About the Expert
Expert Bio
Brad W. Setser is the Steven A. Tananbaum senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. His expertise includes macroeconomics, global capital flows, financial vulnerability analysis, sovereign debt restructuring, and the management of financial crises. He regularly blogs at Follow the Money.
Setser served as the deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis in the U.S. Treasury from 2011 to 2015, where he worked on Europe’s financial crisis, currency policy, financial sanctions, commodity shocks, and Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. He was previously the director for international economics, serving jointly on the staff of the National Economic Council and the National Security Council.
He is the author of Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power (CFR, 2008) and the coauthor, with Nouriel Roubini, of Bailouts and Bail-ins: Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (Peterson Institute, 2004), which draws lessons from emerging market financial crises between 1995 and 2003. His work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Finance and Development, Global Governance and Georgetown Journal of International Law, among others.
Setser was an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2003, and a fellow from 2007 to 2009. He also has been the director of global research for Roubini Global Economics and a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He holds a BA from Harvard University, a masters from Sciences-Po, and an MA and PhD in international relations from Oxford University.
Affiliations:
Exante Data, senior advisor
Featured
Current Projects
-
There is a case that viruses (bird flu, swine fever, and now the coronavirus) have had almost as big an impact on Chinese-American agricultural trade as the trade war. (And more than most want to know on trade in crustaceans)
-
The common denominator across many emerging economies is a shortage of dollars. But the causes differ, as do the solutions.
-
China needs its own version of Rutger Bregman …
-
-
There is a global scramble for dollars going on. It needs to be addressed through creative policies.
-
There is no need for the Treasury to put out its foreign exchange report on time this April. There are other, more pressing priorities. And if it does, the Treasury should exercise its discretion to allow those countries that came close to meeting the definition of manipulation last year off the hook.
-
The large fall in U.S. imports in Q4 slowed global growth, as weak U.S. demand hurt the rest of the world more than it hurt the United States.
-
Lebanon is in a deep financial hole, with no obvious way out.
-
American pharmaceutical companies are skilled at using transfer pricing to shift the profit on their U.S. sales out of the United States. That is why the United States' trade deficit in pharmaceuticals is now bigger than the United States' trade surplus in aircraft.
-
How much tax supported debt will Puerto Rico be left with if the Board's most recent proposal is accepted by the courts?
-
-
The entire euro area's economic statistics now need to be adjusted to remove the distortions created by the tax transactions of large multinationals operating in Ireland and the Netherlands. Headline GDP numbers aren't too distorted, but the main components of GDP—net exports and domestic demand—have been contaminated by tax driven transactions that don't reflect real economic activity.
-
A number of Asian countries could be designated as manipulators in the U.S. Treasury's April foreign exchange report. And unlike the politically motivated designation of China last summer, there would be a clear analytical justification for a new round of designations.
-
Earlier in the year, there was a plausible argument that Trump's tariffs were mostly just diverting U.S. demand to other markets. But in recent months imports from China and imports from the United States' other trade partners are both falling. And the fall in imports has brought the non-petrol trade deficit down significantly from its levels this summer, though perhaps not permanently.
-
-
FDI is increasingly driven by tax avoidance.
-
U.S. imports from China are down. China's imports from everyone are down.
-
Quarterly disclosure with a quarter lag doesn't add much to the numbers already provided in the balance of payments (especially if it isn't clear what is being disclosed). Semi-annual disclosure provides less information than what's already available in the balance of payments.
-
Stalled export growth is more a function of the strong dollar than of Trump's trade wars. U.S. non-petrol exports haven't grown over the last five years.
-
A Big Borrower and a Giant Corporate Tax Dodge? How Best to Describe the U.S. External Balance Sheet
Most grandiose explanations for the United States' persistent surplus in the income balance of the U.S. current account miss the mark. The U.S. debt position tracks the sum of past current account deficits, and the interest rate on that debt tracks the U.S. Treasury rate. The surplus in the income line all comes from the excess income U.S. firms report earning in a few corporate tax havens. -
Ireland's tax authorities have made the job of Ireland's statistical authorities almost impossible. The distortions in the Irish data are now so big that the impact the data for the entire euro area.
-
This gathers the six post series I did with Concentrated Ambiguity into a single easy accessible post.
-
Japanese investors have an obvious incentive to search for yield abroad. But why has foreign demand for Japanese bonds almost matched Japanese demand for foreign bonds?
-
The Fall 2019 Treasury Foreign Exchange Report should send a strong warning to Thailand, Taiwan, and Singapore that their current pattern of intervention in the market would put them at risk of future designation. But it probably won't focus heavily on any of the three.