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

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“No, I don't think you are. I think, Barry, you've put it very well. This is a recurring moralistic theme. My old dissertation advisor, Ben Friedman at Harvard, has a book coming out in the spring that talks about how some of these moral ideas from the late 18th century extend to our American economic policy debates today. And that's why people vote against what seems to be their self-interest often. There's this whole tired Keynes quote, which is still applicable. People of affairs don't realize how much they're the slaves of the ideas of some defunct economist. And this goes back to the discussion you were having with Dalio compared to me.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A series of bank problems. And similarly, there were people who were very reluctant to expand the central bank balance sheet to do QE when the economy was vastly underemployed. My colleague, Danny Blanche Harrow, who's your colleague now, Bloomberg, who you mentioned, he was way ahead of the curve. He was on before me in 2008, 2009, saying, hey, wake up people, we got to do something.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The view that monetary policy could only do harm by trying to be helpful and you wanted things to liquidate, as Andrew Mellon, who was the Treasury Secretary in the U.S. under Uber said. And that great book by Lords of Finance is beautiful portrayal of these ideologies. And Barry Eichen Green, the economic historian, has also written about this and many others. Mark Blythe has a book on austerity. But these ideas just keep coming back. They just keep coming back. And so in 2009, the Bank of England made a terrible mistake letting there be a run on a major regional bank, Northern Rock, because they thought, oh, we have to fight the moral hazard and not tell people that they're going to be bailed out. And then that provoked justice it did in the 30s, although thankfully on a smaller scale.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very old school small sea conservative, but most importantly recessionist or creative destruction point of view that was proven dreadfully wrong by the Great Depression.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way the Translate and U.S. terms is imagine you're making decisions about government policy in the face of recession, and there's a huge picture of Herbert Hoover on the wall in the room. And you would probably do well saying, okay, I look at Herbert Hoover. I think what would he do? What did he do in 1929, 30, 31? And I'm going to do the opposite. And it's not about personalities. It's about Montague Norman represented.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plus, my research background had a lot to do with both monetary policy and what had gone wrong in Japan. So I was seen as relevant. Anyway, long story short, after I was appointed, but before I went over, I attended a party bizarrely with members of the Federal Open Market Committee, including Jellen and Bernanke. In summer of 2009, and literally four different FOMC members I counted came up to me and said, you're going to the Bank of England. If they appointed a foreigner at the FOMC, Congress would burn the Fed down. So it would seem as strange, but I spent three years there. I did my best and people I never seemed to get attacked at all for being a foreigner.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you take that seat? This is a funny, not haha, but interesting thing about globalization having once been very open and different in Britain. Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister well before I got there, talked about having a government evolve the talents. And so the central bank jobs for the members of the monetary policy committee were publicly advertised and people could apply. And you didn't have to be a UK or even an EU citizen. Now, I mean, to be fair, I had done work with the Bank of England as part of my previous research and policy work. I had been a visitor at the bank as a researcher for six months in 2016. And probably more importantly, I did some consulting work for then”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the UK, Brexit because of Dislike of foreigners because of their dislike of change. And so the anti-globalization isn't because it's doing them harm necessarily, it's because they perceive it as foreign and bad. And you can see this in the UK because the single biggest predictor of whether you voted for Brexit in the polling data was whether you voted you would like to see the death penalty back. And the death penalty is never coming back in the UK, but it's a symbolic issue like burning the flag in the US. Again, us economists have to be humble but also straightforward and say, you know, People make decisions have nothing to do with economics. All we can do is tell you that things are lies about how good the economics are won't work.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, yeah, the same force was there in the UK and in the US. And I think it has a lot to do with less well-educated white males status going down. And they get really pissed. And that's not some inevitable result of economics. That's just the reality when you have both technology advancing and justice advancing, that their privileged positions start to break down and they get angry. And in our democratic system, they're allowed to express that anger. I just don't want us saying, oh, there's something underlying wrong with international economic integration. I mean, there's a bunch of political science work out there in polling work, including by my colleague Marcus Nolan and my former colleague Carolyn Freund, where you can just document that people are voting for these things, these parties, the Trump, Ferrara,”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree. And I mean, I was part of that crowd. I had said that there were huge echoes between Brexit and Trump when Trump was running. But I think it's really important, Barry, that we emphasize that not everything's about economics. People choose to do things that matter to them that may be a bad idea economically. You just don't want to lie to them about it. And I think that's where we are with both Trump and Brexit, is that there are people who are motivated for good reasons. There are people who are motivated for single issue voters, whether it's abortion in the United States or local government control in the UK. And there are people, frankly, who are motivated by evil things like racism and nativism and a lot of which contributes to populism.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State of any of the rich countries in Western Europe and less than many of the countries in Eastern Europe. And it's not part of Europe. So essentially all you're getting is a slight diminution in certain industries of regulatory conformity and you're giving up a huge amount of trade access. And so it gets even worse because there were many places, including American companies, including Japanese companies and others, who used Britain as their platform for investment that if they wanted to produce stuff inside the EU or they wanted to have services or headquarters inside the EU of a subsidiary, they did it in Britain because they liked Britain, they liked the English, they liked the rule of law, they liked the place. And now that doesn't work. And we're seeing that all these auto manufacturers, for example, for Nissan Toyota, Land Rover, they're cutting them.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you're effectively putting tariffs on yourself and not just tariffs, you're not part of the single market. So that means all the high end stuff that Britain was exporting in terms of education, business services, financial services. You're no longer going to be necessarily mutually recognized standards and access on those. So you're throwing up this huge spanner in the works, as the Brits would say. And what are you getting for it? Well, you can come up with a laundry list of things you think are wrong with the European Union economically, including if you feel this way, over-regulation, excessive welfare stay, tight labor laws, demographic decline, weaknesses in the euro. And as I pointed out and started pointing out back in 2016, none of those applied to Britain, essentially Britain has the weakest labor laws, the least welfare standards.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you can make a political argument for Brexit Barry if you're a naturalist, you're worried about immigration, you're worried about so-called sovereignty culturally, you're worried about Europe blowing up, there are a lot of reasons you can, as a free citizen in Britain, you could have voted for Brexit, but you can't make it an economic argument. I mean, essentially,”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next generation. And so this is one of the things I used to argue when I was policymaker at the Bank of England back in the financial crisis. You can talk about all these other things that are supposedly bad about expansionary monetary policy, but failure to act has incredibly bad, real tangible effects, not just paper profits for a few people. I'm against inequality, but I'm mostly against inequality because what it does to people on the bottom. I'm happy to tax the heck out of the people on the top, but the fact that the people in the top get ahead isn't going to prevent me from helping the people on the bottom.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, the question is compared to what, and there's no question we would have been better off for a variety of reasons if we hadn't cut back on fiscal abruptly in 2010 and we had had to sustain public investment campaign and then monetary policy would have been different. So again, in conclusion, and I heard your interview with Dalio, in sort of implication, I'm not that different. But again, just like with globalization, you can't pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist. You can't pretend inequality is only the fault of the Fed. I mean, the reason the Fed does some of these things is because not just they're bleeding arts for inequality, but because fundamentally if you have mass unemployment, that is so much worse for those people than the fact that some rich people get ahead because stock prices go up. That has permanent scarring effects on communities, on individuals, on families, on education.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MMT or not, but some people will call it MMT and use that as their justification. So then the question is, what does the MMT tell us? It's different. And where I would come down, and a number of my colleagues would come down, is saying there's a difference between saying the budget constraints are not as tight as people used to think, especially in these current circumstances versus the budget constraint is a myth. Stephanie Kelton, I guess her name is talking about deficit myth. Those are very different, you know? It's like saying to a diabetic, right? If you're taking your meds and you're responsible, you can occasionally cheat. It's different from, say, the diabetic. You don't have to take your meds. And Ben and Jerry's all the time, right?”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me take it in reverse order. I think what if we get unified government, a clear president with a mandate, a, let's assume, say, Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, then I would expect to see a significant shift in ongoing fiscal policy even as the economy recovers. I would expect to see reallocation of taxes. I would expect to see in prey for a carbon tax, but redistribution of some of those revenues back to the people hit by it. And I would expect to see a larger investment in infrastructure, healthcare, and green energy. Now, whether that's MMT or not isn't going to show up in the plans for the first few years, because interest rates are nil. The economy is far from full employment. We've way underinvested in green and in healthcare and in infrastructure. So it makes no difference where you call it.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both important. The when of spending is kind of asymmetric. It's far more important that you don't blow it when you need the spending, as we did by reversing fiscal course in 2010, as the UK did, as Germany, as a number of other countries along with the US mistakenly did, versus really stepping up and doing the fiscal as we did, I say we as the US did and the other major economies did last spring. That's really important. Wasting your money on the, as you put it, pro-cyclical, feeding a boom when it didn't need the help tax cuts we had in 2017 is bad, but it's less dangerous than failing to spend when you need it. And this is one of the funny things. I mean, it's like with monetary policy. Monetary policy is asymmetric too. It's very good at staving off financial panics. It's not so good at creating”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Debating what's public investment, what's useful for the next generation, what's going to have a bigger or lesser payoff, what forms of taxation are better or worse. That's the discussion you should be having, even if you can borrow against the equity in your home, it matters whether you blow it all on Domino's pizza or whether you renovate your kitchen or whether you take that money and put your kids through school.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Safety and has to stick their money somewhere, and that all goes into treasuries and then supposedly safe assets. And then when interest rates are that low, you're better off using fiscal policy than not. But as our cousins at the Peterson Foundation rightly point out, and as I've been saying for several years now, the debate should be about what you spend it on, not how much you're spending. That is a more difficult debate in politics, and it's more difficult to establish than having simple rules of thumb. Oh, 90% debt to GDP ratio is bad. Whoops, turns out not true.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particularly when we're in a bad situation like we are now. And by bad situation, I don't mean just the human horror of the pandemic. I mean, bad situation, the kind of secular stagnation that Larry Summers and others have spoken about, which is that we're in a period of fundamentally deficient private sector demand for productive investment. The real interest that the R-Star, the underlying real interest rate of the economy is very low in econ speak. At that point, everybody just”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we shouldn't freak out about them the way people kept trying to make us freak out about them. That's for sure. Again, my colleague Olivia Blanchard did Peterson, the noted economist, has been doing a lot of the intellectual groundwork the last couple years to explain why this is the case. But a bunch of us, including Olivier and I and others, were already saying back in 2008, 2009, hey, don't destroy the economy for the sake of the shibboleth, this false fear that somebody you're going to turn into Greece. It goes to exactly the point you raised, Barry. If you're a country that can issue debt in your own currency, and importantly, if you're a country where it's credible that in future you can raise taxes if you have to, then you don't need to worry so much about debt. But not worrying so much is not the same as not worrying at all. And so it's just that it's less of a knife edge.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the failures are not about globalization. What we've seen over the last four years is the exact experiment. You roll back globalization and it gets worse, not better.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or India or Poland for making a living. They are entitled to, and they should. And so the question is, given that they exist, how do we integrate a system that lets them make a living and cruise to our benefit? And so the fundamental contention of Trump that we've all been played for suckers, which of course is his mental worldview at all times, because that's his whole game plan, that we've all been played for suckers is just doesn't hold up with the facts. I mean, when we talk about the loss of these jobs, it happens in a country where you have 150 million jobs at any given time and 15 plus million, 20 million, 30 million people turn over their jobs every year, the idea that over a 20-year period, manufacturing jobs shrunk by a couple million, you know, that's reality.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first point is that the main reason a huge swath of people in the U.S. have been left behind is because our politics, driven by race, driven by regionalism long before Trump has made us have the weakest welfare state and the weakest worker protections in the world for a rich country. And so go across the border to Canada, go across the Atlantic to any Western European country, go the other direction to Australia or Singapore or Japan. And workers have not been left behind as much. So that's actually not on globalization. That's on us. And the second thing is that you at some point there were people overselling globalization. I personally think I can claim I largely haven't, but it's about making the best of the reality you got. You're not going to prevent people in China or Brazil.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's some combination of all of them somewhat opportunistically. I mean, our commitment, and I'd like to think a number of other think tanks, but not all, our commitment is to be very open about what it is we're pursuing, to say why we've gotten to the agenda we have, and these are the issues, and includes disclosure of our funders, disclosure of the background of our fellows, and just say, put it out there. We believe that integration with the global economy on net is much better for the U.S. in terms of economic well-being, stability, peace, domestic politics, and just dealing with the big economic problems than the alternative. And so we're just opportunistic. So if sometimes it's about writing op-eds and putting explainers on our website and trying to reach the public that way, sometimes it's appearing with influencers like you or our friend Tom Keen and friend Cine Laqua.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kill everything you seek to kill, and you even less frequently get proposals accepted directly as soon as you propose them. But over time, you hope to change the debate. And there are a number of places I can cite where we've done that, including most recently on fiscal policy with Olivier Blanchard's leadership on trade relations with China and with TPP, other things.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the third thing you try to do is contribute to the public discussion on both those lines to talk about what's good and what's bad. And in the normal times, again, I mean it sounds very establishment. One doesn't have this by right. One has to earn it. But in the normal times, people want to hear what your think tank says because they feel like it offers useful information. And so officials want to discuss with you informally or occasionally make their case formally so that you can be a sounding board and try to make policy better. The one other thing I would say is that the ability to affect policy in our view and the record of the Peterson Institute is about sort of like a baseball player. You're doing really well if you're averaging 300 that you don't always”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, think tanks at best, in our view, are served kind of like, well, they serve three purposes. First is they try to shoot down bad ideas. We're sort of like an independent council of economic advisors. We try to explain what are the costs, what are things that are already known, what are unforeseen effects, and with the Trump administration, there's been an awful lot of that. That's sort of the first thing. The second thing you tried to do is be a source of good ideas for what are the problems in, say, the six month to three-year time horizon. You're not trying to Monday morning quarterback everything day to day, but you've got a bit more leisure and a bit less political pressure. And ideally, your people are good and have insights from experience and research.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Administrations, the Clinton administration, the Obama administration. We have been completely shut out of any meaningful interaction with the Trump administration appointees. We don't have Access by Wright, and we have to earn it. But in this case, we're shut out because we speak not what they want to hear. So you just got to make your choice. And we chose to be on the outs rather than be ridiculously partisan.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, some have become an arm and some haven't. I mean, just speaking very bluntly, Barry, and you had said about funding, and I don't mean to duck that issue. We're much smaller than most of the other think tanks, and so we've been fortunate to be able to choose supporters, starting with the Peterson Foundation, covering our core. But then we have a market test to raise seventy five percent of our money every year. And so we have a balance. And we only take money that's from private sector or individuals that's basically nonrestricted or only about very broad things like trade or macro. The incentives to get partisan have always been there, but they've gotten worse, just as it's been true for everybody in Washington and everybody around the world recently. Because when the government ceases to value expertise and ceases to value open debate, you only weigh in sometimes is to be partisan. I mean, we worked with people in both Bush and”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael Peterson, head of the Peterson Foundation, succeeded Pete as the chair of our board. And together, I think we've built on the values and the core that Fred and Pete had and taken it in a better direction further, that it's not just about the global economy. It's about how the global economy affects the domestic well-being of people, that it's not just about how the U.S. interacts with the global economy, but our target audience are the leaders in the major economies, basically think the G20. And that we're doing more education and outreach and accessible publication rather than academic work.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks, Barry. It's obviously a pleasure for me to talk about it. The Peterson Institute for International Economics was co-founded 40 years ago about by Fred Bergston and Pete Peterson, who had been together in government in the 70s, in the early 70s. And they both saw the U.S. as being part of a global economy that it wasn't yet realizing it was part of. And the strong point of the Peterson Institute since that time has been bringing together people with academic research grant who want to work on real-world problems, which is in some ways may sound like, well, that's what a think tank does, but doing it with quality and some amount of intellectual honesty and not being terribly partisan about it is the trick. I got to take over as the second leader of it, as the president, starting in January 2014.”
2020-11-06 · Masters in Business · Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source