Monetizing Primacy
A discussion of Trumponomics, dollar diplomacy, and multipolarity
President Donald Trump’s administration has advanced a series of contradictory visions for America’s position in the global economic hierarchy. Though the aims and ramifications of the White House’s economic agenda remain muddled, there is little question that a U.S. president exercising the unrivaled powers of U.S. economic statecraft — even in contradictory directions — will have lasting consequences for America’s eonomic might and the global economy at-large.
Join the Quincy Institute and Phenomenal World for a co-hosted discussion of the Trump administration’s economic agenda, the impact of the White House’s ever-fluctuating tariff policies, and how this approach impacts the value of the U.S. dollar featuring Karthik Sankaran, Senior Research Fellow, Quincy Institute, Brad Setser, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, and Mona Ali, Associate Professor of Economics, SUNY New Paltz; the discussion will be moderated by Michael Stynes, CEO, the Jain Family Institute.
The conversation will take place on Thursday, July 31 from 12:00 – 1:00 PM Eastern Time.
Program
Topics
Panelists
Karthik Sankaran
Karthik Sankaran is a senior research fellow in geoeconomics in the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was originally trained as a Modern European Historian but instead pursued careers in journalism and then finance as a strategist and as a trader/portfolio manager. He was engaged primarily with foreign exchange and fixed income in emerging markets at a variety of institutions on the sell-side and the buy-side. In this capacity, he saw the ripples of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 into Russia and Latin America, and then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and the subsequent Eurozone crisis of 2011. He then joined Eurasia Group as Director, Global Strategy, where he worked with country and regional teams to chart feedback loops among political and geopolitical risks, macroeconomics, and market responses. His interests include the structure of the international monetary and financial system; strategies for economic development and resilience; and the weaponization of finance and trade. He has written for the Financial Times, Barron’s, FPRI, LiMes, and has appeared on podcasts and panels including Bloomberg’s Odd Lots, WisdomTree’s Behind the Markets, and FT Alphaville’s Festival of Finance.
Brad Setser
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.
Mona Ali
Mona Ali is Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York. Her research on international political economy has been published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the International Review of Applied Economics, and Géopolitique, Réseau, Énergie, Environnement, Nature (GREEN) among elsewhere.
Michael Stynes
Michael Stynes is Chief Executive Officer and a trustee of the Jain Family Institute. He has led JFI since its inception, building initiatives in income share agreements, guaranteed income, and digital ethics and governance with a focus on bringing the most promising new policy ideas to real-world trial.
As part of JFI’s higher education portfolio, Michael led design and analytics work for Robert Smith’s Student Freedom Initiative, a $100-million dollar education fund for HBCU students. In guaranteed income, Michael’s expertise is in working with governmental partners on at-scale program design and strategy, for engagements within the US and internationally, including in Compton, California and Maricá, Brazil. He has advised a number of founders and philanthropies on how to translate research into pilot and policy implementation.
His academic background is in analytic philosophy, which he studied at Harvard and NYU.