Society of Professional Economists - Econ Thoughts

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Find the latest interviews with leading economists from industry, academia and policy on the Society of Professional Economists podcast.

  1. FEB 26

    Interview with Eric Leeper

    Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Eric Leeper, Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia, about the fiscal theory of the price level, fiscal dominance and the future of monetary policy in a high-debt world. In the conversation, Eric explains the core intuition behind the fiscal theory of the price level: inflation is not solely a monetary phenomenon but also reflects how government debt is backed (or not) by future primary surpluses. Drawing on his long-standing research, including his seminal work on active and passive policy regimes, he argues that when fiscal authorities run persistent deficits without credible plans to stabilise debt, monetary policy alone cannot anchor the price level. The post-COVID fiscal expansion, he suggests, offers a practical illustration of how large, debt-financed transfers — perceived as “gifts” rather than future tax liabilities — can shift expectations and generate inflationary pressures Eric also discusses the steady drift towards fiscal dominance in the United States and the erosion of what he calls the “Hamilton norm” — the principle that deficits should ultimately be matched by future surpluses. He highlights the growing tension between stabilising inflation and stabilising public debt: when debt levels are high, raising interest rates to curb inflation mechanically increases debt-service costs, creating political and institutional strain. In his view, central banks cannot credibly deliver price stability in isolation if fiscal authorities do not restore a sustainable path for public finances. Looking ahead, the discussion turns to the future of Federal Reserve leadership and the limits of central bank independence. Eric argues that truly independent monetary policy requires more candid acknowledgement of fiscal realities. Without clearer fiscal commitments, inflation control may require difficult trade-offs — or painful market discipline — before policy regimes revert to a more stable monetary-dominant equilibrium. Eric Leeper is Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Visiting Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He has served as an external adviser to the Sveriges Riksbank and as a member of the Research Council of the Deutsche Bundesbank. His research focuses on the interaction of monetary and fiscal policy, inflation dynamics and sovereign debt sustainability.

    42 min

  2. FEB 16

    Interview with Brad Stetser

    Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the EconThoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Brad Setser, the Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former senior official at the US Treasury and the Office of the US Trade Representative, about China’s growth model, global trade imbalances, and the evolving responses in the US, Europe, and the UK. Brad argued that China’s economic slowdown has been driven less by Covid than by the prolonged collapse of the property sector since 2021, which has left domestic demand weak, consumer confidence fragile, and household savings stuck at an unusually high level. In this context, China has increasingly relied on exports to meet its growth targets, with net exports contributing an exceptionally large share of reported growth—particularly through manufacturing strength in sectors such as electric vehicles, batteries, and clean technologies. While this export-led strategy has so far proven resilient, Brad stressed that it is inherently unstable, as it depends on the rest of the world continuing to absorb ever-larger Chinese trade surpluses, raising the risk of a sharper external backlash over time. The discussion then turned to trade policy, inflation, and regional responses. Brad was sceptical that recent US tariffs have meaningfully constrained China, noting that much trade has been diverted through third countries rather than reduced outright. Crucially, he argued that tariffs have not generated the inflation spike many predicted: their impact has been closer to that of a consumption tax, temporarily reducing purchasing power, with a significant share of the cost absorbed by firms rather than passed through to consumer prices. On Europe and the UK, Setser observed that responses to Chinese overcapacity have so far been cautious and fragmented. The EU has acted selectively—such as with tariffs on electric vehicles—but remains constrained by internal political economy considerations, while the UK’s renewed engagement with China reflects pragmatic economic calculation rather than a fundamental strategic shift. Looking ahead, Brad suggested that Europe could become pivotal: a firmer European stance on trade imbalances could restore leverage that the US weakened through an overly abrupt escalation of tariffs. Overall, he argued that a return to the pre-2016 free-trade status quo is unlikely; instead, the global economy is moving toward persistently higher and more targeted trade barriers, especially vis-à-vis China, shaped by geopolitics as much as by economics. Brad W. Setser is the Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). His expertise includes global trade and capital flows, financial vulnerability analysis, and sovereign debt restructuring. He regularly blogs at Follow the Money. Setser served as a senior advisor to the United States Trade Representative from 2021 to 2022, where he worked on the resolution of a number of trade disputes. He had previously 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, and as a director for international economics 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). Setser was a senior fellow at CFR from 2016 to 2020, a fellow from 2007 to 2009, and an international affairs fellow in 2003. He also has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He holds a BA from Harvard University, a masters from Sciences-Po Paris, and an MA and PhD in international relations from Oxford University.

    41 min

  3. FEB 11

    Interview with Eamonn Butler

    Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez & Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Eamonn Butler, co-founder and long-time director of the Adam Smith Institute, in a wide-ranging conversation marking the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations. Eamonn and Filippo reflected on the enduring legacy of Adam Smith, arguing that Smith’s core insight—that prosperity is driven by voluntary exchange, competition and individual effort—remains as relevant today as it was in 1776. He traced how Smith helped overturn mercantilist thinking, laid the foundations of modern economics as a discipline grounded in observation and reason, and influenced both policy and practice, from 19th-century free trade to contemporary debates on protectionism, economic nationalism and the politicisation of trade. Butler warned that while economists broadly agree on the gains from free markets, political incentives increasingly pull policy in the opposite direction, often to the detriment of consumers, productivity and long-term growth. This is in full display in policies adopted on both side of the Atlantic The discussion also ranged across Butler’s long-standing interest in economic ideas and entrepreneurship. Drawing on his book on schools of economic thought—discussed during the interview and available at the IEA —he argued for the value of pluralism in economics, from classical liberalism and Keynesianism to the Austrian and Chicago schools, each offering different lenses on incentives, cycles and individual decision-making. Butler emphasised that economies are not machines driven by aggregates, but ecosystems shaped by entrepreneurs, confidence and incentives, with taxation and regulation playing a decisive role. Looking ahead, he outlined how the Adam Smith Institute is marking the anniversary year, including a forthcoming edited academic volume and his own innovative contribution: a graphic-novel adaptation of The Wealth of Nations, designed to bring Smith’s ideas to a new and younger audience. Together, the conversation offered both a timely defence of Smithian principles and a reminder of their practical relevance for growth, opportunity and poverty reduction in the modern world. Eamonn Butler is Director of the Adam Smith Institute and has degrees in economics, philosophy and psychology, gaining a PhD from the University of St Andrews in 1978. During the 1970s he worked on pensions and welfare issues for the US House of Representatives, and taught philosophy in Hillsdale College, Michigan, before returning to the UK to help found the Adam Smith Institute. Eamonn is author of books on the pioneering economists Milton Friedman, F A Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Adam Smith, and co-author of Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls and books on intelligence testing. He contributes to the leading UK print and broadcast media on current issues, and his recent popular publications The Best Book on the Market, The Rotten State of Britain and The Alternative Manifesto have attracted considerable attention. He has also contributed articles to national magazines and newspapers on subjects ranging from health policy, economic management, taxation and public spending, transport, pensions, and welfare.

    35 min

  4. JAN 28

    Interview with Mark Blyth

    Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez and Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Mark Blyth, William R. Rhodes Professor of International Economics at Brown University and author of numerous books on the topics of inflation, austerity and growth. The last twenty years have seen two major shocks to the global and national economies, with profound political and social consequences, in particular the rise of populist sentiments and parties. Changes in the industrial landscape and the recent surge in inflation have been part of the explanation for such trends but there is much more to it. Mark Blyth joined the SPE podcast to provide his insights which he highlighted in two books, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (2025), and Angrynomics (2020). The discussion opens with Mark’s analysis of the post-pandemic inflation surge, drawing on his recent book Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. Mark challenges the view that inflation was primarily a monetary phenomenon, instead arguing that it reflected overlapping global supply shocks—from broken supply chains to Europe’s energy crisis—with sharply uneven distributional effects. A central theme is the disconnect between how economists measure inflation and how households experience it, particularly through persistent increases in the price level of essentials such as food, rent, and energy. Mark explains why this gap has had powerful political consequences, even as headline inflation has fallen, and why central banks’ traditional tools were poorly suited to addressing the underlying causes. The conversation then turns to Angrynomics and the economic roots of populism. Mark argues that today’s political anger is best understood through long-running patterns of wage stagnation, deindustrialisation, and regional divergence, rather than purely cultural explanations. Filippo and Mark explore how globalisation and financialisaton weakened labour power, increased economic fragility for large parts of the population, and eroded dignity and purpose—dynamics that inflation has only intensified. The episode closes with a forward-looking discussion on what might ease these pressures, including higher and more inclusive growth, large-scale housing construction, skills investment, and reforms that restore mobility and opportunity—offering a clear-eyed account of why economic shocks matter politically and what it would take to rebuild resilience and trust in democratic capitalism. Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics and the Director of the Rhodes Centre for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a joint appointment in the department of political science. He is the author of many award-winning books including, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), Angrynomics (New York: Columbia University Press 2020), Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (Oxford University Press 2022), and in 2025, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. He writes about the politics of growth, distribution and decarbonization and why people continue to believe dubious economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.

    40 min

  5. 12/17/2025

    Interview with Chris Giles and Joel Suss

    In this episode of EconThoughts, A&M Managing Director and host Filippo Gaddo speaks with Financial Times economists Chris Giles and Joel Suss, winners of this year’s Rybczynski Prize for their paper The Text-as-Data Revolution and the Value of Financial News. Their work sits within a broader methodological shift made possible by large-scale digitisation and advances in machine learning — a shift Filippo highlights with reference to recent economic-history research that uses text-based methods to reconstruct GDP per capita back to the 1600s. Building on this new frontier, Chris and Joel show how modern language models can extract meaningful economic sentiment from millions of FT articles and turn unstructured text into a coherent, quantifiable macroeconomic signal. The conversation explores why their approach is genuinely novel: instead of relying on traditional keyword-based news indices, their two-stage LLM pipeline evaluates both article sentiment and topic relevance, generating a daily “macro mood” index that captures the tone of global economic reporting with far greater nuance. They describe how this index not only traces historical turning points — from wars to the global financial crisis to the tentative upswing of 2017–18 — but also contains forward-looking information. In fact, their methodology outperforms standard benchmarks, and even the Federal Reserve staff’s own forecasts, in predicting US inflation over a 12-month horizon. Looking ahead, they outline expanding applications: sector-level sentiment, geopolitical-risk indices, tools for policymakers tracking real-time soft data, and eventually an integrated product enabling users to drill from global trends to specific industries. Their work demonstrates how text-as-data can deepen our understanding of macroeconomic dynamics and complement traditional indicators in an increasingly complex policy environment. Chris Giles is the Financial Times’ Economics Commentator. Formerly the newspaper’s long-standing Economics Editor, he writes a regular column and produces the FT’s weekly economics newsletter. His work focuses on macroeconomic policy, fiscal strategy, inflation dynamics, and global economic trends. Chris has spent decades reporting from capitals around the world and is recognised for his accessible, analytically grounded approach to interpreting economic data and policy debates. Joel Suss is a journalist and quantitative researcher at the Financial Times, specialising in data science, economics, and the application of advanced machine-learning tools to journalism. He co-develops the FT’s Monetary Policy Radar indices, including the “macro mood” sentiment measure discussed in this episode. Before joining the FT, Joel worked in academia and policy-focused research, with interests spanning macroeconomics, political economy, and computational social science.

    29 min

  6. 12/11/2025

    Interview with Anne Bradley

    Filippo Gaddo, Managing Director at Alvarez and Marsal, SPE Councillor and host of the Econ Thoughts SPE Podcast, spoke with Dr Anne Bradley, who is George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the Academic Director at the Fund for American Studies. In the conversation, Anne reflects on how economics helps us understand not only markets but the deeper conditions that allow individuals and societies to flourish. Drawing on her academic work and teaching, she emphasises that economic analysis begins with understanding human choice, trade-offs and institutions. Flourishing, she argues, is inherently social: we succeed not in isolation but through networks of cooperation, trust and opportunity. Filippo and Anne highlight that GDP alone is an incomplete metric— paraphrasing Adam Smith, true prosperity depends on whether “the majority of people have real opportunities to develop their potential,” a theme that runs throughout her research. She discusses how economics offers a framework for thinking about constraints, incentives and the unseen consequences of policy choices, all of which shape long-term wellbeing. The discussion covers Anne’s work on poverty alleviation and civil-society solutions, which argues that sustainable reductions in poverty emerge from economic and political freedom, strong local institutions and the dignity that comes from work. Markets, Anne notes, remain “an incredible anti-poverty machine,” yet they function well only when embedded in supportive social norms and institutions. The interview also revisits Bradley’s early career research on the economics of terrorism, a topic where she brought economic tools to bear on a highly complex issue. She explains how terrorism can be understood through supply-and-demand dynamics: while policy tends to focus on disrupting the supply side, long-term progress requires reducing demand by addressing the political, economic and institutional drivers that make terrorism a viable strategy for groups. Raising opportunity costs, strengthening economic freedom and providing peaceful avenues for conflict resolution, she argues, are essential to making terrorism “too costly to sustain.” This analytical lens—rooted in incentives, institutional quality and long-term thinking—connects directly back to her broader work on how societies cultivate resilience, prosperity and flourishing. Dr. Anne Bradley is the George and Sally Mayer Fellow for Economic Education and the Academic Director at the Fund for American Studies. She served as the Vice President of Economic Initiatives at The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, and is a visiting professor at Georgetown University and has previously taught at George Mason University and at Charles University, Prague. She served as the Associate Director for the Program in Economics, Politics, and the Law at the James M. Buchanan Center at George Mason University.

    39 min

  7. 11/24/2025

    Interview with Joe Mayes

    In this episode, Filippo Gaddo speaks with Joe Mayes, Bloomberg journalist and author of Can You Run the Economy?, as he discusses his innovative new book — a rare blend of play and policy that turns the reader into the Chancellor for a year - here. Beginning as a simple online simulation, the project evolved into an immersive “choose-your-own-adventure” for economics, challenging readers to balance fiscal prudence with political survival. As Mayes explains, the goal is not just entertainment, but empathy: to let readers feel the pressures of real decision-making — weighing market confidence against party demands, long-term stability against short-term popularity — and discovering just how hard it is to “run the economy” well. Mayes reflects on how his book captures the essential dilemma of modern policymaking: doing what’s right for the long term while staying electorally viable. Drawing on examples from recent Chancellors, he explores how choices on tax, spending and growth reflect deeper trade-offs between economic integrity and political expediency. Ultimately, Can You Run the Economy? is both a game and a mirror — a creative way to understand why so many governments struggle to do the right thing when the rewards may only come years later. As Mayes notes, success demands not only sound judgment but also the courage to communicate honestly with the public about hard choices and delayed pay-offs — a lesson as relevant in Westminster as it is in his book’s virtual Treasury. Joe Mayes, is bestselling Author of ‘Can You Run The Economy?’ and award-winning reporter for Bloomberg News in London, currently covering UK politics and the Treasury. Previously Bloomberg's chief Brexit correspondent, Joe has also covered the media, real estate and corporate finance beats for Bloomberg. He is a regular contributor on broadcast media on British politics, appearing on BBC News, LBC, Times Radio. Joe was also MHP's 30 Under 30 Winner for City & Business Journalism in 2020 and was nominated for Young Financial Journalist of the Year at the Wincott Awards in 2018.

    28 min

  8. 11/19/2025

    Interview with Cesar Hidalgo

    In this episode of Econ Thought, Filippo Gaddo speaks with César Hidalgo, Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics and Director of the Center for Collective Learning at TSE and Corvinus University of Budapest, about his latest book The Infinite Alphabet: The Laws of Knowledge. See his bio and website here. Cesar traces his intellectual path from network science and the Atlas of Economic Complexity to a broader theory of how knowledge grows, diffuses, and sometimes decays. He distinguishes between “knowledge about things,” which Hayek’s price system helps to coordinate, and “knowledge of how to do things,” which is highly specific, non-fungible, and often embedded in networks of people. Through stories - from a Florida lawyer’s niche expertise to the industrial clusters of Germany and Chinese innovation hubs - he illustrates how knowledge builds cumulatively and why it resists easy transfer across places or professions. The conversation explores how nations can nurture and preserve this type of knowledge. Cesar contrasts Ecuador’s failed attempt to build a remote “city of knowledge” with China’s success in fostering dense urban ecosystems such as Zhongguancun, where public-private “guiding funds” catalysed entrepreneurship. He warns that countries can lose hard-won know-how - citing nuclear construction and shipbuilding as examples - unless they continuously “practice” capabilities. As the conversation between Filippo and Cesar turns to AI, he sees it as a powerful complement to human learning, but not a substitute for collective experience. Looking ahead, Cesar expects the next wave of growth to emerge from South and Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, driven by local knowledge accumulation. He closes by noting that institutional flexibility - especially in labour markets - remains an under-discussed yet essential ingredient for societies to adapt, learn, and flourish. César A. Hidalgo is a Chilean-Spanish-American scholar known for his contributions to economic complexity and for his applied work on data visualization and artificial intelligence. Hidalgo is a tenured professor at the Toulouse School of Economics’ (TSE) Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the head of the Center for Collective Learning a multidisciplinary research laboratory with offices at Institute for Advanced Study (IAST) at TSE and the Corvinus Institute of Advanced Studies (CIAS) at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is also an Honorary Professor at the Alliance Manchester Business School of the University of Manchester. Between 2010 and 2019 Hidalgo led MIT’s Collective Learning group and prior to that he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Hidalgo is also a founder of Datawheel, an award winning company specialized in public data distribution and economic development strategy. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor in Physics from Universidad Católica de Chile.

    39 min
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Find the latest interviews with leading economists from industry, academia and policy on the Society of Professional Economists podcast.

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