Elmira Bayrasli: Last week, Japan hosted the G20 summit, which convenes leaders of the world’s largest economies. While the G20 has been around since 1999, the first summit with world leaders took place just over a decade ago, in 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis. Fair and Free Trade has been a guiding principle of the G20 since its outset. For the past several years, however, protectionism has re-emerged in many G20 economies, and is currently fueling a highly-damaging trade war between the world’s two largest economies: China and the United States. What role does the G20 have to play in the age of Donald Trump, Populism, and powerful digital technologies? Larry Summers, one of the G20’s architects, joins us to discuss. He served as US Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, and as the Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. READ MORE
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What Marco Rubio gets right — and wrong — about the decline of American investment
May 31st, 2019
By Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summers
The Washington Post
May 31, 2019
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently released a thoughtful report highlighting a substantial issue in the American economy: the steady decline of American private investment.
The trend, Rubio contends, is the result of shareholder capitalism and corporate short-termism. In other words, business decision making has shifted toward “delivering returns quickly and predictably to investors, rather than building long-term capabilities through investment and production,” as he writes in his analysis. READ MORE
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Christine Lagarde enters the European Central Bank at a perilous moment
The announcement last week that Christine Lagarde would be leaving her post as managing director of the International Monetary Fund to become president of the European Central Bank marks what may be the most important change in the leadership of the international financial system in decades. At a... read more
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NPR: What The ‘Weakened’ Case For Hiking Interest Rates Might Mean For The Economy
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