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Award-winning financial journalist and bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin will anchor the upcoming 2026 South Dakota Land and Lending Conference.

South Dakota State University’s Ness School of Management and Economics is presenting the annual conference Oct. 15 at the Denny Sanford PREMIER Center in Sioux Falls. Joe Santos, the Larry and Diane Ness Endowed Director and professor of economics at the Ness School, said its theme is the credit cycle — how markets expand, overheat and seize — and what the cycle means for agricultural land, lending and the rural economy.

Sorkin’s most recent book is “1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation,” which was named a Best Book of 2025 by TIME, The Economist, The Financial Times and Bloomberg. His first book, “Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves,” won the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book and was shortlisted for the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize and the 2010 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award.

Sorkin’s fireside conversation with Santos, about the credit cycle in the context of the 1929 crash, will kick off the conference.

“The 1929 crash extended from Wall Street to Main Street,” Santos said. “It traveled to the farm economy, collapsing commodity prices, depressing land values and shutting down the credit channel along the way. Ninety-seven years later, the credit cycle persists, and the business and policy challenges it creates are ones our audience faces every day. It is the right moment to examine them.

“Andrew is among the most accomplished financial journalists of his generation,” Santos added. “His new book reconstructs 1929 the way ‘Too Big to Fail’ reconstructed 2008: from the inside, with requisite detail and depth. Hosting Andrew on the 97th anniversary of the crash is a fantastic opportunity to understand what history teaches us about our current circumstances.”

Next, Sorkin will participate in a land panel discussion about real estate. “Challenges and Opportunities in Real Estate” will also feature Eric Lynch, economist with the National Association of Home Builders; Sean Turgeon, a partner at Rogers Appraisal Service Inc.; and David Widmar, co-founder and managing partner of Agricultural Economic Insights. Former Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken will moderate.

Following breakout sessions sponsored by SDSU Extension, lunch will feature a lending conversation on “Fiscal Policy and the Credit Channel” with Natasha Sarin, president and co-founder of Yale Budget Lab, professor at Yale Law School and former counselor to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and host Jake Mortenson, economist for the U.S. Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation, who is participating in the conference in his personal capacity.

“Natasha’s research on tax policy, household finance and macroprudential risk management, combined with her Treasury experience, places her at the center of questions that determine the cost of credit for every borrower in the room,” Santos said. “The federal government’s fiscal position and the trajectory of public debt bear directly on Treasury yields, which benchmark mortgage rates, farm credit rates and commercial real estate financing rates.”

The closing land and lending panel on “Agricultural Credit and the Rural Economy” includes Chuck Conner, former deputy and acting secretary of agriculture for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and former president and CEO of National Council of Farmer Cooperatives; Rick Dusek, executive vice president of agriculture retail, distribution and transportation at CHS Inc.; Hunter Roberts, secretary of agriculture and natural resources for the state of South Dakota; and Steve Wittbecker, executive vice president of the Farm Credit Banking Group at CoBank. Matthew Diersen, the Griffith Chair in Agricultural Finance at the Ness School, will moderate the panel.

“The closing panel — on land and lending — analyzes issues at the intersection of the day’s themes,” Santos said.

The mission of the conference is to advance understanding of real estate markets, including how they are affected by conditions in the credit channel and decisions by public policymakers.

Additionally, the conference encourages and strengthens relationships between academic researchers, real estate professionals, lenders, policymakers and students in South Dakota and beyond.

The event draws roughly 500 real estate developers, agricultural lenders, bankers, investors, policymakers and students from across South Dakota and the region.

The conference is set for 9 a.m.-3 p.m., with doors opening at 8 a.m. A full schedule of events can be found at the Ness School website. 

. SDSU students can attend the conference for free with a university-excused absence by .