Inaugural Levy Impact Award Presented to Alumnus Oscar Valdés Viera

On May 8th, at the close of the Levy Economics Institute’s 40th Anniversary Conference, the inaugural Levy Impact Award was presented to Oscar Valdés Viera, in recognition of a Levy alumnus or alumna building upon the Levy Institute’s work in their career.

In 2014, the Levy Institute established a graduate program to train a generation of economists that have gone on to make their mark in industry, government, and the nonprofit sector.

Oscar Valdés Viera developed a keen interest in the work of Hyman Minsky while enrolled in Pavlina Tcherneva’s money and banking class as a Bard College undergraduate. He went on to do a year-long senior project with Tcherneva on a Minskyan analysis of state rainy day funds and how they navigate financial instability.

In 2015, Oscar joined one of the Levy Institute’s first M.S. cohorts, writing his Master’s thesis on remittance securitization as a tool to give Cuba access to capital markets on terms its sovereign credit rating alone could never unlock.

Today, he is a senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform and one of the sharpest voices on private equity and capital markets, sounding the alarm on the risks to retirement funds. The Impact Award recognizes Oscar’s work as embodying what Levy stands for.

photo credit: Karl Rabe