Topic: Monetary Policy

Simon Potter

Simon Potter was nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from September 2019 to June 2020, with a research focus on central bank operations, monetary policy, digital currencies, reference rates, the role of the dollar, and economic forecasting.

Prior to joining the Institute, he was head of the Markets Group and System Open Market Account (SOMA) at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In this role, he oversaw the implementation of domestic open market and foreign exchange trading operations on behalf of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the execution of fiscal agent support for the US Treasury, the provision of account services to foreign and international monetary authorities, and the administration and production of reference interest rates for US money markets.

He started at the New York Fed in June 1998 and served as director of economic research and co-head of the Research and Statistics Group at the New York Fed, prior to becoming head of the Markets Group in June 2012 where he was responsible for monetary policy advice. He played a prominent role in the Federal Reserve’s financial stability efforts, including by contributing to the design of the 2009 US bank stress tests, as a member of the international Macroeconomic Assessment Group that supported the Basel Committee’s work to strengthen bank capital standards and, most recently, as chair of the Global Foreign Exchange Committee. In addition, he worked for the Financial Stability Oversight Council in 2011 to produce its first annual report.

Prior to working at the New York Fed, he was an assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles. He has also taught at Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and Princeton. His academic research focused on applying Bayesian methods to time series models.

Adam Posen

Adam S. Posen is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Under his leadership, since January 2013, the Institute has grown to 42 world-renowned fellows and won global recognition – including being named North American Economics Think Tank of the Year by Prospect five years in a row (2016 thru 2020). From 2009 to 2012, Posen served as an external voting member of the Bank of England's rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). Posen served seven terms on the Panel of Economic Advisers to the US

Congressional Budget Office (2005-19), and co-authored Inflation Targeting with Bernanke, Laubach, and Mishkin while at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1994-97). In April 2021, Foreign Affairs published his article, “The Price of Nostalgia: America’s Self-Defeating Economic Retreat,” where he provides an analysis of the US retreat from globalization. More recently, the Institute published this chart on the Global Economy after Brexit.

Thomas J. Sargent

Thomas J. Sargent is an American economist and Professor of Economics at New York University. He specializes in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary economics and time series econometrics.

He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Princeton University’s colleague Christopher Sims, “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.” In his Nobel speech in Stockholm he described himself as someone who aspires to use statistics and economic theory to understand how governments and markets can improve peoples’ lives. Sargent is one of the leaders of the "rational expectations revolution," which argues that the people being modeled by economists can predict the future, or the probability of future outcomes, at least as well as the economist can with his model.

In 2011, he was awarded the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing from the National Academy of Sciences and, in September, he became the recipient of the 2011 CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications.

Sargent is known as a devoted teacher. Among his PhD advisees are men and women at the forefront of macroeconomic research. Sargent's reading group at Stanford and NYU is a famous institution among graduate students in economics.

As of 2014, he ranks fourteenth among the most cited economists in the world.

In 2016, Sargent helped found the non-profit QuantEcon project, which is dedicated to the development and documentation of modern open source computational tools for economics, econometrics, and decision making.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, winning the medal as the university’s most distinguished scholar in the Class of 1964, and obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1968.

He has been Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota, the David Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago, and the Donald Lucas Professor of Economics at Stanford University.

He has been a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1987. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society. He has been President of the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, and the Society for Economic Dynamics.

Martin Redrado

In 1994 Martín Redrado founded “Fundación Capital”, a leading economic research and public policy think tank, where he served as Chief Economist until 2001. He earned a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University and specialized in Finance and International Economy.

While pursuing a career in the private sector, he was called upon by the Government on several occasions to occupy public positions.

In 1991 he was appointed President of the Argentine Securities and Exchange Commission where, among many other achievements, he established the new regulatory framework for the Argentine capital market. He was designated as Emerging Markets Committee President of the International Organization of Securities Commissions in 1992.

Between January 2002 and September 2004 Redrado served as Secretary of Trade and International Economic Relations.

Redrado served as President of the Central Bank of Argentina from 2004 to 2010.

He took the first steps in his professional career in 1985 as a member of the Jeffrey Sachs’ team, implementing the Bolivian stabilization program.

In the following five years, he worked in the United States, particularly for Salomon Brothers, where he provided advisory services during the privatization and placement of shares of British Airways, British Gas and Compagnie Financière de Suez and helped arrange the first placement of warrants of a Spanish company on the international market. He was also a Managing Director at Security Pacific Bank, where he directed the Employee Stock Ownership Program for ENERSIS (Chile) and the placement of major Mexican private companies’ eurobonds on international capital markets and provided consultancy services for the restructuring of Teléfonos de México S.A.

He wrote several books; among the most recent ones, it is worth mentioning “Cómo sobrevivir a la globalización” (How to survive globalization) published by Prentice Hall, “Exportar para crecer” (Exports for growth) and “Sin Reservas” (Without Reservations) published by Planeta.