On Wednesday 10 March, Professor Carmen Reinhart and Prof Paul Krugman, will discuss how governments should deal with the post-COVID debt overhang. Will governments need to re-impose austerity and, if so, when? Should we aim for higher inflation as a means of reducing government debt levels? Or, in a world of low interest rates, should we simply learn to become comfortable with higher government debt levels?
Carmen M Reinhart is Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank Group. Assuming this role on June 15, 2020, Reinhart provides thought leadership for the institution at an unprecedented time of crisis. She also manages the Bank’s Development Economics Department. She is on public service leave from Harvard Kennedy School, where she is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System. Previously, she was Senior Policy Advisor and Deputy Director at the International Monetary Fund and held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns. She also serves in the Advisory Panels of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the International Monetary Fund. Reinhart has been listed among Bloomberg Markets Most Influential 50 in Finance, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and Thompson Reuters’ The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds. In 2018 she was awarded the King Juan Carlos Prize in Economics and NABE’s Adam Smith Award, among others. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Professor Paul Krugman is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Professor Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was previously a professor of economics at MIT, and later at Princeton University. He is the author or editor of 27 books, including scholarly works, textbooks, and books for a more general audience, and has published over 200 scholarly articles in professional journals and edited volumes. He has also written several hundred columns on economic and political issues for The New York Times, Fortune and Slate. A 2011 survey of economics professors named him their favourite living economist under the age of 60.
Chaired by Kevin Daly, Goldman Sachs, this event will be held live via Zoom.