Brad Setser
Fellow for Geoeconomics
Council on Foreign Relations
Brad Setser, an economist with expertise in finance, global capital flows, and emerging economies, is a fellow for geoeconomics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He works in the Council’s Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies, focusing on the foreign policy consequences of capital surpluses in East Asia and oil exporting states.
Dr. Setser most recently was a senior economist for RGE Monitor, an online financial and economic informational company. In 2003, he was an International Affairs Fellow at the Council, where he wrote, with Nouriel Roubini, Bailouts or Bail-Ins: Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets (Peterson Institute), a book examining International Monetary Fund policy toward crises in emerging market economies. Dr. Setser has also been a research associate at the Global Economic Governance Programme at University College, Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the IMF. He served in the U.S. Treasury from 1997 to 2001, where he worked extensively on the reform of the international financial architecture, sovereign debt restructurings, and U.S. policy toward the IMF. He ended his time at the Treasury as the acting director of the Office of International Monetary and Financial Policy.
He is the author of several publications, including The Political Economy of the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (as part of the project on Debt Restructuring and Sovereign Bankruptcy, Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Columbia University; January 2008); Oil and Global Adjustment (Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, March 2007); The Political Economy of the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (The Initiative for Policy Dialogue, June 2006); The Chinese Conundrum: External Financial Strength, Domestic Financial Weakness (CESifo Economic Studies, May 2006); and Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (with Nouriel Roubini, Peterson Institute, September 2004).
Dr. Setser is a Council term member. He earned his BA from Harvard University, his DEA from Institute des Etudes Politiques de Paris, and his MPhil and DPhil degrees from Oxford University.