Filippo Gaddo, SPE Councillor, held a discussion with Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Bank of England's MPC member. Adam is a regular contributor to leading news and policy publications, including the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Harvard Business Review and you can follow his writing on the PIIE website https://www.piie.com/experts/senior-research-staff/adam-s-posen or on X at https://x.com/adamposen.

In this final interview for 2024, Filippo and Adam delve deep into the very topical debate of trade policy and tariffs and the wider implications of US economic policy of the incoming Trump administration. Adam starts with an overview of the current status of 'globalisation', highlighting the benefits that trade and globalisation itself have brought to the US and other developed nations' economies over the past thirty years and dispelling some of the more common myths about the perceived downsides. Filippo and Adam also go through the more traditional arguments put forward in favour of tariffs or industrial policies - national security, protection of manufacturing base, jobs losses avoidance, supply chains security for example - and the validity [if any] of such arguments. Adam then looks to the future and lays out a possible scenario for the 2025 US tariffs landscape - one that could affect Mexico and Canada very early on as much as China and Europe, with a mix of threats, offers, exemptions and even a possible renegotiation of existing deals such as USMCA. Adam cautions us all to take Trump's positions and pronouncements very seriously.

The conversation then ends on monetary policy where Adam's view is somewhat outside the broader consensus: because of Trump's potential inflationary policies the Fed may cut much less early in 2025 than expected and even end up raising rates later in the year. Only time will tell, but we do have something to look forward to - an economic rollercoaster of a year. A wonderful and rich discussion that sets us up well for the Christmas break and the new year.

Adam Posen is President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2013 and over his career, he has contributed to research and public policy regarding monetary and fiscal policies in the G-20, the challenges of European integration since the adoption of the euro, China-US economic relations, and developing new approaches to financial recovery and stability.

He was one of the first economists to seriously address the political foundations of central bank independence and to analyze Japan's Great Recession as a failure of macroeconomic policy.

While at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during 1994–97, he co authored 'Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience' with Ben Bernanke, Thomas Laubach, and Frederic Mishkin. Adam has been the recipient of major grants and research fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the Brookings Institution, the Bank of England, the European Commission, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the US National Science Foundation. In November 2018, he gave the inaugural Adam Smith Distinguished Lecture at the University of Glasgow. In January 2019, he was named a CEPR Distinguished Fellow. He served seven terms as a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office from 2005 to 2019.

Posen received his BA and PhD from Harvard University.