Brad Setser

speaker

466 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard Apr 2025

Brad Setser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Odd Lots · Odd Lots Live: What to Watch on Election Night and Beyond · 5 Nov 2024 podcast

I guess one surprise, and it's just a cultural thing uh about USTR, as I previously worked at the US Treasury, um, is that financial markets, which you know are the obsession of this town, presumably this crowd, are weighted at about zero.

In USDR internal decision making.

People do not look get a report on what happened in the market at the start of a significant meeting at USDR, whereas that would be kind of the norm at the US Treasury.

So culturally, it's not driven by the market.

Culturally, US trade policy is uh driven by lawyers.

And lawyers care a lot about process.

So I think what surprised me the most is the weight that is given to following the procedural niceties of the various different trade laws.

Which I think are actually quite relevant if Trump were to win, which I personally certainly do not hope is the case.

Uh but the those procedural niceties become constraints on how quickly he can uh restart various trade wars.

So in general, I think globalization in the nineteen nineties had a different impact on the US economy than globalization after the nineteen nineties.

If you look it it trade patterns in the nineteen nineties, and you know, there there's a significant interruption in the Asian financial crisis.

And I think most people in Asia would say globalization went wrong in the nineteen nineties.

But

During that period, broadly speaking, exports and imports were both expanding symmetrically.

And you didn't have uh an expansion and explosion of the offshore balance sheets of big banks and their uh uh special investment vehicles, like the obsession of Wall Street and uh the pre-global financial crisis period.

So to me that was a healthier form of globalization.

What went wrong?

Well

A a technical thing, check the box, made it really easy for US companies to shift intellectual property offshore.

That unleashed a wave of tax-driven globalization that we have not yet, in my view, been able to rein in.

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