Authors

Brad Setser

Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow

Council on Foreign Relations

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. Setser served as a senior advisor to the United States Trade Representative from 2021 to 2022, where he worked on the resolution of a number of trade disputes. He had previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis in the U.S. Treasury from 2011 to 2015, where he worked on Europe’s financial crisis, currency policy, financial sanctions, commodity shocks, and Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, and as a director for international economics on the staff of the National Economic Council and the National Security Council. He is the author of Sovereign Wealth and Sovereign Power (CFR, 2008) and the coauthor, with Nouriel Roubini, of Bailouts and Bail-ins: Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (Peterson Institute, 2004). His work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Finance and Development, Global Governance and Georgetown Journal of International Law, among others. Setser was a senior fellow at CFR from 2016 to 2020, a fellow from 2007 to 2009, and an international affairs fellow in 2003. He also has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He holds a BA from Harvard University, a masters from Sciences-Po Paris, and an MA and PhD in international relations from Oxford University.

Publications

The Surprising Resilience of Globalization: An Examination of Claims of Economic Fragmentation

This paper evaluates the current landscape of global trade and financial flows and proposes a set of reforms to support healthier forms of integration. Brad Setser finds that, despite the growing, bipartisan skepticism about the value of liberal trade, global economic integration remains surprisingly resilient. In fact, Setser argues, the immediate risk facing the global ...