack had a long tenure at Lehman Brothers before his group was sold to Barclays during the financial crisis, and it was interesting to hear his insights on his time there.
Other topics of the day included Dodd-Frank regulations, living wills for corporations, debt crises in Greece and Puerto Rico, tax policies for asset managers, and even Michael Lewis’ book Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.
Needless to say, it was a busy two hours! Program students welcomed the opportunity to talk with someone inside the industry about regulation and changes that they have been reading about since the 2008 crisis. Mack also clearly enjoyed the opportunity to talk about macroeconomic issues again, and at one point he reminisced about a course that he had taken at Hamilton with a then recently hired Professor Chris Georges. Georges is the New York City Program’s director this semester.
While the program students certainly learned a lot from Mack’s insights, it was clear that he relished the opportunity to be exposed to academia again, showing that Hamilton graduates are enduringly curious and inquisitive.
