Blanchard: Looking Forward, Looking Back
Olivier Blanchard will step down as Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF’s Research Department at the end of September.
He will join the Peterson Institute for International Economics in October as the first C. Fred Bergsten senior fellow, a post named for the founder of the influential 35-year-old, Washington-based think tank.
When French-born Blanchard, a former chairman of the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined the IMF on September 1, 2008
.. Finally, there is a clear swing of the pendulum away from markets towards government intervention, be it macro prudential tools, capital controls, etc. Most macroeconomists are now solidly in a second best world. But this shift is happening with a twist—that is, with much skepticism about the efficiency of government intervention.
.. There is a good chance that we have entered a period of low productivity growth. There is a chance that we have entered a period of structurally weak demand, which will require very low interest rates. And low growth combined with increasing inequality, is not only unacceptable morally, but extremely dangerous politically.