Adam S. Posen on the Need for Fiscal Stimulus (Podcast)

monetary policy fiscal policy. There aren't that many people who have his breath of experience, whether it's at a think tank, at the New York Fed, at the Bank of England. This really is quite the fascinating discussion, and the timing

is perfect. We're recording this not knowing what the outcome of the election is, and we're recording it on election day, so it'll be interesting to see how our discussion plays out in light of what probably is old news by now, But the discussions of policy and the discussions of what central bankers got right and wrong over history is timeless, and I think if you're at all interested in what's going on in banking, monetary policy, government management of emergencies

and recessions, you're going to find this to be absolutely fascinating. So with no further Ado my conversation with Adam Posing. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is an Imposing. He is the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, where he has served since he comes to us with a PhD

in political economy from Harvard. He has been an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as well as a voting member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. In he co authored a book on inflation targeting with some guy named Ben Bernanke. Adam Posen, Welcome to Bloomberg. Thank you, Berry. Really excited to talk with you. So let's have a conversation. I'm I expect

this to be good. Wonky fund and let's start with with the Peterson Institute, globally recognized think tank focusing on international relations and and economics. Tell us a bit about the institution. How does it get its funding, what are its goals and purposes? Thanks Verry, It's obviously a pleasure

for me to talk about it. The Peterson Institute for International Economics was co founded forty years ago about by Fred Bergston and Pete Peterson, who had been together in government in the seventies in the early seventies, and they both saw the US 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 thing tank does. But doing it with quality and some amount of intellectual honesty and not being terribly partisan about it is the trick. Um I got to take over as the second leader of it as the president starting

in January. Michael Peterson, head to 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 uh Fred and Pete had and taken it in a better direction. Further, um 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 US interacts with the global economy. But our target audio in are the leaders in the main in

the major economies. Basically think the g twenty UM and that we're doing more education and outreach and accessible publication rather than academic work. So you raise an interesting question that I have to address. Throughout most of my career I followed a number of think tanks for pretty much what you described nonpartisan research and analysis. But at the same time, I've noticed a number of pretty well known think tanks have kind of gone, you know, just full

partisan politics. What is that about. Aren't these thin tanks supposed to maintain some sort of objectivity when they pursue policy or have they all just become an arm of various political parties. Well, some have become an arm and some haven't. I mean, just speaking very blantly, Berry and you had said about funding, and they don't mean a

duck that issue. We're much smaller than most the other think tanks, and so we've been fortunate to be able to choose UH supporters, starting with the Peterson Foundation covering our our core. But then we have a market test to raise of our money every year, and so we have a balance um and we only take money that's from private sector or individuals that's basically non restricted. Are

only about very broad things like trade or Macro. The incentives to get part of in 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 the value open debate, you only weigh in sometimes is to be part of it. I mean, we worked with people in both Bush administrations, the Clan administration of Bomb administration.

We have been completely shut out of any real meaningful interaction with the Trump administration appointees. We don't have access us by right, uh, 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 and and you know we we chose to be on the outs rather than be ridiculously partisans. So that raises another question. How does research normally anyway, how does it have an impact on public policy?

What do think tanks do under let's just call it a more traditional administration than the current one. Well, think tanks at best, in our view, are served kind of like well, they serve three purposes first, and 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 has

been an awful lot of that. But 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, and say the six months to three year time horizon. You're not trying to Monday, the earning 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, so they can say, here's a way of addressing this problem,

or here's the problem you've overlooked. And then the third thing you try to do is contribute to the public discussion and on both those lines, not to 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 they you can be a sounding more and try to make policy better. The one other thing I would say is that the ability to affect policy in our view UM and the record of Peterson Institute UM, is about sort of like a

baseball player. You're doing really well if you're averaging three that you you don't always 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 oliving Blanchard's leadership on trade

relations with China, and with TPP other things. So that was actually a question I was thinking about, and you pointed me right to it. In the US, are you targeting the White House? Are you targeting Congress and fiscal policy, or are you really aiming at at having influence on the Federal reserve and monetary policy or some combination of

all of them. 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 thanks, 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, and disclosure of the background of our fellows and and just say put it out there.

We believe that integration with the global economy on net is much better for the US in terms of economic well being, stability, peace, domestic politics, and and just dealing with the big economic problems than the alternative. And so we're just opportunistic. So if sometimes it's about writing our 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 Key and Trincy Makar

or David Weston on Bloomberg. Sometimes it's giving briefings directly the cabinet officials. Let me push back on you a sec here, coming to channel my inner Donald Trump and say, hey, we we've had the entire post war period to see how US economic integration with the rest of the world has worked. And for many Americans it hasn't worked. Globalization and the rise of technology, We've exported a lot of good paying jobs overseas. There's a huge swath of people

in America who have been left behind. How do you respond to that criticism. Well, the first point is that the main reason a huge swath of people in the US have been left behind is because our politics, riven by race, riven 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 of 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 that's actually not on globalization, that's on us. And the second thing is that you at some point that where people overselling globalization. I personally, I 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 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 hard benefit. And so the fundamental contention of Trump that you know, we've all been played for suckers, which of course is his mental worldview at times, because that's his whole game plan,

that we've all been played for suckers. It just doesn't hold up with the facts. I mean, when we talk about the loss of these jobs in in you know, it's it's happens in a country where you have a hundred and fifty million jobs at any given time and fifteen plus million, twenty million, thirty million people turn over their jobs every year. The idea that over a twenty year period manufacturing jobs shrunk by a couple of million, you know, that's reality. And so the failures are not

about globalization. And what we've seen over the last four years is the exact experiment. You roll back globalization and it gets worse, not better. Right, Global labor arbitrage is a real thing, and it's up to us to figure out a way to respond to it proactively, as opposed to sitting back and doing nothing. Beautifully said, So let's talk a little bit about exploding dead and deficits have been hearing about the evils of deficits my entire life.

I've heard warnings about the collapse of the currency and hyper inflation and all these other things. And yet when you look around the world at Japan or the US, none of the warnings have come to fruition. So that raises the question, a country with its own currency and own own central bank, why should we really care about annual deficits. 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 of Peterson the noted Economists, isn't doing a lot of the intellectual groundwork the last couple of years to explain why this is the case. But a bunch of us, including Olivier and I and others, were already saying back in two thousand two nine, Hey, don't destroy the economy for the sake of the false fear that somebody you're going to turn into grease. It goes to exactly the point you raised, Barry.

If you're a country and the 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 that. But not worrying so much it's not the same as not worrying at all, and so it's just that it's less of a knife edge, 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 sector stagnation that Larry Summers is 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 ore star, the underlying real interest rate of the economy is very low and econ speak, and so at that point everybody just starts chasing safety and has to stick their money somewhere, and then it all goes into

treasuries and then so easedly 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, you know what the debate should be about. What you spend it on, not how much you're spending. You know, that is where that is a more difficult debate in politics, and it's more difficult to establish and having simple rules of thumb at the GDP ratio is

bad wolves it turns out not true. But debating you know, what's public investment, what's useful for the next generation, what's going to have a bigger or lesser payoff? Which 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. You know, 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. Huh quite interesting. Let me throw the question back at you, not so much as to the what we spend the money on, but the when we spend the money. There wasn't a whole lot of fiscal stimulus post Great Financial Crisis. There wasn't the usual Keynsian countercyclical spending, and yet the tax cuts were an enormous pro cyclical spends. How important is the when of spending versus the wa of spending? They're 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 two thousand ten, as the UK did, as Germany as member of other countries along with the U s mistakenly did, versus really stepping up and doing the fiscal as we did. I say we, as the US did, UH and the other major economies did last spring. You know, that's really important.

Wasting your money on as you put a pro cyclical, feeding a boom when it didn't need the help tax cuts we had in 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. Monitary policy is asymmetric too. It's very good at staving off the financial panics, it's not so good at creating a boom um creating a recovery. So you have to start take that into account when you're

assessing these things. So let me go right from the deficit conversation to the increasing popularity of a modern monetary theory. It seems to be gaining more and more acceptance in recent years. What are your thoughts on MMT And if we do see some sort of unified government in the United States, do you do you think that's a possibility and what might that mean for the deficit? 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 and pray for, a carbon tax, but redistribution to 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 m MT 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 under invested in green and in healthcare and in infrastructure. So it makes no difference where you call it m empty or not. But some people will call it m empty and use

that as their justification. So then the question is what is the m M T tell us it's different, And where I would come down and the 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. You know, Stephanie Kelton, I

guess their name is talking about deficit myth. Those are very different, you know, it's it's it's it's like saying to a diabetic, right, you know, if you're taking your meds and you're responsible, you can occasionally cheat. Is different from saints to the diabetic. You don't have to take your meds and Ben and Jerry's all the time. Right. That's a That's a pretty pretty good way to describe it. So that raises the issue of fiscal versus monetary policy.

What do you say to folks like Ray Dalio and others who have been arguing the mostly monetary response and the limited fiscal response after the financial crisis has led to a substantial increase in wealth inequality and ongoing income inequality. Again, the question is compared to what and 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 and we had had to sustained public investment campaign,

and then monetary policy would have been different. So again, in conclusion, and I heard your interview with Dahlio Um, you know, 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 fat. I mean, the reason the FED does some of these things is because not just their bleeding hearts for inequality, but because fundamentally, if you have massed 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 perm and it's scarring effects on communities, on individuals, on families,

on education of the next generation. And so this is one of the things I used to argue when I was policy maker 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 the failure to act has incredibly bad, real tangible effects, not just paper profits for a few people. And I'm against an equality, 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. Uh. Quite interesting. So let's talk a little bit about what's going on with Brexit and the Bank of England and all the craziness in the UK. I really like your quote. There are no economic benefits for Brexit.

The only issue is how large the costs are. Explain that to us, Well, you can make a political argument for Brexit, Berry. If you're a nationalist. You're worried about immigration, you're worried about so called sovereignty culturally, you're worried about Europe blowing up. You know, there are a lot of reasons you can do. As a free citizen in Britain, you could have voted for Brexit, but you can't make

it an economic argument. I mean, essentially, on on the negative side, you're throwing up a supply shock with your largest trading partner, which is Europe, which is six your trade and which is a much larger share of the economy. Trade is a much larger share of the British economy than like for US or China, which are huge um And so you're you're effectively putting terroriffs on yourself, and not just tariffs, you're 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 necessary ly usually 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 state, tight labor laws, uh, demographic decline, weaknesses in the euro and as I pointed out and started pointing out back in, none of those applied to Britain. Essentially, Britain has the weakest labor laws, the least welfare 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 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 in Britain because they like Britain. They liked the English, like the rule of laws,

they liked the place. And now that doesn't work, and we're seeing that all these auto manufacturers, for example, for Ni San, Toyota, land Rover, they're cutting back on their investment in Britain. So there is no economic upside. So I would argue, and others have argued that both the UK and Germany were the big winners of the creation of the European Union. What does that say to us

about the rise of popularism? And lots of folks after the Brexit vote said, hey, you and America better pay attention because the same factors driving US towards Brexit is going to drive you towards a Trump presidency. That turned out to be a pretty accurate prediction. 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, you know, but I think it's really important very that we emphasize that not everything

is 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 and I think that's where we are with both Trump and Brexit, is that, you know, there are people who are motivated for good reasons. There are people who are motivated for single issue voters, whether it's you know, abortion in the United States or um local government control in

the UK. And there are people, frankly who are motivated by evil things like racism and native and in a lot of which contributes to populism. And and so yeah, the same force was there in the UK and in the US UM 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 results 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. And there's a bunch of political science work out there and polling work cleaned by my colleague Marcus Nolan and my former colleague Caroline Freud, where you can just document that people are voting for

these things. These parties, the Trump's Forage and in the UK Brexit be because of their dislike of foreigners, because their dislike of change, and 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 and the polling data was whether you voted you would like to see the death penalty pack and the death is never coming back in the UK, but it was. It's a symbolic issue like burning the flag in the US, and and so again US economists have to be humbled but also straightforward and say, you know, people make decisions, have enough to do with

the economics. All we can do is tell you that things are lies about how good the economics are won't work. So let me ask you, how does an American end up on the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England And how did you take that? Because this is a funny not ha ha, but you know, interesting thing about globalization having once been very open and different in Britain.

Uh Tony Blair, who was Prime Minister well before I got there, Um talked about having a government of all the talents and so the central Bank jobs at the 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 any use 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 and probably more importantly, I did some consulting work for then Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Chancellor Alistair Darling at the start of the

financial crisis. 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 storage or you know, after I was appointed, but before I went over, I attended a party bizarrely with members of the Federal Open Market Committee, including Gellan and bernankey Um in summer of twenty two tho nine, and literally four different FOMC members I counted came up to me

and said, you're going to the Bank of England. If they pointed a foreigner at the f m C, Garbass would burn the FED down, you know. So it wasn't 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. Huh, that's quite quite interesting. I read a really interesting peace in a local British newspaper or a national British newspaper. Actually I was steered to it Um by one of your colleagues,

Danny Blancheflower. The quote about you as you would sit in the room where the Monetary Policy the Committee met and hanging on the wall as a picture of one of the governors from the nineteen thirties, Montague Norman, who I kind of remember from Lords of Finance, Am I am? I getting that right exactly. And anyway, anyway, you would sit there when you didn't know what to do, you would think what would Governor Norman do? And then you

would do the exact opposite. So you have to explain that. Yeah, I mean, I was, I was trying to be a little bit cute, but I think it to keep pretty apt. I mean, so imagine that you're sitting The way to translate in 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 thirty one? And I'm going to do the opposite. And and it's not about personalities. It's about Montague Orman represented a very old school, small c conservative, but most importantly recessionist or a creative destruction point of view that was proven dreadfully wrong by the Great Depression. And um was that the liquidate capital, liquidate, labor, liquidate.

That school the view that the view that monetary policy could only do harm by trying to be helpful, and you wanted things to liquidate, liquidate, liquidate, as Andrew Mellon, who was the Treasury Secretary of the US under Hoover said, and that great book by Lords of Finance is a beautiful portrayal of these ideologies. And Barry I can Green the economic historians also written about this, and many others.

Mark Blythe has a book on austerity. But these ideas to just keep coming back, they just keep coming back. And so in two thousand nine, you know, the Bank of England made a terrible mist ache letting there be a run on on a major regional bank, Northern Rock, because they thought, oh, we have to fight the moral hazard and not tell people and not tell people that that they're going to be bailed out. And then that provoked, just as it did in the thirties, although thankfully on

a smaller scale, a series of bank problems. And similarly there were people who were very reluctant to expand the central bank balance sheet to do quee when the economy was vastly unemployed. In my colleague day Blanche. However, as you're calling now Bloomberg who you mentioned, Um, you know he was way ahead of the Kirk. He was on before me in two thousand and eight two nine saying hey, wake up, people, we got to do something. You're making me think about the UK is a little bit of

a special case. How much of this derives from the sort of puritanical belief that you have to suffer through pain before there's any sort of redemption. You have to not smooth out the sharp edges of the cycle, and and trying to reduce that ultimately makes things worse. Am I over analyzing this? Or is? I don't think you are? I think very you put it very well. This is

a recurring moralistic theme. Um. My old dissertation adviser Ben Friedman and Harvard has a book coming out in the spring that talks about how some of these moral ideas from the late eighteenth century extend to her American economic policy debates today, and that's why people vote against what seems to be their self interest often. Um, you know, there's this old tired Keynes quote which is still applicable. People of affairs don't realize how much of the the slaves

of the ideas of some defunct economists. And this goes back to the discussion you were having with Dalio compared to me about the role of central banks and easy monetary policy. If you look around the world right now, or you look it around the world in two thousand nine, Intendant, you thought your biggest problem was people who don't deserve credit or getting credit, business stocks that shouldn't be up

are up. You're totally missing the point. And if you think that the causes of these problems are because of lacks credit, you're you're ignoring the evidence. What you can do if you care about lacks credit is you can worry about your accounting system. You can worry about your bank supervision system. You can engage in tighter regulation and

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. Quite fascinating. Let's talk a little bit about your work at the New York Fed. What did you do there

as a research economist. Well, I got the job at the New York Fed right out of grad school UM and they hire every year several staff, as do all the Federal Reserve banks, and the Federals are 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. UM Rick Michigan, professor Columbia, who I think you know UM at that time, had taken leave for Colombia and was the executive vice president chief economist

at New York Fan. 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 UM who, including a couple of notable senators, who wanted to change the mandate of the FED to a gold standard or

a very tight definition of price stability. And he and some of the outside academic consultants, including a person named Ben bernanke Um and I myself all thought this was very dangerous and as the saying goes, you can't beat something with nothing. So we looked around and happened upon the fact that a bunch of other central banks, including the Bank of England, 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 his book with Bernankee Michigan, the now late sadly Thomas Labak, and myself looking at the international experience of inflation targeting. And it was essentially meant to adjust, not just to send the FED, but adjust to a couple

of realities of the time. That central banks hadn't been transparent enough, and under Greenspan that was an issue. Uh central banks had been a little too discretionary. And this is how you ended up with the weekend to Bernie's problem that if if Greenspan died, they wanted to problem up because it was too much faith in an individual.

And three that central banks had to avoid being too mechanically rules base because then you would get into trouble by tightening policy or loosening policy to mechanically, and so that was our contribution was to come up with this alternative framework, or rather adapt the the alternative framework others have been experimenting with for the FED, and talk about what we had learned. Huh. So I want to talk a little bit about the fed's independence and challenges to that.

But before we get there, you raised the issue of the gold standard, which seems so anachronistic. I just have to ask what would happen if the US ever went back on a gold standard. Within very short time, you would have two things. You would have money flying out of the US 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 and George Soros's 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 they would not be flexible in reaction to the realities.

Um so it would look more like the late nineteenth century when the US was subject to capital flight in the US was subject to sharp fluctuations and real activity driven by monetary policy, regular recession, regular depressions until the FED, at least arguably until the FED came around in the twenties. And and again, the FED wasn't the miracle worker was more Again asymmetric was about getting the FED, getting the money supply out of being the cause of problems. It

wasn't about this. So it's fixing everything and making everything wonderful. But that's those those two aspects of the nineteenth century would be back, and that would be a definite step backwards for the US. So let's talk a little bit about FED independence. This particular president has been very aggressive in jaw boning the FED chair publicly. I know that went on behind closed doors in the past, But how independent is the Federal Reserve and how much has it

changed during this administration. So my doctoral dissertation, which is now twice six twenty seven years ago um was on this very topic. And what I argue 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 managed and measured.

And I think that J. Powell, Chair, 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 cos and they had to account for themselves to Congress as they should. But you know, 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 had conversa attack. But J. Pale had made enough, vested enough credibility and communication to do that safely. And similarly on the monetary policy measures now and the changes that Chair Clarata Chair Powell, Vice Chair Clarata, Governor Brainer and others pushed in the mandate of the Fed or rather they shouldn't say the mandate the strategic framework of the FED to be less preempt upon inflation

more concerned with unemployment. So I think the independence of the FED has been quite fine um 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 at it. I always said to people who were wondering about things, that you know, the the FETE isn't really scared of the President. The FETE is scared of Congress, because Congress can change

the Federal Reserve Act at any time. What do you make of a book like in the Fed by Ron Paul when something like that comes out, what's the response

within the institution to what is clearly a congressional threat. Well, this is in the same spirit that Michigan, bernanke Laubach and I were writing about inflation targeting plus years ago, that you try to be responsive but in a way that is substantive and honest and not over promising 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 FIT Sanuel Jackson Hole conference when that was when right after Chair pal speech, President Trump tweeted that basically the chair the FED was as much of an enemy as a Chinese general, which you know, was looney tunes and was horrible. And you could see Chair Pale and then

the other FED officials being quite chicken by this. But then over time, you know, he tweet tomp 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. Yeah, if if only the President was able to put his own FED chairman into place. Maybe. Oh wait,

wasn't Jerome Pale a Trump appointee. I don't understand. He seems to constantly be appointing people who he is against. I'm a little perplexed by that. Sigh. The ironies are great. So, so let's talk a little bit about how the FED acted during the Great Financial Crisis. It seemed that Congress

was a little bit a wall. What what sort of rating would you give the Fed for what they did let's call it oh eight oh nine, And I think the FED under Britian key, but with everyone involved, did a very good job in two thousand nine into two thousand ten. I think there's a lot of room for criticism of the FED from two thousand five to what about the decade before that? Let me have you roll further back. We see green Span kind of ironically, and

I ran less government involvement, acolyte. He seemed to have his hands on that tiller pretty regularly, um, trying to guide the economy. What what rating would you give the FED in the nine nineties, And again, forgive my bias, No, no, it's fine. And I think this is a discussion that has to be had. I just thought emphasize two thousand 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 earlier part of our conversation, very 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, I mean, and but he was a he was totally in rand on regulation as as Mike as My late colleague Mike Musa, a former Youth 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 as the lead regulator supervisor in the US

financial system, you know. 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 in the situation we were in. I don't think the monetary policy was perfect, but I think was damn good. But it was totally undercut by the Lace Affair approach to regulation and supervision. So you're talking my book now, I'm right

there with you. Although arguably I could make a case that Greenspans rate cuts in the OH one recession and then what he did following the nine eleven attacks, it filled the room with gas for the eight or nine spark, because just look at what happened with inflation and any asset priced in either dollars or affected by low rates. I guess so, But you know, to me, the I mean, there's there's something to that. I think it's more oxygen

than fuel. If if there's no one to one with, was how much the monetary policy loosened versus how much as a 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 if you run a loose regulatory policy, then there is at least the possibility of this kind of explosion conflagration, and and so to me, you know, it was about the low standards and 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 Steagle, I mean

various types of very speculatory, speculative thing. So, I mean we can debate that, but uh, you know, I I don't put a huge thing on on the huge weight on the monetary policies in the early two thousand's, But I'm not going to debate it as long as you are on the same book, Mary that they blew it on supervision and right, I could live with that. So I have a slide in one of the presentations I give where it's just a series of media headlines every single year for like twelve years the FED is out

of AMMO. And clearly they have not been out of AMMO. But here you are in Is that closer to reality today than it was back in two thousand nine or or eleven or fifteen. Will the FED ever run out of AMMO? Depends what you're trying to shoot and and this is why I don't like the AMMA thing. Beyond the sort of much ismo of you know, old white academic guys like me talking about bazookas, which is kind

of absurd. Um, it's really about the tool for the job. So, if the job is fighting a deflationary shock, if the job is a lock up in financial markets, if the job is a panic producing widening spreads, if the job is a sudden withdrawal of liquidity by the by the banking system or the household sector, the FED has infinite demo. It can do what it needs to stave that off. This is what I meant by asymmetry. If the FED is job is to try to reflate the economy, create

ongoing growth and recovery. It's not screwing up is necessary, but it's not sufficient. It's, as Kines would say, pushing on a string. Again, there's so many analogies. It just think of the FED as a defensive specialist, not a shooting guard. Right. So if it's got the wrong kind of shock, it can handle it. But you don't want them making the three point shot because they're not going

to make it. So let's address that the bigger threat over the past decade arguably has not been inflation, but deflation. What are the possibilities that we might see negative rates continue to expand the around the world. Might we see them here in the US? And what tools does the FED have to combat them? I viewed the decline in long term rates as something beyond the fence control largely

and is driven by real factors. Geta Gobinev. The Chief Economy I MF just recently had an up d in the Financial Times talking about how unprecedentedly global negative rates negative at least nominal rates are on government debt and Larry Summers again to give them credit for for envisioning the secure stagnation. You know we're in when I've been writing my peers and colleges raining but this for several years.

Now that that you're in you're in a fundamentally different environment that the real rate to return on capital is well, the risk appetite is low, the inflationary pressures are well. On top of that is the fact that ultimately, and this is my point of who 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 and a rich democracy unless you have sustained wage growth

just doesn't happen. And this is kind of where Chaire Powell and others on the Federal Market Committee have been talking for the last year or two and 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 Plashmard. Danny and I were out there in two thousand fourteen with a few other people screaming that the Fed had vastly underestimated the amount of labor market flack, that they were worried about inflation way too soon. Um. 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 twenty five years as relevant for what's happening in the

rest of the world now. You know, because wages don't tend to fall, you get unemployment instead, and because normal prices are are sticky and eCOM speak, people don't tend to cut prices that much, although they do more now in the Internet age, and 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 twenty years ago, Chrobman, BERNANKEI others, we were very, very worried that deflation would be a downward negative spiral and would

accelerate and wouldn't make matters much worse. And what Japan has shown us is now 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 worry too much about deflation 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 in in Mike lewis speaking, so look at look at the causes, not the effects. So I have to ask you an obvious question. If the incoming president were to nominate you to a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, is that is that something

you would accept? What would you do in that role? I think it's very unlikely they would, because even though I am fully qualified, they, the Democratic majority in Congress and the Buying 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 it can be

appointed before I would be. But if I was offered the opportunity to serve an policy and 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 the world. But if it turned out that there was reason for me to enter public service, I would do it. So I have to ask you a question that lately I've been

sneaking into a lot of people. What are your thoughts on blockchain and crypto. I'm a a little bit of a skeptic. It sort of seems like a solution in search of a problem. But what does blockchain mean to the international monetary system? Might this ever become mainstreams as part of our economic global currency? You know, I think

there's a saying talk about central banking. There's this there's a reference in central banking to what's called the plumbing um, which is the the payment system things that have to work, but which are sort of clunky, big, not very glamorous underlying things. And though blockchain and particular bitcoin and some of the other cybercurrency aspects have been promoted as sex

hot fintech, they're really plumbing. They're they're really They're really just a better, a better gauge of pipe that doesn't tend to get clocked up very much. So I think we are going to over the next few years, seem much more use of it. And I think it's frankly not going to matter very much all right, I know I only have you for a limited amount of time, So let's jump to our favorite questions. We ask these of all our guests, and let's start out with streaming.

Give us some of your favorite Netflix or Amazon videos that you might be entertaining yourself with during this pandemic Work from home era, Yeah, the pandemic work from home era? And just how horrible the world is? My wife and I find we we 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 of our Great British Baking shows, it's called In the US, we started watching The Crown and as a former residence of the United Kingdom, that also has extra fun. We decided bizarrely to start rewatching Colombo from the beginning. Um, that's not art, but it's it's it's kind of comforting, and it's better for

us than the Hallmark Christmas movies, let's put it that way. Um. You know, so I don't really have anything that fabulous to recommend to people. In terms of podcasts, we listened to a lot of food and wine podcasts. We listened to visible we listen. I listened to yours. Um. 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. Um. Anyway, nothing nothing, terribly would tray to to suggest to your audience that they haven't heard of. So usually when people give me a run of things they're watching, I can come up with something they might enjoy. I just started streaming earlier last month a show I completely missed the first time around that I'm trying to figure if you would like it? Madmen? Have have you seen any of it? Okay, yeah, so we skipped it the first time around, and it's me.

It's a few episodes. It's so visually gorgeous, so I'm tempted, but it's also just so uncomfortable, right. I mean, it's portraying the reality, which is useful, but again, don't see that. So that was the question. I've asked some people. I'm I have a couple of years on you, but not many. But I've been asking people who are ten and twenty years older than me, how hyperbolic is this? How exaggerated is it for television? And the consensus seems to be No,

that's a pretty accurate portrayal, which is just shocking to me. No, and that's what I've heard. And of course then there's the occasionally mentioned but obviously they are racism that it's this is totally white group of people basically, and so you know, it's one of these things where I give them credit. They're portraying the reality accurately, and it's incredibly uncomfortable. So I'm gonna check out that History of English. It sounds interesting. Tell us about some of your early mentors

who helped to shape your career. Well, I've mentioned already as we went along two of the people who were most important to my career Ben Freedman of Harvard and Rick Michigan of the Federal Reserve when I dealt with him in Columbia, both of whom sort of took me as I am somebody who's not as mathematically facile, technical and much more real world than most good economics PhDs, and gave me opportunities encouragement that 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 fallco founder with p. Peterson of the Insto for International Economics now Paterson Notes to Do and from the time I got to p I A in 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 personnelis. And the through line between Ben and Rick and Fred was that they all were real world, not in since 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 parents. My mother and father, Harold and a pos And were both physicists.

They were both civil servants in the US UM, my father for the Year Force, my mother for the Smithsonian and UM. As a result, I was brought up to know always how difficult it was to know something, how important was to check things erically, how cool it was when you did really understand something, and also, perhaps surprisingly to have a very broad set of interest um 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. And so that made me very aware, even though I was brought up my infinitely better off than they were. UM that you know, you had to be very aware of the tacit knowledge of

navigating places, of navigating institutions, and navigating relationships. And not that I've done it perfectly by any means, but I was very aware of that from a young age. UM, 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 Peters Institute who I tried 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. Quite interesting, So we've both mentioned a couple of books. Let's talk about what you're reading. Tell us some of your favorite books,

and tell us what you might be reading currently. UM. So similarly to on the Netflix, Amazon TV watching, I must admit I am terrible about having done attention span to read serious stuff right now. Frankly so, I'm sending a lot of time reading The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, UM, courts, various, The Atlantic, UM, and not that much in book links. 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 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 The Age of Diminished Expectations was ahead of its time. It wasn't right for the period it was, but it's right now. UM. I really try to read a lot of history and

and I've become addicted to UM. There's this Oxford very short introduction series which let's turned academic summarize what's going on in a field. And I've been using that as my crime notes. And and I'll give a shout out to Adam Two's n M I U I. I didn't absolutely adore his book Crash, but his previous book The Deluge, about the US role or and the internetal economy around World War One and after, I thought was terrific and very important perspective on what's going on in the world today.

You're reading list, especially in the magazines, sounds shockingly similar to mine. Um. I don't preselect people who only agree with me, but by by coincidence, and in fact, I try and seek out people who will who I will disagree with, but by coincidence, your your periodical reading list is very similar to mine. And I think a lot of people do not understand that we are in a

golden age of long form journalism. The reportage that has been taking place has just been the New york I mean, I know some people don't love the tone of The Atlantic or The New Yorker, but but the reporting has just been spectacular. I I completely agree with you, And again I didn't come into this knowing that you and I with a line. I just figured I listened to you, and I think you're smart and it's a long gladly

aligned Um. But in terms of you know, I think David Remnick and his team at the New Yorker I've 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, UM has gotten back to being an incredibly good source.

But yeah, that those are those are some. But then there's all this wonderful stuff that gets aggregated now, you know, and you wonder about the business model, how how can 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 New Yor went also with the New York Times. Um, you know, there's a there's a laundry list of people in in you know, David Lynch and others at that and Heather Long at

the at the Washington Post. Less long form usually, you know, it is a good to atre journalism. There's also a bunch of cowardly things going on by editorials editorial writers, but the stuff that's real, individual essays and reporting, there's a wealth of worthwhile things to read. Now, no doubt, So what sort of The other thing I have to

plug is The Guardian. The Guardian. I read The Guardian every day and I don't agree with all of it, but it is fantastic, both reporting and essays Guardians and I think a lot of people don't realize that how unique their financial structure is. They have an endowment that essentially supports them to some degree. They haven't been under the same pressure as a lot of other reporters or newspapers that I'm curious if that sort of structure might

catch on in the future. I agree with you, and you know, you look at Bloomberg and you look at Washington Post, and both of those have not quite the same structure, but have philanthropically mind it, mega billionaire backers up pockets who want the journalism to be high quality and all. And I think that's amazing and clearly the Sulzburgers to some degree, I've had that same model in mind for The Times, um. But yeah, the Guardian, I

think is a potential model going forward. And they're not totally they don't have a multi billion dollar backing, but they've managed to sustain quality to The Times is one of the few lucky winners in this political environment. There their subscription seems to have gone through the roof of

the past four years. Well, I mean this goes back to to sound like an economism, and this goes back to a very fundamental point that Paul Krugman in the Different Forms of Others raised twenty 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 taught up 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 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 NBAUR working paper on this from within the last year. I think, on um, you know, where you lose local newspapers, you see corruption go up, you see voter misinformation go up.

So I totally respect that these these bastions of independence and quality like The Post, the Watching Post, 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, the whole,

the whole governments and business accountable. So I know there's a recent book, Winners Take All, but previously and I want to say, Cornell is a professor who wrote a book called The Winner Take All Society that discusses exactly what you're referring to, which is that that long tail fat head very much Robert Frank who actually, yeah, I apologize, I should have thought mentioned that book, Yes, exactly makes that argument. Yeah, absolutely so, So let's talk about recent

college grads. If if someone came out of college and was asking you for advice on a career in economics or monetary policy, or or going on a think tank, what sort of advice would you give them? I mean, going to a think tank. You is a very bizarre, specialized little nature, right, it's it's it's it's a lovely nature for those of those who like it, But it's generally not, even though I sort of went to work with that mind issarily not something you should plan for.

Not because it's like you shouldn't plan for play in the NBA that's not There are more think things and more jobs now than there's ever been, but just that it's still a weird niche profession. If your goal is to use economic analysis to make the world a better play and particularly to affect public policy, then there is a broad said of 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 roch Jetty and you know the epitome of data science nowadays. I don't necessarily me being very technical, but being empirical minded and of course some technical skill to go with that is helpful. UM. And and learning just how messy it is to gather and deal with the world data. And I would also encourage young people to I mean it's trite, but but

to work on the written and oral communication. UM. What the problem is with written in oral communication among young people now is very different than what it was when I first started was in a position to be hiring people ten twenty years ago. Then the problem was people being too pro licks to to to profligate with words, to confusing, unwilling to take a stand. Now the problem is teaching people how to make a longer form argument,

but both ways you got to do that. And then the final thing, which is my fundamental belief in my career um 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 US, are not necessarily the way things are done around the world,

and they're not necessarily the best way. And that sounds incredibly obvious, probably to you and the people listen to your podcast very but you know, the extent we're seeing it now in the U s elections and the US politics, just the extent to which people have no concept of how the US compares and and acts compared to others, and with the ways in which it's similar to others in the ways in which it's different. So I think

that's really important. Yeah, I couldn't agree more that no one country has monopoly on good ideas, and we certainly should borrow freely. Our final question, what do you know about the world of economics, international relations, politics today that you wish you knew twenty five or so years ago when your career was just ramping up. You were kind of to send you a list of questions and this one was the hardest one actually for me to think about ahead of time. Um, I don't know why, because

it's the perfectly reasonable question. I guess, I guess the the The main thing that I wish I had known twenty years ago, twenty five years ago that I didn't is just, frankly, to be more woke that how much, despite my 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. And I am very ashamed to this day of how late I was to waking up to some of them.

That's really interesting. You know, we're recording this on election day, so we don't know what the outcome is. But arguably the reaction of much of the public to not just the racial injustice and the you know, the killing of unarmed African American males or or anyone for that matter, but the police response to peaceful protests, I think a lot of people who were not quote unquote woke, we're very much shocked by that behavior. It's not what you think of when you think of as America, at least

in privileged, wealthy, white society. It's not what you think exactly. 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, but I am ashamed of it. I I I remember one of the first times I went abroad, which was in I went to conference or economic students in Italy. Is our conference got me there anyway, and I remember talking with somebody 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 fascist we used to have and doing this and that. And I remember being horrified at that he could say such a thing, And how could I think, how could he think that? 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 you know, over time, it's all

going away, you know. And that was obviously totally oblivious to the reality of life for for particularly blackmails, but all kinds of people in the US, and the behavior of police and it's just, you know, we don't know, As you just said, it's election a we don't know what's going to happen. But I hope whoever wins week, we we have to try to be more just to not kill innocent people. It shouldn't be that hard, right newslash we shouldn't kill innocent people. Let me alight, it

sounds fatuous, I'd like I'd like to start with that. Well, well, I will tell you, as much as people have been critical of the current president, I give him points for at least accidentally revealing how much the underlying structure of the United States has been under stress in a variety of ways. I like you, you know, I grew up a pretty or at least the last twenty years, fairly

privileged life. I assume that that had gotten much better than it was, and if anything, we've learned over the past few years that it's much worse than many Americans assume. And I think people are starting to realize that. Yeah, and that again, I mean, this is this is where you know, it's important, hugely important, and I'm grateful for this opportunity Mary to talk economic policy and these things matter greatly. But you know, there's a lot of stuff

that that economics is not the motivation. Economics is only a small part of the impact that we have to face, and it's not it's not because you know, you had Lisa Cook on recently, who I think is terrific and she actually worked with me at New York FED a long time ago, you know, and you can frame it in terms of as she does sometimes in terms of the lost potential and in addition to the injustice. But ultimately it's got to be about the injustice, not about

just economically. It would be nice. Thanks Adam for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Adam Posing, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. If you enjoy this conversation, well look up an Inch or down an Inch on Apple iTunes and you could see any of the previous three hundred and fifty such conversations we've recorded over the past six years. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m

IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Be sure to check out my weekly column that's at Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Sign up for our daily reads at Ridholtz dot com. Follow me on Twitter at Ridholts give us a review on Apple iTunes. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps put these conversations together each week. Michael Boyle is my producer. Tim Harrow is my audio engineer. Attica val Brund is our project manager. Michael Batnick is my head of research. I'm Barry Riholts.

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