The 12th annual Consumer Issues Conference will take place at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Family Room of the Wyoming Union.
The topic of this year’s conference will be consumer financial protection.
“This year we chose the theme of consumer financial protection because there has been so much going on including the 2008 financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank bill and its components for banking and consumer protection, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and trends of technology and money management and people were more responsible for their own financial decisions,” Cole Ehmke said.
Ehmke is from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Sciences and is an Extension Specialist in Personal Finance and Agricultural Entrepreneurship and a member of the planning committee.
The conference will begin with the film “Inside Job,” a documentary about the financial crisis of 2008.
“The film is about peeling back the layers so we can understand the situation that led up to the 2008 recession. Specifically, it talks about corruption in the financial services industry and the regulatory oversight that didn’t protect investors and homeowners,” Ehmke said.
There are many contributors to this conference including speakers and information provided by the Wyoming College of Law, College of Agriculture and the College of Business.
Keynote speakers will include Richard Alderman from the University of Houston, Lori Stiegel from the American Bar Association, Holly Petraeus from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Tahira Hira, who is the Senior Policy Advisor to the President of Iowa State University.
Even if financial issues are not of much interest to someone, Ehmke says the conference can still be useful for most people.
“We’ll have a variety — something for everyone. There will be things for people trying to understand the implications of all the recent changes in the marketplace for their own investing,” Ehmke said.
UW students can attend for free, and Ehmke says that it could be useful to students who are interested in investing or who are simply interested in money management.
“Students will get some tremendous insights into not only their own money management, but also how the market and regulatory environment are working,” Ehmke said. “Our financial health is up to ourselves, so students get a sense of what this means on a day-to-day basis.”
On Oct. 4 and 5, sessions will be held on building better credit scores, mortgages and foreclosures in Wyoming, financial devastation as elder abuse, and military and consumer financial protections.
