Fiscal Policy Measures for the Next Downturn

PIIE fellows Olivier Blanchard and Jason Furman, as well as Angel Ubide, managing director at Citadel, and Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, discussed fiscal policy measures for the next downturn at a PIIE event on March 5, 2019.

Blanchard, who will discuss the practical implications and limits of his fundamental analysis on the costs of debt, has been the Institute’s C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow since October 2015. He was previously the economic counselor and director of the research department at the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015. He remains the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT.

Furman’s remarks will be on his recent Foreign Affairs article with Larry Summers on debt reduction and their proposal for the United States. He has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Institute since January 2017. He is Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. From 2013 to 2017, he served as the 28th chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Obama Administration.

Ubide will speak about the options for fiscal action in the euro area. He is a managing director and head of economic research in global fixed income at Citadel LLC. He has worked for almost two decades in the financial services industry, first at Tudor Investment Corporation and later at the D. E. Shaw Group and Goldman Sachs. He was senior fellow at the Institute from 2009 to 2016.

MacGuineas will provide a critical alternative take on the feasibility and wisdom of resorting to additional fiscal stimulus. In addition to her positions at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, she is also the head of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. She previously worked at the Brookings Institution and on Wall Street.