Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then as the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.

He has published over 70 theoretical, empirical and policy papers on international macroeconomic issues and coauthored the books “Political Cycles: Theory and Evidence” (MIT Press, 1997) and “Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets” (Institute for International Economics, 2004) and “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance” (Penguin Press, 2010).

Dr. Roubini’s views on global economic issues are widely cited by the media, and he is a frequent commentator on various business news programs. He has been the subject of extended profiles in the New York Times Magazine and other leading current-affairs publications. The Financial Times has provided extensive coverage of Dr. Roubini’s perspectives.

An expert on the politics of U.S. health and social policy, he is the author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, written with Paul Pierson (2010, paperback 2011), The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (2006, paperback 2008), The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States (2002), and The Road to Nowhere: The Genesis of President Clinton’s Plan for Health Security (1997), co-winner of the Brownlow Book Award of the National Academy of Public Administration. He is co-author, with Paul Pierson, of Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (2005) and has edited two volumes—most recently, Health At Risk: America’s Ailing Health System and How to Heal It (2008).

A frequent media commentator, Hacker has testified before Congress, advised leading politicians, and written popular pieces for the American Prospect, New Republic, Nation, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Boston Review, and other publications. He is the author of a 2007 proposal for universal health care, “Health Care forAmerica,” that became a template for several presidential aspirants’ plans.

Most recently with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, he and a group of multi-disciplinary researchers including Greg Huber and Mark Schlesinger of ISPS developed the Economic Security Index (ESI), which measures the share of Americans who experience at least a 25 percent decline in their income from one year to the next. In addition, he oversees a Social Science Research Council project on the “privatization of risk.”

Naomi Klein’s first book No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies released in 2000 was an international bestseller translated into over 25 languages with more than a million copies in print. The New York Times called it “a movement bible.” In 2011, Time Magazine named it as one of the Top 100 non-fiction books published since 1923. A tenth anniversary edition of No Logo was published worldwide in 2010. The Literary Review of Canada has named it one of the hundred most important Canadian books ever published. A collection of her writing, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate was published in 2002. Naomi Klein is a contributing editor for Harper’s and reporter for Rolling Stone, and writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian that is syndicated internationally by The New York Times Syndicate. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. Additionally, her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Globe and Mail, El Pais, L’Espresso and The New Statesman, among many other publications.

He serves as Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, as well as Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and Health Policy and Management.  He is Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. He has authored three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).

Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty.  His work on ending poverty, promoting economic growth, fighting hunger and disease, and promoting sustainable environmental practices, has taken him to more than 125 countries with more than 90 percent of the world’s population.  For more than a quarter century he has advised dozens of heads of state and governments on economic strategy, in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.  He also advised Pope John Paul II on the encyclical Centesimus Annus. He works closely with international organizations including the African Union, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Food Programme, UNAIDS, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, among others.

Professor Sachs’ work has been pivotal in many of the key junctures of globalization during the past thirty years.  In the 1980s he helped several Latin American countries including Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru to end hyperinflations and renegotiate their external debts.  He was the leading academic advocate in the United States for reducing the debt overhang of the developing countries and his ideas were incorporated in the global debt-reduction plans undertaken from the mid-1980s onward, including the Brady Plan and the HIPC Program.

In 1989, Professor Sachs advised Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement and the first post-communist Government of Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki.  He wrote the first-ever comprehensive plan for the transition from central planning to a market democracy, which became incorporated into Poland’s highly successful reform program led by Finance Minister Leszek Balcerowicz.  Professor Sachs was the main architect of Poland’s successful debt reduction operation.  The Government of Poland awarded Sachs with one of its highest honors in 1999, the Commanders Cross of the Order of Merit.  He also received an honorary doctorate from the Cracow University of Economics.

Sachs’s ideas and methods of transition from central planning were successfully adopted throughout the transition economies.  He helped Slovenia (1991) and Estonia (1992) to introduce new stable and convertible currencies.  Based on Poland’s success, he was invited first by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and then by Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the transition to a market economy.  He served as advisor to Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Federov during 1991-93 on macroeconomic policies.  He received the Leontief Medal of the Leontief Centre, St. Petersburg, for his contributions to Russia’s economic reforms.

From the mid-1990s till today, Prof. Sachs has been involved with economic reforms in many parts of Asia, including India and China.  He has been a senior advisor to the Indian Government, most recently on the scaling up of primary health care in rural areas (the National Rural Health Mission), a policy that he recommended and helped to promote through the Indian Commission on Macroeconomics and Health.  For his broad-based support of India’s economic reforms he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, one of India’s highest honors. He has similarly engaged with the Chinese Government on many issues of sustainable development, and during 2001-3 worked with senior government officials on China’s Western Development Strategy.  He has authored many scholarly and policy papers on India’s and China’s economic reforms.  Sachs has also worked in other parts of Asia on a number of development and research projects, including in Malaysia, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and others. He actively supports Bhutan’s innovative strategy of Gross National Happiness. He works with the Government of Jordan on a national program of poverty reduction and with the Government of Qatar on education and ICT initiatives throughout the Arab region.

Since 1995, Professor Sachs has been deeply engaged in Africa’s escape from poverty.  He has worked in more than two-dozen African countries, and has advised the African leadership at several African Union summits.  In the mid-1990s he worked with senior officials of the Clinton Administration to develop the concept of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).  He has engaged with dozens of African leaders to promote smallholder agriculture and to fight high disease burdens through strengthened primary health systems.  His pioneering ideas on investing in health to break the poverty trap have been widely applied throughout the continent.  He currently serves as an advisor to several African governments, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others.

The Millennium Villages Project, which he directs, operates in more than one dozen African countries, and covers more than 500,000 people. The MVP has achieved notable successes in raising agricultural production, reducing children’s stunting, and cutting child mortality rates, with the results described in several peer-reviewed publications. Its key concepts of integrated rural development to achieve the MDGs are now being applied at national scale in Nigeria and Mali, and are being used by many other countries to help support national anti-poverty programs. He works very closely with the Islamic Development Bank to scale up programs of integrated rural development and sustainable agriculture among the Bank’s member countries. One such project supports pastoralist communities in the Horn of Africa, with six participating nations: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000, Professor Sachs has been the leading academic scholar and practitioner on the MDGs.  He chaired the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2000-1), which played a pivotal role in scaling up the financing of health care and disease control in the low-income countries to support MDGs 4, 5, and 6.  He worked with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000-1 to design and launch the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria.  He worked closely with senior officials of the administration of George W. Bush to develop the PEPFAR program to fight HIV/AIDS, and the PMI to fight malaria. On behalf of Secretary-General Kofi Annan, from 2002-2006 he chaired the UN Millennium Project, which was tasked with developing a concrete action plan to achieve the MDGs.  The UN General Assembly adopted the key recommendations of the UN Millennium Project at a special session in September 2005. The recommendations for rural Africa are currently being implemented and documented in the Millennium Villages, and in several national scale-up efforts such as in Nigeria.

Professor Sachs has been the Director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University since 2002.  In that capacity, he leads a university-wide organization of more than 850 professionals from natural-science and social-science disciplines, in support of sustainable development.  Sachs has consistently advocated for the expansion of University education on sustainable development, and helped to introduce the PhD in Sustainable Development at Columbia University, one of the first PhD programs of its kind in the U.S.  He championed the new Masters of Development Practice (MDP), which has led to a consortium of major universities around the world offering the new degree.  The Earth Institute has also guided the adoption of sustainable development as a new major at Columbia College.  The Earth Institute is home to cutting-edge research on all aspects of earth systems and sustainable development.

Sachs is the recipient of many awards and honors, including membership in the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Society of Fellows, and the Fellows of the World Econometric Society.  He has received more than 20 honorary degrees, and many awards and honors around the world. His syndicated newspaper column appears in more than 80 countries around the world, and he is a frequent contributor to major publications such as the Financial Times of London, the International Herald Tribune, Scientific American, and Time magazine.

Sachs’ policy and academic works span the challenges of globalization, and include: the relationship of trade and economic growth; the resource curse and extractive industries; public health and economic development; economic geography; strategies of economic reform; international financial markets; macroeconomic policy; global competitiveness; climate change; and the end of poverty. He has authored or co-authored hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, including three bestsellers and a textbook on macroeconomics that is widely used around the world.

Prior to his arrival at Columbia University in July 2002, Sachs spent over twenty years as a professor at Harvard University, most recently as Director of the Center for International Development and the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade.

Sachs was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1954. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in the fall of 1983, at the age of 28.

She is a Research Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Dr. Kelton has a B.S. in Business Finance and a B.A. in Economics, both from California State University, Sacramento(1995). After finishing her undergraduate degrees, she completed an M.Phil in Economics at Cambridge University, England(1997). She then spent a year at The Levy Economics Institute on a fellowship she won through Christ’s College, Cambridge.

While at the Levy Institute, she wrote a number of papers that became part of her Ph.D. dissertation at the New School for Social Research (April 2001), titled Public Policy and Government Finance: A Comparative Analysis Under Different Monetary Systems. She is creator and editor of New Economic Perspectives, a top-ranked economics blog, and has been featured in: Common Dreams, Business Insider, Truthdig, Counter Punch, Wall St. Pit, Credit Writedowns, and many more.

Germany increasingly recognizes that if the adjustment needed to restore growth, competitiveness, and debt sustainability in the eurozone’s periphery comes through austerity and internal devaluation rather than debt restructuring and exit (leading to the reintroduction of sharply depreciated national currencies), the cost will most likely be trillions of euros. Indeed, sufficient official financing will be needed to allow cross-border and even domestic investors to exit. As investors reduce their exposure to the eurozone periphery’s sovereigns, banks, and corporations, both flow and stock imbalances will need to be financed. The adjustment process will take many years, and, until policy credibility is fully restored, capital flight will continue, requiring massive amounts of official finance.

Until recently, such official finance came from fiscal authorities (the European Financial Stability Facility, soon to be the European Stability Mechanism) and the International Monetary Fund. But, increasingly, official financing is coming from the European Central Bank – first with bond purchases, and then with liquidity support to banks and the resulting buildup of balances within the eurozone’s Target2 payment system. With political constraints in Germany and elsewhere preventing further strengthening of fiscally-based firewalls, the ECB now plans to provide another round of large-scale financing to Spain and Italy (with more bond purchases).

Thus, Germany and the eurozone core have increasingly outsourced official financing of the eurozone’s distressed members to the ECB. If Italy and Spain are illiquid but solvent, and large-scale financing provides enough time for austerity and economic reforms to restore debt sustainability, competitiveness, and growth, the current strategy will work and the eurozone will survive.

Read more at Project-Syndicate

At the most recent meeting of its policy-setting Open Market Committee, Aug. 7, the Fed declined to lower interest rates further, under pressure from inflation hawks. The vote to keep rates at their present level was only 7-3, with the dissenters favoring tighter money.

But raising interest rates now or any time in the near future would be insane, since the underlying economy remains very weak. Any increase on food prices will reflect heat waves, factory farming, and of course global climate change — not the price pressures of a recovery.

If you think the Fed would not be so crazy as to tighten money because of a drought, think again. In the 1970s, inflation was the result of price spikes in key sectors — energy, food, health care, and housing. It was emphatically not the result of macroeconomic overheating, the classic reason for the Fed to damp down the economy with higher interest rates.

Read more at The Huffington Post.

No matter what the headlines say, the short-term impact of the rising yields on Spain’s actual borrowing cost is very limited. Spain is currently paying just 4.1 per cent on the stock of its outstanding debt which has an average maturity of 6.4 years. This means that if Spain can now borrow at an average rate of say 7.1 per cent (a full 3 per cent points above current costs) it would take more than six years for this to reflect in its average borrowing costs. This means that in any one year its actual borrowing cost is likely to rise only by about a sixth of that amount, around 0.5 per cent. If the panic in the markets does not worsen (which is a big if) Spain’s actual borrowing cost will only rise to a bit more than 4.6 per cent by July 2013 – which is a cause for concern, but not a cause for panic. What then is the problem? Why the near panic?

Read more at Business Spectator.

On the one hand, it notes the view of Ron Bloom, who had been the president’s senior advisor on manufacturing policy, that the U.S. should take steps to push down the value of the dollar in order to make manufacturing in the United States more competitive. It then contrasts this view with that of Lawrence H. Summers, formerly the top economic adviser to Obama. The piece tells readers:

“along with many economists, Mr. Summers argued that an overly aggressive trade stance could hurt manufacturing — by, for instance, pushing up the price of imported steel used by carmakers — and over time, drive companies away. ”

Read more at Business Insider.

Draghi’s strong – indeed, unprecedented – statement was widely interpreted as signaling that the ECB would soon revive its bond-purchase program, focusing on Spanish debt in particular. Stock markets around the world soared. Jens Weidemann of the Bundesbank immediately expressed reservations, but the next day German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande issued a joint statement expressing their determination “to do everything in order to protect the eurozone.”

I recently argued that the ECB, working with the nascent European Stability Mechanism (ESM), was the only institution that could save the eurozone. It could do so by buying Italian and Spanish bonds in the secondary market with the pre-announced intention of keeping their sovereign interest rates below a certain threshold for a certain time.

It is likely that Draghi’s statement will indeed be followed by ECB purchases of Spanish (and Italian) sovereign bonds. A man like Draghi would not have issued such a statement without believing that he could follow through on it. But, if this is to become a decisive turning point in the eurozone crisis, three things must happen.

Read more at Project-Syndicate.org.

As a practical matter this should be very easy to do since doctors in the United States earn on average about twice as much as their comparably trained counterparts in Western Europe and Canada.They earn five to ten times as much as doctors in the developing world.

If the government were to set up mechanisms that could fast track the certification of doctors from other countries so that they could quickly establish that they have been trained to U.S. standards and then would be free to come to practice in the United States just as any native-born doctor, it is likely hundreds of thousands of doctors from around the world would quickly take advantage of the opportunity. (In the case of developing countries, it is easy [even a DC policy wonk could do it] to design mechanisms where they would be compensated for doctors who came to the United States so that they could train two or three doctors for every one that came to the United States. This would ensure that developing countries gained from the arrangement as well.)

Read more at Business Insider.

The rationale of the euro was never properly established through reasoned and open public discussion. Those who argue that monetary union was the next step in a necessary project of political integration left the economic argument obscure. One motivation of the euro’s creators appears to have been to make a bid for status as a global reserve currency. Such a currency may be perceived to carry benefits if successful, such as enlarged seignorage (the purchasing power accruing to the money creator) and the “exorbitant privilege” of being able to purchase goods and services from the world without selling them in turn.

RESERVE CURRENCY

What is a reserve currency and how does it come into being? A reserve currency is widely employed as a store of value (hence the term “reserve”). However, this role (as well as that as a widely used unit of account) typically derives from its role in transactions. This observation sheds light on the process through which a reserve currency emerges. For a reserve currency to be useful as a medium of exchange, it must be possible to employ it in transactions which have a sufficient volume (and involve a sufficient number of parties) to create a reliable demand. There must be a domain (a geographical area or perhaps a market for a commodity) in which such transactions take place freely and in sizeable quantities. Unsurprisingly, both the United Kingdom and the United States accounted for a large share of both world income and world trade during the periods of their respective emergence as reserve currency issuers.

In practice, there is a second condition. Suitable historical conditions for a reserve currency to emerge seem to occur only when the country issuing the currency generates a persistent and sizeable current account surplus, implying an ongoing demand for the country’s currency in order to purchase goods and services from the country or to make factor payments to it. A persistent current account surplus also creates pressure for exchange rate appreciation, giving rise to a motive to hold the currency as a store of value. In contrast, for a reserve currency to emerge in the presence of a current account deficit would require that it be accumulated abroad on the promise of future current account surpluses or the emergence of the currency as a medium of transactions (which do not involve the country) beyond its borders. Although this scenario is logically possible, it is empirically implausible as it depends on expectations concerning the future which seem unlikely to emerge and to be sustained.

Read more at The Hindu.

Dr. Palley was formerly Chief Economist with the US – China Economic and Security Review Commission. Prior to joining the Commission he was Director of the Open Society Institute’s Globalization Reform Project, and before that he was Assistant Director of Public Policy at the AFL-CIO.