2024-07-15
53 分钟Welcome to Macro musings, where each week we pull back the curtain and take a closer look at the most important macroeconomic issues of the past, present and future.
I am your host, David Beckworth, a senior research fellow at the Mercator center at George Mason University.
And I'm glad you decided to join us.
Our guest today is Josh Lipsky.
Josh is the senior director of the Atlantic Council's geographic center, and he joins us today to discuss the tools of financial statecraft and how they have evolved over the years and their implications going forward for digital currencies.
Josh, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
David.
Really pleased to be here.
Great to have you on.
I've been following the work that you're doing there on payments, cross border payments, digital currencies and, of course, financial statecraft.
We'll talk about all of that today, but maybe start us off by talking about your work there, what the council is and what it's doing and how you got there.
Yeah.
Happy to do that.
So I've been at the Atlantic Council for years.
I was at the IMF before that as an advisor and speech writer to Christine Lagarde.
And prior to the IMF, I was at the state Department for about three years.
And having been at state and then been at the IMF, I had this realization that oftentimes those two institutions are working on similar issues, but they don't speak the same language.
So at State Department, for example, you might be dealing with the rise of terrorism in a certain region at the IMF, you might be dealing with hyperinflation in that same country.
But we don't talk a lot about counterterrorism at the IMF, and we don't talk a lot about hyperinflation at the State Department.