YouSaid · the spoken record

Adam S. Posen

lines on the record: 83
first: 2020-11-06
most recent: 2020-11-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that, again, I mean, this is where it's hugely important, and I'm grateful for this opportunity, Barry, to talk economic policy. These things matter greatly. But there's a lot of stuff that economics is not the motivation. Economics is only a small part of the impact that we have to face. And it's not because you had Lisa Cook on recently, who I think is terrific. She actually worked with me at New York Fed a long time ago. And you can frame it in terms of, as she does sometimes, in terms of the lost potential in addition to the injustice. But ultimately, it's got to be about the injustice, not about just economically it would be nice.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got me there. Anyway, and I remember talking with somebody who was from Spain, and this person was saying to me, you Americans think you're so free. When I was there, the state police are walking around like the fascists we used to have and doing this and that. And I remember being horrified that he could say such a thing. And how could I think that? And he must be totally wrong. And, you know, and I had always made the comfortable assumption, yeah, if you're black or even Jewish, you don't want to be driving alone in Alabama, sure, but over time it's all going away. That was obviously totally oblivious to the reality of life for particularly black males, but all kinds of people in the US and the behavior of police. We don't know, as you just said, it's election day. We don't know what's going to happen. But I hope whoever wins.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm just so ashamed of that. I remember, I mean, obviously it matters much more to save innocent people's lives than what I'm ashamed or not ashamed about, but I am ashamed of it. I remember one of the first”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were kind enough to send me a list of questions. This one was the hardest one, actually, for me to think about ahead of time. I don't know why, because it's a perfectly reasonable question. I guess the main thing that I wish I had known 20 years ago or 25 years ago that I didn't was just frankly to be more woke, that how much, despite my liberalism and fancy education and attempted objectivity, I had overlooked a lot of the fundamental injustices in the world, and I had overlooked a lot of our history.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both ways you got to do that. And then the final thing, which is my fundamental belief in my career, is be internationally minded, not necessarily that you need to work on international policy, but that the way things are in your home country, including the U.S., are not necessarily the way things are done around the world. They're not necessarily the best way. And that sounds incredibly obvious probably to you and the people who listen to your podcast, Barry. The extent we're seeing it now in the U.S. elections and the U.S. politics, just the extent to which people have no concept of how the U.S. compares and acts compared to others, and the ways in which it's similar to others and the ways in which it's different. So I think that's really important.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“among young people now is very different than what it was when I first was in a position to be hiring people 10, 20 years ago. Then the problem was people being too prolix, too profligate with words, too confusing, unwilling to take a stand. Now the problem is teaching people how to make a longer form argument”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to use economic analysis to make the world a better place and particularly to affect public policy, then there is a broad set of ways you can do it. And for young people, the first and to me most important thing is focus on learning how to think about data. And I don't mean necessarily Rajetti and the epitome of data science nowadays. I don't necessarily mean being very technical, but being empirical-minded and of course some technical skill to go with that is helpful. And learning just how messy it is to gather and deal with real world data. And I would also gather young people to, I mean it's trite, but to work on their written and oral communication. What the problem is with written and oral communication”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, going to a think tank is a very bizarre specialized little niche, right? It's a loveliness for those of us who like it, but it's generally not, even though I sort of went to work with that in mind, it's generally not something you should plan for. Not because it's like you shouldn't plan for playing in the NBA. There are more think tanks and more jobs now than there's ever been, but just that it's still a weird niche profession. If your goal is...”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally respect that these bastions of independence and quality like the post, the Washington Post, the New York Times The Guardian, the Financial Times, the Economist, and basically Boomer are doing wonderful things, but we also need some kind of philanthropic model or something to provide local reporting to hold governments and business accountable.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, this goes back to sound like an economist. I mean, this goes back to a very fundamental point that Paul Krugman and the different forms others raised 20 years ago, which is one of the effects of the Internet, of globalization, of technology especially, is that we're living in a world of superstars, that the market is global. And so when you are top in your field, you get outsized rewards, and then you also get network effects, and you also start deterring and losing the local. And this is true in journalism as well as in other fields and business. And what's been very sad, and there's a lot of documentation about this, is we've seen there's a very good NBR working paper on this from within the last year, I think, on where you lose local newspapers, you see corruption go up, you see voter misinformation go up.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who wants the journalism to be high quality and all, and I think that's amazing. And clearly the Solzbergers to some degree have had that same model in mind for the times. But yeah, The Guardian, I think, is a potential model going forward, and they don't have a multi-billion dollar backing, but they've managed to sustain quality too.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the other thing I have to plug is the Guardian. The Guardian, I read The Guardian every day and don't agree with all of it, but it is fantastic, both reporting and essays. Guardian is fantastic.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going on by editorial decisions and editorial writers. But the stuff that's real individual essays and reporting, there's a wealth of worthwhile things to read now.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I completely agree with you. And again, I didn't come into this knowing that you and I were the line. I just figured. I listen to you and I think you're smart, so I'm glad we align. But in terms of I think David Remneck and his team at New Yorker have been killing it forever. I think Jeffrey Goldberg and what the Atlantic has done, particularly since Trump has been outstanding. I think New York review of books after some turmoil has gotten back to being an incredibly good source. But yeah, those are some, but then there's all this wonderful stuff that gets aggregated now. And you wonder about the business model, how can these things be sustained? I mean, there are people also in the newspapers. I mean, my friend Peter Goodman at the New York Times, Neil Irwin also at the New York Times, there's a laundry list of people, David Lynch and others and Heather Long at the Washington Post less long form usually. It is a good age of journalism. There's also a bunch of cowardly things.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crim notes. And I'll give a shout out to Adam Tues and MYU. I didn't absolutely adore his book crashed, but his previous book, The Deluge about the U.S. role and the international economy around World War I and after I thought was terrific and very important perspective on what's going on in the world today.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Various the Atlantic and not that much in book lengths. But when I think about some of my favorite books of recent years, I mean, you mentioned Lords of Finance, which I think was superb. I think the Robert Gordon book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, was incredibly important. I think some of Krugman's earlier collections of essays, but going back to one of his earliest, the Age of Diminished Expectations was ahead of its time. It wasn't right for the period it was, but it's right now. We try to read a lot of history, and I've become addicted to these Oxford very short introduction series, which lets current academics summarize what's going on in a field. And I've been using that as my...”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, similarly on the Netflix Amazon TV watching, I must admit I am terrible about having a pen attention span to read serious stuff right now, frankly. So I'm spending a lot of time reading The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that made me very aware, even though I was brought up infinitely better off than they were, that you had to be very aware of the Tacit knowledge of navigating places, of navigating institutions, of navigating relationships. And not that I've done it perfectly by any means, but I was very aware of that from a young age. And so right now, quite unsuccessfully, but I'm trying to pay it forward both in terms of the individuals, the younger people at the Peterson Institute, who I try to help, and more generally working with other think tanks. We're trying to create something so that people of minority backgrounds, people of less privileged backgrounds can be taught some of this tacit knowledge so we can have more people of diverse backgrounds succeeding in the policy research profession.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Parents, my mother and father Harold and Posen were both physicists, they were both civil servants in the US, my father for the Air Force, my mother for the Smithsonian. And as a result, I was brought up to know always how difficult it was to know something, how important was to check things empirically, how cool it was when you did really understand something, and also perhaps surprisingly to have a very broad set of interests. My parents, the other big lesson for my parents, which was less about mentoring and more about my values in addition to the sort of attempt at scientific objectivity, although I wasn't a physicist, is that they had very, very tough lives. They were children of immigrants and grew up in poverty, both of them, and very narrow misses from having life and career go very askew.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've mentioned already as we went along two of the people who were most important. Gave me opportunities and encouragement to sort of go my political economy policy-oriented route. The other two really key mentors for me are one Fred Bergston, who was, as I mentioned, my predecessor and the co-founder was Pete Peterson of the Institute for International Economics, now Peterson Institute. And from the time I got to PII in 1997, Fred taught me about reaching a policy audience, reaching a public, and also gave me the opportunity to develop to think about running think tanks and what's involved with the personnel. And the through line between Ben and Rick and Fred was that they all were real world, not in the sense we weren't all academics writing books and articles, but real world in the sense of the stuff we did had to have some implications for the real world and had to be checked against the real world. And so my final mentors really, frankly, were my...”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what I've heard. And of course, then there's the occasionally mentioned, but obviously there racism that's totally white group of people, basically. And so it's one of these things where I give them credit. They're portraying the reality accurately, and it's incredibly uncomfortable.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, yeah. So we skipped it the first time around and it's, I saw a few episodes. It's so visually gorgeous. So I'm tempted, but it's also just so uncomfortable some of the sections in it. I mean, it's portraying the reality, which is useful, but again, do I really want to see that?”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a podcast called The History of English, meaning the history of the English language, not the English people, which is totally geeky and quite fun. Anyway, nothing terribly would trade to suggest to your audience that they haven't heard of.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does it hold up? It's not art, but it's kind of comforting and it's better for us than the Hallmark Christmas movies, let's put it that way. So I don't really have anything that fabulous to recommend to people in terms of podcasts. We listen to a lot of food and wine podcasts. We listen to 99% visible. We listen to, I listen to yours”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the pandemic work from home era and just how horrible the world is. My wife and I find we can't watch anything serious. So we're very stereotypical. We've watched a bunch of all the seasons of Great British bake off our Great British baking shows. It's called in the US. We start watching The Crown and as a former resident of the United Kingdom that also has extra fun. We decided bizarrely to start rewatching Colombo from the beginning. How is that then?”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think there's a saying, talk about central banking, there's a reference in central banking to what's called the plumbing, which is the payment system things that have to work, which are sort of clunky, big, not very glamorous underlying things. And though blockchain in particular, Bitcoin and some of the other cyber currency aspects have been promoted as sexy hot fintech, they're really plumbing. They're really just a better gauge of pipe that doesn't tend to get clogged up very much. So I think we are going to, over the next few years, see much more use of it, and I think it's frankly not going to matter very much.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's very unlikely they would because even though I am full qualified, Democratic majority in Congress and the Biden campaign have both said with good reason that the Fed needs to rebalance the number of women and people of color in important positions, and there's plenty of good women and people of color who can be appointed before I would be. But if I was offered the opportunity to serve an economic policy in a senior role, I am very much sentimentally and believe I can make a contribution as a central banker. I love my current job running the Peterson Institute. It's a great thing for me, and I hope we do some good in the world.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To worry too much about the inflation because it's not as bad as we once thought it was and it's not that likely. But I do think we need to worry about the underlying problems of the global economy that we're in a low interest rate, low yield, low risk appetite world, that there isn't the next technological advance, the next big thing in Michael Lewis speak.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the other piece of this is I've done a lot of work in Japan. Everybody should be looking at what happened in Japan over the last 25 years as relevant for what's happening the rest of the world now. Because wages don't tend to fall, you get unemployment instead. And because nominal prices are sticky in econom speak, people don't tend to cut prices that much, although they do more now in the Internet age than they used to, deflation is less of a threat than we thought it was. You know, if you go back to stuff I was writing 20 years ago, Krogman Bernanke, others, we were very worried that deflation would be a downward negative spiral and would accelerate and would make matters much worse. And what Japan has showed us is, no, deflation is kind of a sticky mess. You get into it. It's hard to get out. It's an ongoing drag on you, but it doesn't tend to spiral out of control. So upshot, I don't think we need to.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, and this is my point of view, and it used to call me a throwback for thinking this, but now people are coming around, is that you can't have sustained inflation in a rich democracy unless you have sustained wage growth And this is kind of where Chair Powell and others on the Federal Market Committee have been talking for the last year or two. And we were just starting to maybe get to the point there was going to be some wage inflation before the pandemic hit. And you mentioned Danny Blanchard. Danny and I were out there in 2014 with a few other people screaming that the Fed had vastly underestimated the amount of labor market slack, that they were worried about inflation way too soon.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I view the decline in long term rates as something beyond the Fed's control largely and is driven by real factors. Guita Gopinath, the chief economist of the IMF, just recently had an op-ed in the Financial Times talking about how unprecedentedly global negative rates, negative least nominal rates are on government debt. And Larry Summers, again, to give him credit for envisioning the secular stagnation, I've been writing in my Pearson Colleagues, I've been writing about this for several years now, that you're in a fundamentally different environment that the real rate of return on capital is low, the risk appetite is low, the inflationary pressures are low. On top of that is the fact that”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends what you're trying to shoot. And this is why I don't like the ammo thing beyond the sort of muchismo of old white academic guys like me talking about bazookas, which is kind of absurd. It's really about the tool for the job. So if the job is fighting a deflationary shock, if the job is a lockup in financial markets, if the job is a panic producing widening spreads, if the job is a sudden withdrawal of liquidity by the banking system or the household sector, the Fed has infinite ammo. It can do what it needs to do to stave that off. This is what I meant by asymmetry. And recovery, it's not screwing up as necessary, but it's not sufficient. As Keynes would say, pushing on a string. Again, there's so many analogies. Just think of the Fed as a defensive specialist, not a shooting guard, right? So if it's got the wrong kind of shock,”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, we can debate that. But I don't put a huge thing on the huge weight on the monetary policy ease in the early two thousand, but I'm not going to debate it as long as you are on the same book Barry that they blew it on supervision and right?”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess so. But, you know, to me, there's something to that. I think it's more oxygen than fuel. There's no one-to-one with how much monetary policy loosened versus how much asset price inflation you got. That's just not there in the data. But there is a fact, which I was pointing out at the time, that if you run a loose regulatory policy, then there is at least a possibility of this kind of explosion conflagration. To me, it was about the low standards in mortgage lending. It was about the low standards of leverage. It was about the low standards of supervision of non-banks. It was about the encouragement of banks to get into all kinds of businesses they shouldn't have been in. I don't mean Glass-Steagall. I mean various types of very speculative things.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was totally Ayn Rand on regulation, as my late colleague Mike Musa, a former U Chicago professor, once said, you know, you don't want a conscientious objector as the commandant of the Marine Corps. You don't want Alan Greenspan as the lead regulator or supervisor in the U.S. financial system. And I thought that was brilliant. And so you go back and there were just so many lapses and intentional decisions on regulation and supervision that were poor that got us to the fragility and the situation we were in. I don't think the monetary policy was perfect, but I think it was damn good. But it was totally undercut by the laissez-faire approach to regulation and supervision.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's fine. And I think this is a discussion that has to be had. I just want to emphasize 2009-10, the Fed saved the world in many ways. The question is how much of the world needing saving was due to past actions of the Fed. And as I was saying in an earlier part of our conversation, Barry, I think you have to make a distinction between monetary policy and regulation and supervision of the financial system. And Greenspan actually was quite good at monetary policy, and his activism was smart. But he was a”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the Fed under Bernanke, but with everyone involved, did a very good job in two thousand nine into 2010. I think there's a lot of room for criticism of the Fed from 2005 to 2008. What about the decade before?”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to harm just throughout so many tweets about so many things, including the Fed, it just became noise and they were right to just sort of, I don't want to say rise above it. You can't rise above it, but to withstand it and not overreact.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is in the same spirit that Michigan Bernanke, Laubak, and I were writing about inflation targeting 20 plus years ago, that you try to be responsive, but in a way that is substantive and honest and not overpromising and not denying, but also not pretending that people should believe the lies told about your institution. And so it's interesting, I mean, a year ago, August, I was at the Fed's annual Jackson Hole Conference, and that was when right after Chair Powell's speech, President Trump tweeted that basically the chair, the Fed was as much of an enemy as a Chinese general, which was looney tunes and was horrible. And you could see Chair Powell and the other Fed officials being quite shaken by this. But then over time,”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Vested enough credibility and communication to do that safely. And similarly on the monetary policy measures now and the changes that Chair Powell, Vice Chair Clarida, Governor Brainerd, and others pushed in the mandate of the Fed, or rather, I shouldn't say the mandate, the strategic framework of the Fed to be less preemptive on inflation, more concerned with unemployment. So I think the independence of the Fed has been quite fine in recent years, but it's taken a lot of work, and not just PR work, but genuine engagement with the public and with Congress. And I give them a lot of credit. I always said to people who are wondering about things that The Fed isn't really scared of the president. The Fed is scared of Congress because Congress can change the Federal Reserve Act at any time.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Managed and measured. And I think that Jay Powell, current chair of the Federal Reserve, has done a terrific job of navigating the public threats from President Trump and others. And you can see this in the way that Congress has supported the measures they've taken, that they did something which I think proved to be absolutely right, the provision of liquidity and cross-national swap lines at the start of the pandemic economic effects in March, April, and they didn't get attacked by Congress. And they had to account for themselves to Congress as they should. But there were people, including Ben Bernanke, let alone me, who were very worried that we would need those swap lines in the next crisis and who Congress had attacked, but JPAL had made enough.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my doctoral dissertation, which is now twenty seven years ago, was on this very topic. And what I argued was independence of the Fed or any central bank depends on having a political constituency that supports it. And that sort of like the Supreme Court, you can't go vastly away from public opinion because in the end they'll change the institution. So independence is something that has to be”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And again, the Fed wasn't the miracle worker, it was more, again, asymmetric. It was about getting the Fed and getting the money supply out of being the cause of problems. It wasn't about fixing everything and making everything wonderful. But those two aspects of the 19th century would be back, and that would be a... Definite step backwards for the US.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Within very short time, you would have two things. You would have money flying out of the U.S. because people would want to cash out the currency. It's like an exchange rate peg. You have people betting against the ability to maintain it. So think of 1992 and George Soros' famous bet against the British pound. And you would start having greater fluctuations in the real economy because you would be determining monetary policy by arbitrarily the amount of gold showing up in the world, essentially, and would not be flexible in reaction to the Realities. So we look more like the late 19th century when the US was subject to capital flight and the U.S. was subject to sharp fluctuations in real activity driven by monetary policy.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Central banks hadn't been transparent enough and under Greenspan that was an issue. Central banks had been a little too discretionary and this is how you ended up with the weekend of Bernie's problem that if Greenspan died they wanted to prop him up because there was too much faith in an individual. And three, that central banks had to avoid being too mechanically rules-based because then you would get into trouble by tightening policy or loosening policy too mechanically. And so that was our contribution, was to come up with this alternative framework, or rather adapt the alternative framework others have been experimenting with for the Fed and talk about what we had learned.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happened upon the fact that a bunch of other central banks, including the Bank of England, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of Canada, Reserve Bank of Australia, had moved to this thing called inflation targeting. And so I did a bunch of other stuff while I was there, and Rick Michigan certainly did a bunch of other stuff while he was there. But our main output in this regard was creating this book with Bernanke, Michigan, the now late sadly Thomas Laubach and myself, looking at the international experience of inflation targeting. And it was essentially meant to adjust, not just defend the Fed, but adjust to a couple realities of the time.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“a gold standard or a very tight definition of price stability. And some of the outside academic consultants, including a person named Ben Bernanke, and I myself all thought this was very dangerous. And as the saying goes, you can't beat something with nothing.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got the job at the New York Fed right out of grad school, and they hire every year several staff as do all the Federal Reserve banks and the Federal Reserve Board. I didn't get a job at the board, but I was very fortunate to get the job I did at the New York Fed. Rick Michigan, Professor Columbia, who I think you know, at that time had taken leave for Columbia and was the executive vice president and chief economist at New York Fed. And he was building a real network and exciting program and he was very open and good to me to let me be part of it as a junior person. And the main point was that we were reacting to threats to the Federal Reserve at that time. There were several people in Congress who, including a couple notable senators, who wanted to change the mandate of the Fed to”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you think that the causes of these problems are because of lax credit, you're ignoring the evidence. What you can do, if you care about lax credit, is you can worry about your accounting system. You can worry about your bank supervision system. You can engage in tighter regulation. And that's where the effort should be if you're worried about misallocation. And that should be something that goes on all the time, not waiting for some purgatory apocalyptic period to wipe out the stables. That is no way to act because you wipe out a lot of human beings doing that.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about the role of central banks and easy monetary policy. If you look around the world right now or you look around the world in twenty nine, twenty ten and you thought your biggest problem was people who don't deserve credit or getting credit. Stocks that shouldn't be up are up, you're totally missing the point.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source