Post-crisis economic policies

Abstract

Following is the text of the letter that Edmund Phelps, the Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia, sent to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on February 2010 to report to the G20 on the conference “Post-Crisis Economic Policies” that the Center held on 11–12 December 2009 in Berlin. The letter makes a special contribution to the topic of this Special Issue on “Growth or Stagnation after Recession?” and so it is reproduced in its entirety without any editorial change. As Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, I want to report to the G20 on the conference “Post-Crisis Economic Policies” the Center held on 11–12 December 2009 in Berlin. Last year I reported to the G20 on our conference “Emerging from the Financial Crisis” held 20 February 2009 in New York. At this recent conference, as at the previous one, a great many renowned policymakers, bankers, regulators and scholars joined forces with members of the Center to discuss key issues and come up with proposals on how to improve economic performance in the advanced economies in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, and Josef Ackerman, Chairman of Deutsche Bank, were dinner speakers. Lucas Papademos, Vice-President of the European Central Bank, Sir Howard Davies, Director of the London School of Economics and former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, Dr. Joachim Faber, Member of the Board of Management of Allianz SE, and two Nobel laureates – Robert Mundell and I – each spoke in a panel as did the chair of the Center’s Advisory Board Peter Jungen. We convened to discuss ways to raise radically our post-crisis prospects – to boost our nations’ normal prosperity levels and to buttress their prosperity from severe swings brought by speculative